Happy 25th Anniversary to Alanis Morissette’s third studio album Jagged Little Pill, originally released June 13, 1995.
I didn’t grow up in a traditional family. My parents divorced when I was just five and through that, I became acutely aware of just how the world treated and continues to treat women. Single mothers back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s were looked upon as some kind of Scarlett whores that their husbands no longer wanted and for whatever reason, society now had to deal with. If a five-year-old boy like me could see this, why couldn’t society at large recognize it too?
It was through this experience and others that I started to see my then twenty-five-year-old mother as the antithesis of what society wanted. She was strong, intelligent, independent, opinionated and incredibly beautiful—all things that made many incredibly uncomfortable. They still do.
Fast forward twenty years to 1995 and yet again I was confronted with society’s inability to understand how someone with the XX chromosome could be vocal and living in her truth(s) without being labelled “angry.” So it was amidst this constant mischaracterization of women feeling empowered and able to speak about their many complexities that Alanis Morissette and Jagged Little Pill arrived. It marked her international debut, third overall studio album, and the one that sparked numerous conversations on the supposed “Angry Young Woman” epithet.
Just two years after Madonna co-founded the Maverick record label back in 1992, the company signed a then relatively unknown 20-year-old Morissette. Just over a year later and her debut album for the label had been released and proved to be the smash record the label had envisioned. With total sales now in excess of 33 million units globally, the album not only cemented Morissette’s star status, but went 16x platinum in the US, became the best-selling debut album of all time and garnered the singer five out of the nine GRAMMY Awards she was nominated for in 1996, not to mention taking out the number one spot in a staggering 14 charts around the world. But this album is about so much more than just groundbreaking statistics—it’s a powerful album about personal experiences.
Whilst the walk down memory lane in revisiting the album twenty-five years later is full of coming-of-age stories and in many ways, articulated everything that I was feeling then, aged nineteen, I am also reminded that Morissette was a mere year older than me at the time and wrote and produced music that not only belied her youth, but gave a voice to a generation.
Jagged Little Pill surfaced at a time when grunge was at its peak and although Morissette presented a strong, multifaceted woman, open and honest, she hadn’t ridden the same wave that her feminist peers like Courtney Love and Ani Di Franco had done. Instead, she had received success with her first two pop albums in her native Canada and even dated “Uncle Joey” (Dave Coulier) from Full House, all things that couldn’t have been further from the voice expressing torment, pain and vulnerability on Jagged Little Pill.
All that changed when Morissette met legendary record producer and songwriter Glen Ballard (Michael Jackson, The Pointer Sisters, Paula Abdul). With Ballard now providing some guidance and a wealth of production knowledge, the two set about bunkering down in Ballard’s studio, supposedly recording a song a day. According to Morissette, she penned the track “Perfect” in a mere twenty minutes and requested that her original demo vocals be used to create a rawness on the album. Ballard in tow, it only seemed fitting to have session musicians lend their wares and there was no better fit than Dave Navarro and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers to provide some serious guitar work on the album’s lead single “You Oughta Know.”
A total of six singles were released from the album, with all of these songs (except "All I Really Want”) entering the top ten in various charts around the world and “Ironic” taking out the number four spot on the Billboard Hot 100, her highest charting single in the US. But it was “You Oughta Know” that set the tone for the album and gave license to a type of female sexuality and unabashed raw anger not seen on a commercial scale, showing that women get equally as irked as men, most definitely as horny and may even get a little perverse as captured in lines like, “Is she perverted like me / Would she go down on you in a theater?”
With hope in her heart, the album’s second single “Hand In My Pocket” showcases a self-assured Morissette who is able to have a little fun. The third single and album smash “Ironic”— the much-disputed irony-free song that Morissette stood by in the wake of criticism over its linguistic usage—became her trademark. Whether or not you deem the song situational irony, dramatic irony or even completely unironic, you can’t deny that Morissette’s indifference to the world and how it will eventually do you over in the end makes for a damn good song.
Apart from the officially released singles, there is even more beauty on this album. Whether it be the togetherness on “Mary Jane” as Morissette reassures a friend in the midst of grief or the religious hindsight on “Forgiven,” she adds even more layers to her self-exploration and that of others too.
Morissette delivered an opus of immeasurable beauty on Jagged Little Pill, a beauty entrenched in her psyche, her anger, her lovelorn heart and her hope. She created a fluidity and slickness within this album rare for a twenty-one-year-old novice artist. She kept her words raw and articulated emotions and feelings that many women had felt too ashamed to even acknowledge, let alone put out there for the whole world to hear.
She created a mood and attitude that has defined an era. Its connectivity is in its broad content that spans pious fraud, parental expectations, mental illness, co-dependence, the patriarchy, friendship, amour propre and adultery. Complicated this music may be, but it’s precisely this that resonates with people and the complexities of simply being alive sometimes, something everyone goes through at some point in their lives.
Twenty-five years later and Jagged Little Pill has just as much meaning as it did back in 1995. Sure, there have been others to follow in Morissette’s footsteps, and let’s be clear here: Morissette wasn’t the original purveyor of female empowerment. But what Jagged Little Pill is, is a definite reminder that although we have come a long way when it comes to the micro (and not so micro) aggressions women face daily, we still have a long way to go. And lest one forget it, all that is needed is a spin of this record.
LISTEN: