33 rebellions per minute
"All I really want is deliverance"
1995
Alanis Morrisette, JAGGED LITTLE PILL
Okay, you know what she sounds like: the voice, the little drum loops,
the acoustic guitar--- the easy-to-standardize sound of commerce 1996-7
being defined by one woman, her band, her producer, 16 million
consumers, and however many music industry pros watched the cash
registers ring and went "hmmm". Some of you, nonjudgmental, do not
personally like Ms Morrisette because her voice is literally painful for
you to listen to; I don't understand your reaction, indeed I find her
voice impressive and thrilling, but you can't help it, and my indignant
defense of her honor is not aimed against you. It is aimed, instead, at
the casual jerks who cite her as an example of trendly female anger,
spiced with cheap-shock lyrics (see especially complaints about her
"me-against-the-world outlook" and "cheap melodrama" uttered by Sean
Slade, who, um, produced Courtney Love). I call these people "jerks",
because they have clearly managed to devise an entirely hostile
condemnation of a CD they have not listened to, except one snippet of
one song that MTV sorta edited out anyway. Alanis Morrisette is a nice
person. Okay? She has 2 angry songs, out of twelve, but they certainly
aren't mindless--- "You Oughtta Know" is detailed throughout, and most
romantic relationships these days do seem to include prurient elements,
which she includes and which _other_ dorks choose to focus on. Both
angry songs are revealing, though, in that she seems unable to conceive
a worse revenge than saying "y'know, you kinda hurt my feelings", and my
best guess is that "I bet she'd make a really excellent mother" is
sincere--- the one she's pissed at is the guy who said he'd love her
"until you died, til you died, but you're still alive". A fair reason,
I'd say.
Meanwhile, she's filling the rest of her disc with "Hand In My Pocket",
which missed being an optimistic hippie classic only due to timing;
"Ironic" and "Forgiven" and "You Learn", the freshman philosophisings of
an introspective girl who won't slap you with a lawsuit or a clutched
razor the moment something bad happens; the empathetic "Perfect"; the
encouraging "Mary Jane" and "Wake Up"; and "Head Over Feet", which is
one of the best and nicest love songs I've ever heard, managing the rare
task of being sung to a detectable, and detectably worthy, person
(despite its dumb titular cliche--- or does the gravitically standard
"head over feet in love" intentionally reflect the line "I've never felt
this healthy before"?). On "Not The Doctor", we even learn that she'll
keep helping too-high-maintenece friends even when this requires her to
repress seethings until the time comes to hide them away in
multiplatinum-selling songs. She may use small variants of the same
melodies over and over, but she's intelligent, and she's a sweetie. A
lot of folks looking for the nearest handy look-who-I'm-not target, are,
indeed, neither of those. And incidentally, as I recall those 10th-grade
Houghton Mifflin English textbooks, there are at least 3 kinds of irony,
dubbed "dramatic", "situational", and "curling", and one of those,
whichever one is best illustrated by "Gift Of The Magi", is in fact the
kind she's trying to portray on "Ironic". So, NYAAH!
1998
Alanis Morissette, SUPPOSED FORMER INFATUATION JUNKIE
As soon as I learned the preposterously unwieldy title of Ms. Morissette's then-forthcoming second album, I decided I would honor her by making it the first album I ever bought on its release date (granting that a few months earlier I'd ordered three copies of the Loud Family's DAYS FOR DAYS ahead their release, two as gifts). When I brought it home, sat down with the headphones and lyric sheet, and listened, I was not surprised to discover that it spreads 17 songs over 72 minutes. I was not surprised at intensely personal, complicated lyrics that seem less like songs than like well-run therapy sessions illegally hijacked by Glenn Ballard and by Time/Warner in the guise of Madonna in the guise of whatever she looked like that week. I was not surprised that only three of the songs, considered as music alone, would have fit smoothly onto JAGGED LITTLE PILL ("Thank U", "Can't Not", "Joining You"). I was not surprised that the drum programs and processed bass guitar and synth noises frequently reach denseness and aggression levels ranging from the thickest soundscapes of Tori Amos's CHOIRGIRL HOTEL, through "Baba"'s sculpted feedback shrapnel, right on up to songs that could faithfully be remixed as bonus tracks on a reissue of Skinny Puppy's THE PROCESS (one of the only two good buys in my post-DOWNWARD SPIRAL attempts to find more industrial music I liked), if only Alanis's voice were removed. And, given that that Skinny Puppy analogy is the logical equivalent of "many Playboy centerfolds would make great Architectural Digest spreads if only the damn woman was out of the way", I was not surprised that I spent my first few listens trying to figure out what I thought of Alanis, and of what she was trying to say; and that the effort each time was draining enough that I'd wait a week for the next listen.
The reason I wasn't surprised is that JAGGED LITTLE PILL, much though I like and admire it, was an obvious dead end. The lyrics were those of a bright 20-year-old showing off her newfound wisdom, but Alanis was not going to stay 20, either literally or, with the pressures of world superstardom, figuratively. More urgently, the music was self-cannibalizing to a worrisome degree, the same tunes and deliveries and mannerisms showing up in multiple songs with the same blase redundancy as the Sex Pistols' NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS--- which was never followed up at all. I saw only two options: try and make the same record again, a surrender to pointlessness; or throw away the PILL formula forever. Frankly, even if I didn't trust Alanis, I trusted Glenn Ballard (co-producer/ co-music-writer) not to try the formula again. Glenn became noteworthy working with hair-metal bands in the '80's, the Warrant/ Whitesnake crowd. He _knows_ that no formula stays popular for more than a couple of years. He knows that Alanis has a major uphill fight to sell even half what she did last time; no recording artist has _ever_ sold more than 8 million records twice, except Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey (who avoid going out of fashion by never really having been in fashion in the first place) and Pink Floyd, whose album sales from right before DARK SIDE OF THE MOON to right after THE WALL still suggest fickleness: in millions, read the sequence 0, 15, 7, 2, 22, 1. Led Zeppelin IV sold as many copies as all the other Led Zep LP's put together. It is very unlikely that Hootie & the Blowfish's entire post-CRACKED REAR VIEW career will even approach that debut's sales, any more than Peter Frampton became a durable icon due to FRAMPTON COMES ALIVE, or the Knack after GET THE KNACK. Soul Asylum lost more than 98% of its sales in a two album span, from GRAVE DANCERS' UNION to 1998's CANDY FROM A STRANGER. For Alanis Morissette to try and make JAGGED LITTLE PILL again would be for her to follow a strategy that has proven, again and again, to never work. Sales like hers are what happens when people who buy five CD's a year start focusing on a record. But if they cared about music enough to buy follow-ups, they'd obviously buy a hell of a lot more than five CD's a year, now wouldn't they? Only true music fans need the same CD under two different names, and they're precisely the ones that will have suspicions that there might, in fact, be something better to do with that second CD. If, that is, the artists themselves don't raise the question first; and impudent ever-questioning 20-year-olds, with as many millions of dollars as years of age, probably will.
So what _is_ Alanis saying, in her non-rhyming non-metered convoluted overflows of words that bunch up into tight fits for one 4-beat measure then spread the next two syllables over the next 4 beats, or that pile up for verses on end and still need to add space where the melody and instrumentation has run out just to squeeze in, over one or two notes, an "and supportive" or an "unfortunately you needed a health scare to reprioritize"? Let's see... on the simple end, she's attacking pseudo-messiahs ("Baba"); denying, from experience, that self-reliance and individual achievement are ways to the good life (the Eastern-melodied "Would not Come" with its metallic 2-note bass grind); renouncing an abusive relationship (the assualtively rhythmic "Sympathetic Character"); asking an ex, over softly picked-out piano notes, "Are You Still Mad" over her offenses towards him, in what seems to be an apology although her answer to the title (a nifty grotesquely harmonized "of course you are") is not exactly reassuring; thanking terror, disillusionment, frailty, silence, and the capital of Rhode Island for her increased sanity (the more assured and pleasedly past-tense "You Learn" sequel "Thank U": "How bout stopping eating when I'm full up", "how bout how good it feels to finally forgive you"); thanking her Mom for other cool stuff (the overtly soft and pretty "Heart Of The House"); praying to be a good person in the face of adversity (the gently mantra-like sing-song "That I Would Be Good"); and putting words about wonderful she is in the mouths of record executives ("UR", which should be spelled "You Are", and which basically annoys me even though her plaint "do you guys realize I was born in 1974" seems fair). Even these songs have an unusual care and subtlety to them, and a choice eye for non-generic detail, such as asking her Mom "Do you see yourself in my gypsy garage sale ways, in my fits of laughter, in my tinkerbell tendencies, in my lack of colour coordination?", or praying to be good "even if I gained ten pounds". Every review I've seen of this album mentions her fondness for repetitive line structures, such as (an extreme case) beginning every line of "Are..." with "Are you still mad that"; but her willingness to ignore rhyme and syllable counts makes this a more, not less, free method of song construction, which she exploits.
The best songs, though, in my opinion, are the ones that eschew clear lessons and that, better yet, strew scenes and dialogue all over. The acoustic guitar piece "Unsent" tells five men of her life, simply and in turn and by first name (not necessarily their _real_ names, but I kind of suspect so), what they have meant to her. "Front Row" analyzes, and quotes from, a relationship in such a tangle of perspectives that 1/3 of the words have to be thickly processed and sung under the chorus just to end with a pop-song sized track. "The Couch", sounding like a synth-backed cross between Dar Williams and Ani DiFranco, is ultimately a love song from father to daughter but speeds through "fifty-odd years" of his experiences, fired-off opinions, and come-to-mind events. The soft, understated "One" takes the U2, not the Metallica, version of the title, but her apologies for a supersized ego (when actually we are all one, one, one, one) are laid over a recalcitrant mutter of "Did you just call her amazing? Surely we can't both be amazing!" and a conclusion of "looked good on paper, sounded good in theory".
"I Was Hoping", probably my favorite here, is almost pure dialogue, a breakup song on Ms. Morissette's terms in which the issues and disagreements are laid out for us to ponder at our own pace, though not (she insists unconvincingly) to judge or take sides. Finally, the anthemic "Joining You" is a sympathetic song to a suicidal friend whose Mom had called her, and makes its anti argument by listing and rejecting the premises in suicide's favor: "If we were our (nametags, rejections, outcomes, indignities, and yes, successes), I'd be joining you", but instead "we need to find like-minded companions" in their search "to know why and how come about everything". Which know-everything impulse is probably--- as much as the propulsive beats, as much as the slick but imaginative production wherein the wildest effects are tossed in with complete disregard for surrounding context--- why I am so tremendously fond of this record. The stubborn side of me that prefers anti-suicide songs on the order of Carter USM's "Billy's Smart Circus" (in which only the "sui", not a well-aimed "cide", is rejected as an inappropriate response to evil and suffering) doesn't magically wash away with this album. But if Alanis can stick an exuberant "Let's solve the world's problems! (blems! blems!)" into a 2:30 dance-track/ audio upper like "So Pure", in the company of "Let's be outspoken, let's be ridiculous", then mostly, that's good enough for me.
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