"Jagged Little Pill" Hasn't Been Sanded Down By Time

We use the phrase as an illustrative Mad Libs, where filling in any nouns or adjectives will give us a dichotomy to begin a discussion. There are indeed two types of people... and in this case we can begin with the 90s sitcom "Full House". Yes, really. There are two types of people; those who heard the stories about Alanis Morissette's "You Outta Know" being written about Dave Coulier and were aghast at a beloved family show actor being included in such things, and those who heard the stories and laughed at one of the actors in a cloying and annoying piece of schlock being as unlike his character as all of us who were sick of the moralizing sitcom tropes.

"Full House" was a defining piece of life for that period of time when it aired, which makes it ironic that the period just after was in part defined by "Jagged Little Pill", an album that tore down the conventions of playing nice in pop music, ushering in an era of confessional truth that would drown "Full House" in the tub just to have the corpse to play with as a bath toy.

Pop music has been many things through the years, with 'honest' and 'raw' rarely being among them. Pop is escapism, it is music to leave behind our worries for three minutes at a time. That might feel good, but it means an entire genre is mostly empty calories. Even when it felt like everything had changed when Nirvana released "Nevermind", it was only a feeling. Look over the lyrics Kurt Cobain was writing, and it becomes clear that if he was the 'voice of a generation', it was a generation with nothing to say.

The turning point in bringing truth back to pop music was not him, it was Alanis Morissette. "Jagged Little Pill" was a revelation because she was the rare artist who was telling the full truth of her story through her songs, not manufacturing an image or hiding the pieces that were uncomfortable to show the world. Her music was not designed to go down easy, as the title makes clear, but rather to rip us open so we could not ignore the uglier side of life any longer.

People have been arguing for decades about whether "Ironic" is truly ironic, which misses the entire point. Whether or not the situations described in the song qualify under the technical definition is irrelevant, because the irony is that it is a song about feelings that aren't defined by academic versus colloquial usage of a term. Alanis was writing about the feeling of getting punched in the gut by life again and again, sarcastically asking whether it was the feeling of misery or the misery itself that came first. It is a song that takes on the question of why bad things happen to good people with more than a degree of skepticism that good people even exist.

Perhaps it was ironic that Alanis would set the stage for this revolution in music, and the next few years would come to be defined first by Shania Twain's hyper-corporatized "Come On Over", and then the wave of teen pop and boy bands. One dose of Alanis' honesty was what we needed, but was almost too much for our senses. After having music confront us with the reality of the world we were creating for ourselves, we needed to revert back to a safer space, one where we could look upon plasticine stars and feel as if we never had a chance.

Alanis' most defining trait was her relatability. She was an artist of the people, rough around the edges the way we all are, not posturing as anything but herself. That let her music connect with a massive audience who turned "Jagged Little Pill" into one of the defining records of the time, but it also meant we could see in her how small the gap between artist and audience truly was. While most of us could never imagine being the ultra-polished star with the airbrushed looks and auto-tuned voice, we could have been an artist like Alanis. We can all write down our feelings, we can all vent our frustrations with life and scream them out. By bringing music closer to us, and making clear how we could be her if for a few bits of fate and luck, it drove us to push music further away again. We need the distance to keep us from wondering why we haven't made any art of our own worth a damn. Do we have nothing to say for ourselves?

All of this is ironic, no? It's a bit of a cheap question, but it returns us to the heart of why we are still listening to "Jagged Little Pill" thirty years after it came out. Pop music is often disposable outside of the earworm melodies, so no matter how often Shania Twain's songs might have gotten stuck in your head, they seldom made you think while they were there. Alanis' songs were in a unique voice, and they stirred in us something more authentic than we expect from pop music.

Over the years, we have gotten glimpses of raw honesty since. Every time a song comes out with a searing lyric that makes us believe it is written from a place of true hurt, every time a song makes us consider our own place in life, it owes a debt to Alanis Morissette for making it possible for such music to be accepted as part of the mainstream. Maybe even more than "Nevermind", "Jagged Little Pill" was an album that came out at a time when we didn't know what the next chapter was going to be, and we didn't know how to explain why we still felt so frustrated and angry.

Alanis Morissette was the one who showed us how to turn inward. That didn't last long, as soon the world would start to burn once again. Maybe it's healthier for us to have global crises rather than existential ones. Massive problems may be easier to cope with than our internal ones. That's ironic, right?