20 Years of Jagged Little Pill: How Alanis Morissette Influenced My Life

Why are you so petrified of silence? Here, can you handle this?

Alanis Morissette opened her breakthrough-album “Jagged Little Pill” with one of her most wordy songs ever. 20 years later, I still analyse every part of “All I Really Want”, but my favorite part is when she breaks into silence. As Alanis is celebrating the 20 year-anniversary of “Jagged Little Pill” today, I’m breaking some of my silence about her influence on me and how that has influenced so many others around me without them even knowing.

I rarely share family anecdotes but I will say that I made my sister get me “Jagged Little Pill” because I beat her in a card game so many times. I was 12 back in 1996, so I couldn’t possibly pay for the CD myself. While JLP was released in 1995, back in the 90s it took a long time for US based musicians to gain traction in Europe.

Listening to JLP now I still don’t understand why Alanis sold over 33 million copies. As much praise as I have for this album, lyrically it’s just too intense for the masses. I suppose most people bought it for “Ironic” and “You Oughta Know”, but it’s other songs that changed my life and made me the person I am today (and I’m not even exaggerating here).

See, all the female musicians that were popular in the years before Alanis hit the mainstream didn’t have the most sophisticated lyrics, to say the least. Listening to JLP, I finally heard someone put all the fear and pain I felt into words accompanied by music. Sure, there was the Grunge movement way before JLP, though to be honest I couldn’t possibly relate to the problems of white male binge-drinking 20-somethings.

Of sexism and eating disorders

JLP was so ground-breaking because Alanis was one of the first mainstream artists (that I can think of) to address issues like sexism, abuse, eating disorders and overall self-hatred in a way that was authentic and relatable. The embarassingly underrated “Right Through You” is directed at a music executive who didn’t take Alanis serious and belittled her for her age and gender:

You took me for a joke, you took me for a child. You took a long hard look at my ass and then played golf for a while.

Back then, the song spoke to me because she ended it with her becoming a zillionaire despite all the hate that she experienced. Being verbally abused and bullied since I was a little child throughout my teen years, “Right Through You” gave me hope that one day my life will be so much bigger than I could imagine (disclaimer: I am not a zillionaire yet). Almost 20 years later I relate to the song because all the moments of discrimination a woman experiences in her life.

“Mary Jane” is so real I can’t even listen to it without feeling physical pain. Every line spoke to what I was going through and seeing in so many other young women around me at that time. At 12, I had officially entered an unhealthy relationship with food that would last a life long, and eating disorder and lack of self-acceptance is a central theme of the song.

I hear you’re losing weight again, Mary Jane. Do you ever wonder who you’re losing it for?

There are some light moments on JLP too that shouldn’t go unmentioned. “Head Over Feet” is the hymn for the soul mate I would eventually meet later in life. “You Learn” is a friendly reminder that no one’s perfect and that’s a good thing. And while I have no emotions for “Ironic” anymore, I feel happy for Alanis and what she has done for so many women whenever it’s on the radio.

Jagged Little Pill and Alanis Morissette’s impact on society

As someone who’s openly supporting women and fighting for them to get more recognition, I’m often asked about my idea of feminism. As a working class child, I didn’t grow up reading Gloria Steinem. I didn’t even know about Johanna Dohnal, who was considered the first big female rights activist in Austria. I always found gender issues to be highly elitist and ignoring working class (I still do, actually). Alanis Morissette’s JLP was the gateway to a modern world that I could grasp and that I finally felt welcomed in. Same goes for No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani, Garbage’s Shirley Manson, Fiona Apple, Sheryl Crow, Jewel and other women who grew to success around the same time. Alanis paved the way for artists to share a female perspective on life and politics.

Reflecting on the past 20 years, JLP was the base for so much I conquered in life. It gave me the confidence to be open and personal in my writing (as I am right now) and address fears and issues rather than keeping them taboo. When people ask me about feminism, I like to say: “Everything I know about feminism, I learned from Alanis Morissette.” With Digitalista, a network for female professionals in digital industries, we’ve made a lot of impact in Austria over the past three years. I partially credit Alanis and JLP for it. Because if I didn’t listen to her and No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom back in my early teen years, I really don’t think I’d be where I am today. I learned that being patted on the head by a guy is not cool, that I have more power than people give me credit for, that self-acceptance can take a life time and open-mindedness can lead to great things.

The most important song — and the one still most relevant in my current life — is “Hands In My Pocket”.

And what it all boils down to is that no one’s really got it figured out just yet.

The aftermath

I vividly remember picking up “Jagged Little Pill Acoustic” (a special 10 year anniversary release) at a Starbucks (!) in Oakland in 2005 and thinking, “My life is so weird”. Little did I expect all the things that would happen in the following decade. A while ago I realized that Alanis’ albums make so much more sense to me ten years after their inital release. The funny thing is that Alanis is ten years older than me, which explains things. The one album that most resonates with me is her JLP follow-up “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie”. But still, Jagged Little Pill will always have a big place in my heart for igniting that initial spark.

Update:

Alanis just published her very own JLP essay which perfectly sums up my feelings:

Apparently, there were a lot of things people didn’t know about me. That I could write. That I was angry. (The angriest people I know are people whose presentational selves connote an ongoing and unrealistic joy.) That I had multiple feelings. That I was complex, and yet somehow quite simple at the same time. That I wasn’t just the girl you could bully, take advantage of, exploit, use, manipulate. That there was a human being in there somewhere.