[This weekend on the Artblog Reader Advisor: Matt celebrates becoming just a bit jaded. — the Artblog editors]
Saturday marked the 20th anniversary of Alanis Morissette’s debut album Jagged Little Pill. It’s hard for me to explain why I love this album so much. I was a nine-year-old boy in Michigan when Alanis was on the radio and in the Discmans asking, “And are you thinking of me when you fuck her?” My oldest sister, however, was just graduating from high school and was primed to take the enormous cultural import of the album full-hearted and head-on. I have a very distinct memory of JLP playing behind her closed bedroom door.
For me, it might have been my first encounter with the word “ironic,” perhaps laying the unconscious seed for my (and all hipsters’) eventual embrace of irony culture. But more likely, its resonance for me 20 years later relies on a more universal reading of rebellion, redemption, and acceptance. I can’t and will never truly be able to relate to the seismic cultural significance of a woman in a male-dominated 1995 (present-day) industry (society) basically giving the biggest middle finger of all time. What I can relate to is wanting to give the biggest middle finger of all time. What I can relate to is seeing a nonsensical, horrific, sexist world and reassuring myself that everything is going to be fine, fine, fine. So today I submit a collection of links to celebrate JLP and get you in the mood to drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and scream at the top of your lungs.
“Kurt Cobain saw life as a sick joke because nothing mattered; [Alanis] saw it as a sick joke because everything does,” via The Atlantic
UNCLE JOEY, via BuzzFeed
David Browne gave JLP a C+ in 1995. Man, did he miss the train, via Entertainment Weekly
“In her songs, men take her for granted and mentally abuse her, and she retaliates by threatening to leave one of her exes’ names off her album credits (talk about a career-minded individual). Morissette needs to make new friends.”
Because you really need to sing along with this right now, via YouTube
