The Jump

The Jump – Season 3 – Episode 9

Shirley: In 1995, Alanis Morissette released the album Jagged Little Pill, to both critical and commercial acclaim. It went on to become one of the best-selling albums of all time, selling 33 million copies to date. The album spawned three number one singles, two more in the top 10, nine Grammy nominations, five Grammy wins, including Album of the Year, and more than anything else, the songs in Jagged Little Pill became anthems of empowerment across the world. And she did all of this when she was just 19 years old.

Very few people could handle the pressure that comes with that much, and that kind of attention. Even fewer could do it before they reached 20 years old. On today's episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Alanis about the lead single, and tone-setting anthem from Jagged Little Pill you ought to know. I'm Shirley Manson, and this is The Jump.

I want to start with saying congratulations on a ridiculous career. I haven't seen you in 20 years, and here we both are. And what a miracle and what a testimony to hard work.

Alanis: Yes.

Shirley: Well, of course, we're here to talk about one specific song, and you picked You Ought to Know, from your third studio album, which blew my mind, because when the world met you, this was actually your third record. Correct?

Alanis: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And I had a single out, I had a record company when I was 10 years old, because nobody wanted to sign kids back in the day. Now they're fine with it, apparently.

Shirley: Yeah, no shit.

Alanis: Now they seek you out in the uterus. So basically I had a record out, I'd done, I guess at this point, I could call it an EP, when I was 10. And then...

Shirley: Wow.

Alanis: And then two records in Canada. I knew that would've required me to leave school, and I just wasn't really, wasn't up for that. So I said, "No." And then I was dropped from MCA records after, I guess I was 18, because I was starting to write songs that were less compatible, shall we say, with the records that I'd had in my teen years, and a little more autobiographical, heaven forbid, not rhyming.

And so I was writing all these songs, and I did one of the last videos that I did with MCA, and I remember they were mortified, because there were snakes in the video, and it was risky, and they both, two people came up to me after they saw the video at Canada's equivalent of MTV, and they said, "We don't think where you're going is the way to go. And you should really pretty much keep doing what you're, what the people you've worked with as a teenager, I think you should do that." And I was like, "Oh geez."

然后不久之后,MCA说,“我们不能真正y continue on this journey with you." They didn't say this directly, but basically it was, "We really think you're done." Shirley: And that must have been pretty devastating, getting dropped at 18 years old?

艾拉妮丝:在某种程度上,它不是,因为going on, because every meeting I went to, basically what I was presenting was being met with resistance, and being met with, "We don't think this is a good idea. And what are you talking about?" And the collaborators I was working with at the time, whether they were aware of it or not, they, I think there was just fear of some of the content that I wanted to write. There was even, there was a lot of questioning around whether I was a writer. And so for me, there was an emancipation a little bit when I was dropped. It was devastating, because rejection sucks, but it was also not devastating. It was pretty liberating. And I thought, "Finally, I can start from scratch with a clean slate."

(singing)

Shirley: So you had a good working relationship with Glenn Ballard, the producer of You Oughta Know.

Alanis: Yes. And collaborator. So yeah, basically I was starting to write with different people in Canada and in Los Angeles, but I wasn't really precious during the song writing process. Although, once I met Glen Ballard in LA, and we started writing together, I was blown away at the ease, not so much that it was an effortless experience of writing You Oughta Know, or writing the songs we wrote for Jagged Little Pill, but there was a flow to it. There was no resistance, basically. Anything that I wanted to write was not only welcomed, but the flame was fanned. It was great.

(singing)

Shirley: I was wondering how much these lyrics were actually the empowered Alanis, or were they a projection of a future Alanis, if that makes sense?

Alanis: Great question. Yeah. I love it. Only an artist would ask that. It was devastation filtered through fire. I'm always moved by how multitudinous we are. Whenever I ask my kids how they're doing, they'll say three or four or five or six feelings, because we're aware, "I'm sort of excited, but I'm also a little bit depressed under that. And then I'm also very, very bored, but also really..."

So with You Oughta Know, it was pure devastation. I mean, I was horrified, combined with my having learned from the patriarchy. I was basically taught, by just modeling and watching the world, that so many of us were terrified of being sad and broken, and males, especially men in my life anyway, were, anytime they felt sad or scared, they would just filter it through anger. It's like anger was the go-to. If you're sad, you're angry. If you're scared, you're angry. If you're vulnerable, you get angry.

所以,你需要知道,每个人都很快的connected with the anger and the empowerment, and certainly it's in there, but so is the opposite of that; so is deep, deep sadness, and profound dis-empowerment. I worked through my love addiction issues, 15 years, 20 years after that. So I was still mired in these confusing messages about what hetero relationships even were supposed to be. And I was a youngin', I was still figuring it out.

Shirley: I think it's fair to say there's not, previous to this record, this whole record of years, the album Jagged Little Pill, but I think this song specifically, there hadn't been a lot of racial expression from the female standpoint in popular music. Is that fair to say?

艾拉妮丝:我的经验是,辛妮O 'Connor, Tori Amos, there were so many women that were raging, and they were everything. So when people think, "Oh, that's a really angry record." First of all, I'm flattered, because if someone's going to one-dimensionalize me and reduce me to one thing, I'll take anger. So it's just so one-dimensionalizing, even the hyper-sexualizing of women in music and videos and everything. I'm just like, "It's fine. Just know that that's 1/1,000,000th of her.

Shirley: Yeah. But the expression of anger is relatively unusual.

Alanis: Yes, yes. Sorry. I do want to say yes to that, too. It's not the norm. The norm is pretty much infatuation songs. When you're working through something, some grist, then a song is a great thing to do, for me anyway. But yeah, anger and rage. If you're a woman body, if you identify as a woman, and you're alive in this time, certainly alive in 1994, if you weren't angry, you weren't paying attention. And in some ways, I was super checked-out about the degree of how patriarchy was affecting me, to the point where people would say after You Oughta Know was released, "How do you feel about being viewed as this super empowered woman?" And it was confusing to me, because I thought, "Well, I am empowered, and aren't women empowered?"

But I was clueless about the degree to which patriarchy was basically trying to choke women. And when You Oughta Know was first brought to the radio stations, their response was, "Yeah, we can't play this. We have our quota of one woman." Or, "We're already playing Sinead. So sorry, we can't play this." So there was a big rejection to playing You Oughta Know at the beginning, before K-Rock played, it because of their quota, they wanted to keep their female artists quota down, which is mortifying.

(singing)

Shirley: There was a lot of taboo subjects covered in the lyrics of this song that we hadn't yet really been exposed to. When you talk about Tori, or you talk about Sinead, but yes, they were well-versed in their own fury, but they weren't very explicit. And I mean, it seems so silly to call it explicit, but

Alanis: No, it doesn't. That's the right word, don't you think?

Shirley: Yeah.

Alanis: Yes.

Shirley: Because it hit me at the time as being really like, "Wow." I remember just going, "Oh, fuck. That's so smart." I was focused, above all else, on these lyrics. I can remember it to this day on MTV, watching it in the upstairs of Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin. I was making our own DB record, and watching you perform this song, and I was struck by the video. But more than anything, it was the lyrics I honed into. And I was like, "This is really smart. She's tuning into something that needs to be said at this very moment. And it's the right time."

Alanis: Wow. Yeah. I did feel like there was a wave happening, whether we call it the feminist wave, or women being honest about their internal experience, or whatever was happening, it was happening. And I felt like this huge wave was coming, and someone said, "Who's going to ride it?" And I just put my hand up, I was like, "I'll do it." I am that woman who puts my hand up before I even hear what the freaking request is.

Shirley: It really is. It's like a phenomenal moment in musical history, I think.

Alanis: Yes.

Shirley: And you have gone on to sell 30 million copies of Jagged Little Pill, which I think is the biggest debut album of all time.

Alanis: Yeah. I don't know the

Shirley: In the history of

Alanis: In the history of the galaxy.

Shirley: I mean, fucking hell, girl. That's insane. So tell me where you were when you wrote this song? This exact song.

Alanis: So my journal was full when I was in Toronto. I basically, to this day, I won't tell anyone where, but I have cabinets and cabinets full of journals. So I remember crying in my room, and then looking at the journal that was just teeming with information of all my crushes or whatever. And I remember walking downstairs and throwing it in the fire, thinking that this decision I was making of being willing to be in the public eye was going to be really vulnerable, and if anyone really knew how vulnerable or how betrayed I felt, or whatever, that that somehow would be the end. And of course the poetry is, that it was the beginning, telling these stories.

Shirley: So you're saying these lyrics for You Oughta Know where were from a journal?

Alanis: So probably two, I had a whole page full that was what I pulled from when we started writing You Oughta Know. I was telling the stories, especially You Oughta Know, everyone, not everyone, but a lot of assumptions around that song being a song intended to fuel revenge. And for me, I love revenge fantasy.

Shirley: Me, too.

Alanis: I think we have to really, really, really dream it and visualize the revenge movement, or it just gets stuck in our bodies. But I'm not the woman that says, "Oh yeah, then go do that."

(singing)

Shirley: Did you automatically think, "Hmm, this is going to be a single. This is a standout here?"

Alanis: I did, because I love it so much. There were a lot of people who wanted Hand in My Pocket or Ironic. I didn't even want the song Ironic on my record.

Shirley: That shows you what you know.

Alanis: Yeah, exactly. I loved it. And I wanted it to be the first single. And I kind of stood by that for awhile. We were a little ahead of the game, because we weren't anywhere near releasing it yet. But I just remember saying to myself, not even to Glenn, that I would love to have that song at first. Because, and this is the patriarchal, because the old thing of, "You only have one opportunity for a first impression." Okay. Okay, sort of. But my whole thought is I had a sense with my model version of fame, and the vicissitudes of it in my teen years. Once someone identifies, or once an audience, sometimes, once they identify you, it's really hard to wiggle out of that. And that was my experience as a teenager.

So I thought, "Whatever song comes out first, I don't want to have to wiggle out of that for the rest of my life." And that meant starting with anger, and starting with the sense of power or passion, was the perfect place for me to start, because it's such a big part of who I was. People were eventually going to find out that I was insecure and vulnerable and love-addicted and co-dependent. They were going to find all that out later, but what a great way to start by saying, "Even though I am all of these vulnerable things, I'm still fire."

Shirley: Yeah. That's it.

(singing).

Shirley: Alanis Morissette, thank you so much for your time, and your kind consideration. I'm deeply grateful to you.

Alanis: Yay. Thank you, Shirley, for your thoughtfulness and amazing questions.

Shirley: Lots of love to you and your beautiful family.

Alanis: Aw, thank you. You too, Shirley.

(singing)

Shirley: The Jump is hosted by me, Shirley Manson, and it's produced by Dann Gallucci. The Jump is an original series from MailChimp, produced in partnership with Little Everywhere. Dann Gallucci and Jane Marie are the Executive Producers. The Jump is mixed by Mike Richter. Original music composed by Hrishikesh Hirway, and a very special thanks goes to our wonderful booker, Mara Davis.