Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta Know" is every ex-lover's worst
nightmare, the most unwelcome of 3 A.M. phone calls, it's full of
blistering accusations and unanswerable questions, like it's acid
catchphrase-in-the-making, "Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?" In
the video, she wails, snarls, and sneers; trudges through a symbolic
desert wasteland; and makes three changes of costume-just in case you miss
the theme of shedding skin and violent personal renewal. By the time she
lies down in a field of flowers at the end, you hope she's exorcised her
personal demons. She sure has awakened yours. It's the empowerement clip
of the day, a raspy anthem for all those inner children out there who
refuse to get over it.
Alanis didn't simply reinvent herself to make "You Oughta Know" and
the album it came from, Jagged Little Pill. She cut down to the bone,
stripped out her innards, and held them up for everyone to enjoy.
Self-excavation the Henry Rollins way is a dangerous game, but at her best
Alanis comes across like a more repressed Liz Phair, a less disturbed
Sinead O'Conner, a Marianne Faithfull who never shot junk. At worst, she
sounds like Edie Brickell on a bad day.
Which is still better than being Ottawa's answer to Tiffany. Three
years ago, this archetypal scorned woman was plain Alanis, junior disco
diva, she echoed the older, sexier likes of Paula Abdul and Janet Jackson.
At the age of ten, Alanis had won a part in Nickelodeon's kids series You
Can't Do That On Television. At fourteen, she set up a record company and
shot a promo video in Paris. By the time she was seventeen, she had a
platinum debut album called Alanis, a Juno Award (Canada's Grammy), a huge
pimply following, and next to no friends her own age. Her follow up album,
Now Is The Time, did little but prove that her time had come and gone. The
perfect child-star was washed up at an age when most people have barely begun.
Alanis is twenty-one now--old enough to know better and to realize
that her biggest betrayer has always been herself. "Did anyone get laid
last night?" Alanis asks her band as the tour van pulls out of Seattle on
the way to Vancouver. No one answers. This means that the high scorer in
the band's unofficial one-night-stand league remains the current leader,
with four bodies bedded. Whoever it is.
"I'm really proud of us," Alanis chirps. She would be. Since
finishing Pill, she's been making up for lost time, smoking joints and
having one-night stands, whereas the other Alanis was a tower of
self-control. Sort of. "I never allowed myself to go off the path when I
was younger," she mutters. "There are a lot of things I didn't do. I lost
my virginity at nineteen but I was very sexually active since I was
fourteen, doing everything but. Isn't that odd? I enjoyed what I was
doing, but I couldn't fully enjoy it."
Alanis is small and much prettier than she photographs, with a
wide, sensuous mouth that seems locked in a perpetual smile; large,
engaging hazel-brown eyes; and chest length, curly auburn hair. She is,
however, not at her best today. Ten days into the tour, she and the
four-man band are already feeling the burn of too many dates in too short a
time since the Jagged Little Pill album took off. The floor of the van has
developed a healthy carpet of chicken bones, mashed melon pieces, and
banana peels. The band fight highway ennui by flinging the rotten fruit at
the windshield of the trailing equipment truck. The fruit goes flying; the
cellular phone pesters them with interview bookings, chart updates, and gig
offers; and Alanis sleeps most of the two-hour drive.
We meet the next morning for a late breakfast in a Vancouver coffee
shop. Alanis is having fruit, a dry bagel, and charmomile tea. Still
tired, she's wearing her trademark retro-'70's clothes, which look fresh
out of the thrift store bargain bin: candy-apple-red polyester
bell-bottoms, Adidas sneakers, and an oversize men's shirt that covers her
frame like a tent.
"They say that androgynous people are the happiest," she says,
smiling. Where disco Alanis used to flaunt decolletage during her
bubblegum days, now she won't wear clothes that highlight her butt at the
expense of her songs. And anyway, she says, she'll never fit society and
the media's standards of perfection, so why try?
She plays with her fruit salad, eating just a little of it as she
explains that ever since she was ten, she's known what she wanted and how
to get it. The TV series and records came because of her self-discipline
and drive for attention. And she thought she didn't really deserve any of
it. All her youthful accomplishments were like sugar to a diabetic. "I'd
say 'Thank you' for a compliment and think, 'You don't know how terrible I
am!' It was a little bit of a drug for me. I wound up with all this
adulation, and at that age you don't know what self-esteem is."
When she was fourteen she was trying to be fourty-signing
contracts, making videos, reveling in adult approval. Now she's twenty-one
and trying to be twelve, doing all the things her Catholic childhood and
self-imposed perfection wouldn't allow. Everything, that is, apart from
smoking tobacco, drinking, injecting, snorting, or doing caffeine. She
even wears stick-on tattoos: "Part of my fear of commitment." It's a
funny kind of abandon.
By the time her first career curdled, Alanis had few friends her
own age. She found them too immature. She'd steal their boyfriends
instead, simply for the conquest.
"The only way I felt desirable was when a man would leave his
girlfriend for me. I wish I could go back and apologize to all the girls I
did that to. And if I ever dated guys my own age, it would only last about
a week."
To sink Disco Alanis, she moved to L.A., leaving her tight-knit
family, her management, and her old bands for a second chance. Staying in
Beachwood Canyon, above Hollywood, she was alone and unknown. Her Canadian
good manners were interpreted as doormat passivity; she was mugged.
Finally, on a flight home to Canada last Christmas, the emotional costs she
had avoided for so long came due.
"I was writing my fifty-sixth Christmas card on the plane when I
had a head-on anxiety attack. I just bawled my eyes out and started
shaking and wanted to faint. It scared the living shit out of me."
Similar uncontrollable crying jags and fainting spells followed,
and she checked herself into a hospital, admitting to herself that she was
losing it. Hypnosis and therapy helped to release years of blocked
emotions, feelings she didn't even have a name for. When she started
working on Pill, the songs came spilling out like automatic writing, some
of them so unbidden that she doesn't even remember putting the words on
paper. Far from her old pop confections, these were discordant, off-kilter
tunes about rejection, betrayal, guilt, and-yes-oral sex.
"It was like God's way of saying to me, 'You've been working your
ass off, and I'm going to give this to you. Enjoy it, please.'"
The meet-and-greets and the radio promotions grind on. Despite
Jagged Little Pill's success, some of Canada's DJs remember the other
Alanis all too well. At Z59.3 FM, one of Vancouver's biggest Top 40
stations, the presenter asks her about her bra size and fingernail polish,
and ends with a Howard Stern-like request for a kiss. In Toronto, the
interviewer concluded, "Well some people can evolve, some people can
change. Personally, I don't believe it."
Later, in the lobby of the hotel where the band are staying, Alanis
pauses at the elevator.
"There are a lot of people who resent success here," she says quietly.
"If this was a confessional record that I released independently
and it didn't succeed, you'd believe it. But because it's succeeding, you
don't know whether to believe it or not."
She doesn't care. Perhaps for the first time in her life, she
doesn't have to.