Jagged Little Pill is Actually An Album
Alanis Morissette's most popular and acclaimed work, 1995's Jagged Little Pill, is, shockingly, an album. Of course, when people talk about the Canadian singer's magnum opus, they are never bereft of reasons to praise it without actually talking about the music within. On release, it quickly became a chart-topper in many countries, eventually including both Canada and the U.S., and earned her the honor of being the first Canadian artist to go double diamond. It picked up respectable critical praise and nine Grammy nominations, and took home five, including Album of the Year. But perhaps most relevantly, the record has gone down as an incredibly powerful and influential feminist work in a decade where very few female artists were able to achieve this level of success while being this relatable to teen girls who desperately needed a voice in the mainstream for their struggles.
It's not difficult to see then why criticism of such a record would cause quite an uproar from all those who hold it dear in their hearts. The article which has incensed on Twitter all those avid listeners from two decades ago, entitled "Jagged Little Pill Is Actually Very Bad???", focuses mostly on its cultural significance when establishing the writer's prior experience with the album before diving into the bitter realization that, upon a contemporary relisten, the album is apparently 'very bad' musically. Because funnily enough, Jagged Little Pill is an album, and has music on it; nearly an hour of music, as a matter of fact. And when people listen to the album for the first time without the youthful memories of its unique message, they don't get the benefit of rose-tinted glasses; they just get the music.
So how does the album actually hold up? Though the focus here is on the opinions of those who grew up with the album, and how their bias is inseparable from their adoration due to a misuse of language, I feel it necessary to at least establish my personal stance. I first listened to Jagged Little Pill a few years ago, and I was not then, nor am I now, the target audience for this record. I have no teenage angst to be evoked by Morissette's scathing fury, I definitely am not the one who needs a powerful vehicle for female anger at systemic misogyny; hell, I wasn't even alive when this record came out. So on the one hand, I have no ingrained reason to empathize with the album's point of view, but on the other I am relatively free of any bias or nostalgia preempting an analysis of the music within. Besides, if the album is timeless, it should have at least something to offer me, right?
Not really, no. Jagged Little Pill is very, very not good. Perhaps not bad, but definitely not good. The production is relatively polished for a pop rock album, but barely a minute into the opener All I Really Want and the record's Achilles heel is already painfully apparent: Morissette can clearly sing well, she just refuses to do so. The lyric "And there I go jumping before the gunshot has gone off" contains approximately five voice cracks, a pattern repeated on a variety of lines throughout. For every bitterly cynical utterance like "And all I really want is deliverance", there is a juxtaposition of absolutely appalling writing like "Do I stress you out?/My sweater is on backwards and inside out". The pinnacle of such amateur poetics is the often ridiculed Ironic, whose lyrics consist almost entirely of situations which Morissette attempts to pass as such, yet (fun fact) the song contains no actual examples of irony. Classic album, indeed.
When Morissette is able to rein her voice back into listenable levels, the results are often catchy, powerful, and enjoyable. Of particular note is the eight-minute closer, whose first half You Remind Me is perhaps the record's most satisfying moment leading into an extended silence preceding the hidden Your House, a soulful a capella that, surprisingly, goes over well despite fluctuating wildly between soft crooning and dramatic, emotive belting. The problem is that these moments are few and far between, not nearly prevalent enough to outweigh the continuous lackluster singing and cringeworthy lyrics which not even the admirable production can distract the listener from.
The album is quite striking, I could never dispute that. But Morissette's passion explodes outward with no thought or eloquence, and as a consequence her vocal performance is constantly crippled and her songwriting is too often atrocious. The problem with the discourse surrounding Jagged Little Pill is, unfortunately, an all too common one that stems from a failure of language to adequately convey what people mean when praising art: just because you like an album does not inherently make it good. In the same way that no one can be expected to enjoy every single album considered a 'classic', the important thing is to separate nostalgia and personal taste from quality, and recognize that 'favourite' and 'timeless' are not synonyms.
This is, of course, an issue somewhat endemic to casual, short-form debate popular on sites like Twitter but also prevalent in all kinds of discussion, especially around art that is personal to one or both parties. It could be argued that for every 30-something woman tweeting out 'um Jagged Little Pill is amazing, it spoke to me more than any other album when I was a teenager, how dare someone call it bad!!!', they really mean 'I like this album, therefore it must be good, therefore anyone calling it bad is wrong'. Perhaps they view an attack on its quality as an attack on their taste; a reasonable leap of logic that nevertheless fails to reckon with the truth that not everything one enjoys has to be considered 'good' by a general consensus.
In fact, the article which wrought all this posting ferocity makes this distinction fairly clear. It tells the story of the writer ordering a Jagged Little Pill vinyl off of Amazon, having it shipped to her in earnest (through Amazon Prime, of course), and putting it on with the intent of reliving her adolescence, only to discover that, regardless of her nostalgia, the album is very not good (she also unearths another lyrical gem off of Right Through You: "You took a long hard look at my ass/And then played golf for a while"). The piece takes reasonable pains to separate memories from melodies, acknowledging that " These are not profound lyrics. They are not timeless. But holy fuck did they speak to my sense of not being nearly good enough—according to boys, according to Seventeen, according to MTV spring break specials."
Still, it is entirely possible that the album's staunch defenders do consider it both an important youthful memory and a standout record from a musical standpoint. Though honestly, I really just cannot see listening to All I Really Want or Right Through You and thinking they constitute the pinnacle of vocal talent, or hearing the lyrics to Ironic and labeling this album as 'beyond criticism'. Honestly, as much bullshit as 'objective quality' is as a concept, I have no idea how anyone could listen to this record without prior bias and adequately defend it as good, more out of an absence of merit than anything else. As obviously flawed and dated as pop rock albums like Paramore's Riot! or Green Day's American Idiot are, they have more than enough 'good' on them to constitute blind adoration and fond reminiscence; Jagged Little Pill slaps the listener across the face with its amateurish songwriting from start to finish, and has little to offer as compensation.
In any case, I would be incredibly skeptical of the opinions of someone who declares this album a musical masterpiece, and so I will instead focus on those who equate personal enjoyment with overall value. Titling an article "Jagged Little Pill Is Actually Very Bad" is clearly clickbait attempting to stoke a (mostly negative) response from this demographic, but the writer frames the piece as the depressing realization that something she idolized as a teenager no longer holds up and was only ever adored because it spoke to her in such a way that the music itself was somewhat unimportant.
Would it be accurate, then, for me to call Taylor Swift's 1989 an amazing, timeless album? It debuted at the top of the charts, won two Grammys including Album of the Year, has sold ten million copies worldwide, and holds some nostalgia for me as someone who heard the singles everywhere in my teens and who owes much of my fascination with pop music to the record. Still, I can't exactly defend it unabashedly; as a whole the album is far from flawless, and Shake It Off and Bad Blood are two of the worst pop tracks I've ever heard. To read a headline criticizing it would never surprise me, and any defense of it from my end would be relegated to 'yeah it's not great, but it has its moments, and it's still one of my favourite pop albums ever'. Maybe it's too much to ask of the general public to be able to make such a distinction, but either way, Style is far better than anything Alanis Morissette ever wrote.
I guess the only other issue to be settled is whether the impact Jagged Little Pill had on a generation of teens is enough for it to warrant the classification of 'great album'. The writer of the article opens by noting a discrepancy between her music taste and her husband's collection of records from names like Fleetwood Mac, Miles Davis, and the Beach Boys. Perhaps an odd framing, and one that was noticed by some who found it disappointing that a piece critical of a feminist album takes time to frame a man's music taste, including a response piece (entitled "Jagged Little Pill Is Actually Very Good") that opens with "Since apparently in the Lord’s year 2019, women are starting opinion articles with opening lines about their husband’s opinions...". Regardless, perhaps people should consider that Rumours, Kind of Blue, and Pet Sounds are all critically acclaimed, influential albums that had a profound impact not just on culture at large, but on the genres they existed in (along with being disgustingly better records than Jagged Little Pill), and have by virtually any metric earned the title of 'classic album'.
The original article idiotically attempts to compare Jagged Little Pill to the children's-song-turned-meme 'Baby Shark', a comparison that makes no sense on so many levels. Relistening to the record with a critical ear, the obvious parallel for me is Avril Lavigne, P!nk, and their contemporaries; fiery, cynical, youthful, and delightfully dated in all the ways only terrible pop-rock can be. Difference is, no one is holding them up as impactful feminist icons whose songs are beyond criticism (though maybe they will be in ten years, which is a depressing thought). Lavigne and P!nk are, funnily enough, other artists whose greatest hits are seared into my neocortex from youth yet who I have no trouble calling terrible musicians, even if So What (the P!nk song, not the Miles Davis track) randomly starts playing in my head with disturbing frequency.
In comparison to the aforementioned classics, Jagged Little Pill's influence can be summarized as speaking to a teenage demographic at a time when few others were doing so, and inspiring a generation of mediocre pop-punk acts who achieved nowhere near the same success both critically and commercially. A notable legacy, certainly, but not the most glorious one. Think Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory: immensely popular, incredibly iconic for a generation of young listeners, yet far from an unequivocal triumph when it comes to, you know, the actual music it consists of. And generally, when people talk about whether an album is good or not, the primary concern is, for some reason, the actual music.
Again, the original article makes the point succinctly:"This makes both Alanis and the album, which she co-wrote and recorded at the young age of 19, culturally significant—but it doesn’t make it good, timeless music." If Jagged Little Pill is your favourite album of all time and holds a special place in your record collection, then great; don't let anyone ever take that away from you. But to pretend as though it is beyond criticism because of this is ridiculous. No matter how many times I listen to a Taylor Swift album, it's never going to become a masterpiece.