“Jagged Little Pill” by Alanis Morrisette | Album Review
I look back at one of the most important and influential albums of the 90s.
This album review looks back at one of the most important and influential albums of the 90s to coincide with its 30th anniversary.
Genre: Alternative, Rock, Pop
Label: Maverick
Release Date: June 13, 1995
Vibe: 🤘
👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform
It’s funny. You listen to artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, and, to a degree, Chappell Roan, and you can hear Alanis Morissette’s influence. Soulsearching, confessional, often volatile music that never apologizes for its fiery feminism. Rodrigo has performed with Alanis and expressed a ton of mutual admiration for one another in a Rolling Stone piece from a few years back. “I love how you’re so honest and talk about stuff that normally isn’t talked about in songwriting,” Rodrigo said at one point, which is striking to think that Jagged Little Pill may still be viewed as pulling back the curtain on taboo subjects three decades after its initial release. The rest of the exchange is as sweet as it is revealing about the times we live in.
Rodrigo: “I remember having my mind blown when I was 13. I was in the car with my parents [and] remember hearing ‘Perfect,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ I told my music teacher a couple days after: ‘You can write songs like that?’ I just looked at music and songwriting in a completely different way.”
Morissette: “What was it about that song? Was it the perfectionism theme, or was it just the idea of stream of consciousness?”
Rodrigo: “I just think that’s something me and all of my friends had felt so acutely for so long, and I’d never heard somebody talk about it — even in general, in conversation, and definitely never in a song that’s so popular.
“It’s really hard to sing about what you sing about sometimes. Maybe it’s not hard for you, but as a listener … I went to see Jagged Little Pill on Broadway before lockdown, and that was the first time I heard ‘So Unsexy.’ I remember being like, ‘I can’t believe she’s saying all of this stuff.” Stuff that is so, so vulnerable and intimate. That was another moment where I was like, ‘Wow, songwriting can be so much bigger than I imagined it in my head.’”
Morissette: “I don’t know what your process is around songwriting. For me, when I first write it, it’s just for myself. It’s me alone in a room […] A lot of people have said to me very generously, like you just did, ‘Wow, that’s so brave,’ and I wonder what part of it is brave, because it just doesn’t feel brave to me [laughs]. It just feels like a mandatory experience to the point where if I’m not doing that — if I’m not expressing myself in that way — I’d probably get sick really fast.”
Before Jagged Little Pill, there wasn’t much room in mainstream music for women to express certain aspects of their psyches. Or, if they did, it had to be packaged in a specific way so as not to ruffle too many feathers. Courtney Love and Liz Phair had breakthroughs on the alternative side, and you could say Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston did affecting versions of emotionally wounded. But no one sounded like Alanis until she burst onto the scene in her early 20s and, despite a raft of imitators, no one has held a candle to her performance on this LP in the years since. These songs literally broke the glass ceiling on how women could express anger, heartbreak, and sexual autonomy within the confines of a well-calibrated pop-rock song. As Rodrigo alluded to, this record was the first time many young women were implicitly permitted to be loud and unapologetically messy.
Alanis Morissette’s 1995 magnum opus arrived at just the right time stylistically. The grunge movement was on its last legs, but bubblegum teen pop hadn’t saturated radio and MTV to the degree that it would three or so years later. There was plenty of wiggle room to experiment and not get totally shut out of pop radio. Had Jagged Little Pill dropped a couple of years before or after, it may not have hit as big a sweet spot as it did. But, to add to that, you can’t underestimate the pent-up demand for someone like Alanis to break through. Based on the rapturous response the record received, it’s clear that young women raised during either Reagan/Bush social conservatism or Monica Lewinsky’s public humiliation were searching for the words to describe what it felt like to live in a wordl where they were constantly told “be yourself” and then punished when they actually did. If nothing else, this album gave many the go-ahead to speak their truth, whether that meant screaming or laughing through tears. To admit they didn’t have it all figured out.
Before Jagged, Alanis Morissette was a Canadian teen star. She’d appeared on the homegrown sketch show You Can’t Do That on Television and, by 1993, already had two studio albums under her belt. Her self-titled debut, Alanis, dropped in 1991 and would eventually go Platinum in Canada, though her sound was worlds away from what she’d become known for later in the 90s. Those early records had more in common with the dance-pop and New Jack Swing trends of the moment, stylistic choices that led to Alanis being (hilariously) dubbed the Great White North’s answer to Debbie Gibson. I’m a fan of Gibson’s, but that feels so shortsighted an assessment now. In interviews, Alanis has talked about how her music at that time never “belonged” to her in a way. Like she was wearing clothes that may have been deemed flattering, but they weren’t custom-made for her to wear.
That all changed after she moved to Los Angeles and, through her manager, was introduced to Glen Ballard. When the two met, he was best known for writing heartfelt pop ballads, including Wilson Philips’ “Hold On” and Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror,” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1990 and 1988, respectively. Ballard was impressed enough by Alanis’ talent to let her have run of his home studio and, crucially, didn’t impose any direction on her music. Their initial meeting apparently went so well that they started writing material right there in the room together, the first step in a creative partnership that would change both of their lives. Crucially, Ballard encouraged and helped amplify the rawness of Alanis’s sound. Reams of notes became lyrics and unforgettable hooks. Most of the vocals were tracked in one or two takes. Throughout the process, there wasn’t a ton of second-guessing or edits by committee. The real gift of Jagged Little Pill is that it remains a singular vision.
The central engine that drives Jagged Little Pill is the unflinching, articulate, and unapologetically feminine “You Oughta Know.” It’s a full-body howl of a breakup song, featuring 90s rock veterans Dave Navarro and Flea on guitar and bass, respectively. When she asks, “Would she go down on you in a theater?” it’s less a question and more of a right hook to the jaw, wrapped in sneering sarcasm and the sly smile of vengeful deliverance. “Right Through You” comes close to equaling that emotional onslaught, taking aim at industry sleazeballs with the steady hand and icy smile of an arsonist with a lit Molotov cocktail in their hand. In lesser hands, these may come across as tantrums. But, even when the volume is turned down somewhat on a track like “Perfect,” the portrait of love lands like a kick to the sternum.
It’s worth noting that the mystique adds to the effect. Alanis has never come out and stated who these songs are about specifically, and, honestly, it’s to her advantage to leave it that way. It gives her audience more room to project their life experiences onto the canvas she’s set up for them. In 2008, she elaborated on why this approach has been a guiding force in her work, saying: “I've never talked about who my songs were about and I won't, because when I write them they're written for the sake of personal expression. So with all due respect to whoever may see themselves in my songs, and it happens all the time, I never really comment on it because I write these songs for myself, not other people.”
One of the album’s greatest strengths is that it never tries to sand down its edges from a production standpoint. Ballard’s contributions behind the scenes are simultaneously loose but laser-focused. The guitars lurch and scrape, the drums thud with undeniable purpose, and the resulting soundstage never threatens to overpower Alanis’s vocals. It’s a record that comes across as if it was recorded and mixed before anyone had time to catch their breath and let their nerves settle. That rawness pays off beautifully on songs like “Hand in My Pocket,” which use a single, simple drum loop and crisp guitar line to unravel contradictions like a slam poetry session. Then there’s “Ironic,” the album’s most enduring (and misunderstood) hit single. If you’re someone who’s nitpicked the lyrics, you’ve missed the point. Alanis isn’t trying to define irony, but rather the dissonance left in its wake. The way the song rolls casually out of your speakers, somewhere between a shrug and an eye-roll, encapsulates that feeling of everything not quite adding up. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the messiness is the message.
The ripples created by Jagged Little Pill are everywhere in music. In addition to the artists I’ve already mentioned, Fiona Apple, Pink, Avril Lavigne, Kelly Clarkson, and Billie Eilish are a handful of others who’ve cited this album as a major influence on their careers. Before bringing her out to perform a song during one of her shows in 2015, Taylor Swift said this of Alanis: “She defined the generation of female songwriters. She taught us you could get really, really mad if you wanted to. It’s fair to say that many of the female songwriters would not write the way we do without her music.” The primary reason for that, I think, is Alanis gave aspiring artists like Swift and her peers the oxygen they needed to put words to notions that didn’t fit neatly into heteronormative gendered expectations. There were trailblazers before her, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think the shattering of this specific glass ceiling can be overstated, certainly for my generation.
Then there’s the commercial angle to all of this. Globally, it’s sold over 33 million copies and, in the U.S. alone, it’s one of only three albums to sell at least 15 million units since Nielsen Music began tracking that data in 1991 (Metallica and Shania Twain are responsible for the other two, by the way). Suddenly, Jagged’s success forced more labels and record execs to take women in alt-rock and alt-pop more seriously than they ever had. The rise of the “emo girl” archetype, which became its own bankable subgenre, owes Alanis a colossal debt. So does the current wave of vulnerability-as-brand artists who’ve rocketed up TikTok and Spotify global charts for, and I don’t want this to sound reductive, processing trauma in a publicly accessible format. Whether it’s to your taste or not, the catharsis that comes with it is incredibly relatable. The data doesn’t lie.
In Broadway form, Jagged Little Pill was reimagined as a rock musical in 2019, bringing its themes of trauma, addiction, and sexual identity into the 21st century. It’s a testament to how these songs still speak, still sting, still liberate, 30 years later. The musical didn’t necessarily revive the album but, like Mamma Mia! did for the ABBA canon, reframed it for a new generation of fans. The true magic lies in how revolutionary it still sounds, even if we’d like to think we’re more progressive when discussing women “being themselves” in the context of performance. One look at a comment section devoted to Sabrina Carpenter’s live shows will tell you we’re not as advanced as we think we are in a lot of ways. But, through those discomforts, Jagged Little Pill offers presence. A witness. A mirror. It asks you to sit with those feelings and reactions. To scream when you need to. To let your rage and your joy and your longing live, well, maybe not in harmony, but certainly not in shame.
What’s your favorite track off this record? Drop it in the comments!
Every song on this album is my favorite! This album was so incredible, and is still in my rotation.
What an absolute classic