Still a Bitter Taste: Jagged Little Pill's Lasting Impact on Female Rage

I want you to know I’m happy for you. I wish nothing but the best for you both…. 

There’s a moment when Jagged Little Pill crosses over from being a run of the mill breakup album and into being the blueprint and cultural figurehead we know it as today. Track two opens with the gasping lyrics above, before the grittiness sets in, Is she perverted like me? Would she go down on you in a theatre? Does she speak eloquently? And would she have your baby? I’m sure she’d make a really excellent mother. 

You see, when Alanis Morissette made Jagged Little Pill, she was trekking through waters unknown to most female songwriters at the time. If a breakup song was bitter it was only accepted from a man, and if a woman was going to write anything she had Carly Simon and Stevie Nicks’ playbooks to go from. The vindictive call outs, brash emotional honesty, sexual frustration, thinly veiled low blows - those weren’t for women to do. Or, if she did, she would be cast to a cult hero because the mainstream public just couldn’t be ready for something like that. Until Jagged Little Pill, women weren’t allowed the God-given right to stick one hand in her pocket and have the other flick her cigarette. 

Break-up albums were nothing new by 1995. Jagged Little Pill follows in a long line of albums inspired by the twisting narrative strewn about through Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. Writer is scorned, takes pain to the page, creates their masterpiece of emotional storytelling, hailed as genius, rides their success into another slew of great albums. There was bitterness, there was anger, but it was always subdued by ballads filled to the brim with lyrics that conveyed anything beyond the pain of heartbreak. 

But not with Alanis. 

The songs that make up Jagged Little Pill tell the story that had been seen time and time again from a distinctly female perspective. The long fabled scorned woman has always had to put her anger on ice if she wants to be taken seriously. She can’t talk about sex without being labelled a slut, she can’t speak badly about other women, she can’t say anything she really feels. To be the raw, honest, emotional artist that so many men were upheld for being, especially when it came to the topic of romance and its inevitable fall-outs. Women who did harbour this unflinching honesty in their lyrics - Patti Smith or Courtney Love, for example - were maligned to these cult-heros, whose names were known but whispered like urban legends in passing as their male counterparts were these pillars of fame. Endlessly talented women who have created some of the most defining works of their time and classic pieces of music, but their names fall between the cracks due to not adhering to being a well-behaved woman. 

Alanis Morissette was able to break-free from this age-old trope. Jagged Little Pill is like a thousand tiny pricks to dismantle a man who clearly wasn’t worth the trouble he caused. Back to You Oughta Know, the album’s first single, helps it become everything it is during the short run time. The opening lines are how a woman is expected to react to this heartbreak - through gritted teeth be apologetic and sweet. She isn’t allowed to react, she isn’t allowed a shred of emotion as to not be labelled a crazy ex-girlfriend who can’t move on. The verses signal to us her real response to this betrayal, she’s sarcastic with an almost poisonous venom dripping from her remarks. Every time you speak her name does she know how you told me you’d hold me until you died? / Til you died, but you’re still alive hits like a freight train out of nowhere in some sense. For how many men had called women some of the worst things a person can think of and gotten number one hits, there was Alanis pushing back on how she was to be treating who pushed her to this breaking point. It wasn’t that women weren’t doing this - they were - but it was never something you’d hear played at every gas station, grocery store, restaurant. Alanis saying Are you thinking of me when you fuck her? is no different than INSERT SONG HERE, the difference is she is masking intent. Why should she? She talks about sex without mincing her words, she doesn’t take the high road of respecting other women: we are witnessing a woman scorned as she’s burning. There’s no rational to her thinking other than aiming to make him bleed just as he did her, an eye for an eye. Hand In My Pocket explores her as the person she is. As a narrator, she’s not someone the public is used to her, a flawed woman you still want to root for even if you don’t agree with her doing it. I’ve got one hand in my pocket and the other is flicking a cigarette. The image of her holding the cigarette as she recounts her pitfalls, that even if she’s wrong she’s in control of her own life. Ironic being filled with examples of non-ironic situations: isn’t that ironic? I love the placement of the song after Mary Jane as well, with Mary Jane seeing Morisette speaking to someone woman to woman and offering advice only for the next song to repeat the line. It's the good advice you just didn’t take. It ties back with Hand In My Pocket again, with the woman being in control of her sometimes very poor decisions.

Not the Doctor could be read in two ways: to her ex and to the audience. The first few verses are her begging not to have to answer or take care of the grown man who should know better, harkening back to An older version of me on You Oughta Know. There's one line that seems to loom larger now thirty years later: I don’t want to be your idol / See, this pedestal is high and I’m afraid of heights. There was no way the insane success reached on Jagged Little Pill could’ve been predicted. It was always going to be a phenomenal album with an absolute powerhouse as its fearless narrator, but who would have thought it would see the success that so many other female-fronted albums never could? Throughout the album we see someone going through pain and healing in the non-linear and harsh way it always happens, for once not needing to pull her punches to reach success. For once, a man was burned at the same stake women are all too aquainted with in public, and that right there is the legacy she's left with this album.

She helped pave the way for countless artists and songs today to reach the stratosphere they are in. There would be no Fiona Apple, no Katy Perry, no Taylor Swift. There wouldn't be Sour by Olivia Rodrigo, we would've never gotten to a point where a our female writers were able to say how they feel with no barriers like so many men had done for decades. All because of Alanis Morissette and the flawless ablum we have been lucky enough to have for thirty years now.

Jagged Little Pill is bitter, hence the title. It’s not easy to stomach and even harder to swallow. But maybe that's okay.

Alanis Morissette performing You Oughta Know on David Letterman in 1995: