“Anger is a powerful life force”: Alanis Morissette on the emotion that can move worlds
Rock and roll has always been about freedom. It’s the musical embodiment of youthful abandon, breaking out of the mould of the past and freely forging a fresh future for yourself. It’s about channelling your mixed-up confusions, anxieties, energy and anger into something wild, new and untamable.
But rock and roll has so often been the domain of the male star. In rock and roll, the word ‘desire’ has always been shorthand for ‘masculine desires’, ‘freedom’ for ‘masculine freedom’ and ‘energy’ has been short for ‘masculine energy’. It is music that has predominantly been about male anxieties, perspectives and waves of anger. Words like ‘genius’, ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘legendary’ have been reserved for the work of the men in music. There have been plenty of women in rock, but it has been noted before that even Debbie Harry and Chrissie Hynde had a band of men behind them, validating their experiences in the perception of the music-buying public.
When Alanis Morissette channelled her desires, her energy and, most importantly, her rage into her third album – the groundbreaking, legendary genius of Jagged Little Pill – she stood alone. It was just her name and face on the cover of the sleeve, and just her name to judge the quality and the content of the songs by. Empowered by her anger, she reclaimed and redirected the word and the feeling in a way that had barely been done before on an album made by a solo singing-songwriting woman.
She liberated a whole generation of others—fellow artists and fans alike—to be angry about their situations. She gave them the freedom and agency to articulate their own frustrations and, in doing so, the freedom and agency to control their narratives and perceptions.
On songs like ‘All I Really Want’ and ‘You Oughta Know’, Morisette unleashes her poetic wrath on the subjects of her songs and figures from her life who had done her wrong, while elsewhere, on pieces like ‘Hand in My Pocket’, the anger is tempered by feelings of frustration, reflection, resignation and acceptance, as well as hope and, ultimately, the self-confidence to rise above it all, anyway.
Speaking to NPR in 2012, Morissette acknowledged the liberating impact of the anger she had unleashed on her biggest-selling album, and the way that the emotion has defined her public image ever since, saying that “if there were to be any quality I become a poster child [for], I’ll take anger, because as a woman, two of the main emotions that we are, quote-unquote, ‘not allowed’ to feel are anger and sadness. That anger is such a powerful life force, and I think it can move worlds. It is behind every activism and every [act] that I do. Anger fuels it.”
Jagged Little Pill wasn’t the first album to champion ‘female rage’, or to attempt to reclaim the emotion from a woman’s perspective, but it was culturally groundbreaking in both public reception and perception, and marked a turning of the tide in the way that women could express themselves in the media. While the works of Sinead O’Connor, PJ Harvey and Liz Phair pre-date the release of Morissette’s biggest and best album, the record undoubtedly influenced such diverse and luminous later talents as Fiona Apple, Pink, Courtney Barnett, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Olivia Rodrigo, and countless others.
Throughout history, teenage girls have always been the key demographic driving trends and sales in popular music. Whether it was the Bobby Soxers swooning for Sinatra, the hysteric masses screaming first for Elvis Presley and then for The Beatles, or the adoring fans of Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber and One Direction more recently, the music industry has always been driven by the tastes of young women.
But it’s not as often that an artist has broken through with an album for young women by a young woman. We may be living through the age of Taylor Swift right now, but multi-million-selling albums like Tapestry, Tracy Chapman and Come Away With Me have been far too few and far between. Jagged Little Pill was a game changer, though, with Billboard ranking it as the top-selling album of the entire 1990s. The record has gone on to sell over 33 million copies since its release.
Since Morissette unleashed the powerful life force of her anger and made it more acceptable for other women to follow in her path, the women whose music has been most celebrated in recent times for its anger have usually been white, though.
For a lot of people of colour, and especially for black women, there is a stereotype and a stigma around the misreading of their frustrations and anger as aggression, but as far back as the times of artists like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and later, Billie Holiday, black women have had more than just about anyone to be angry about, and have expressed their experiences through their songs. Nina Simone was able to wield her anger with deft precision and with powerful weight, as were singers like Mavis Staples, Odetta and Aretha Franklin. Later on, women in hip-hop like Missy Elliot, Da Brat and Lauryn Hill paved the way for today’s generation to do the same.
On her 2016 album Lemonade, Beyoncé was able to re-frame, reclaim and redirect the often misunderstood anger of the black woman and demonstrate the more nuanced attributes of the emotion in songs like ‘Don’t Hurt Yourself’ and ‘Sorry’.
Considering the impact, resonance and legacy – and not to mention the sales figures – of songs such as ‘Strange Fruit’ and ‘Mississippi Goddamn’, as well as for albums like The Dreaming, Jagged Little Pill, When the Pawn… and Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Lemonade and Adele’s 30, Alanis Morrissette was right: anger is a very powerful life-force in the right hands, indeed.
