The unexpected album that became the best-selling classic rock record of the 1990s
In this country at least, it’s easy to get swept away with Britpop nostalgia. There’s a tendency for us to focus our retrospective view of the 1990s through one scene, one idea and more crucially, one band.
Oasis takes up a lot of conversational space here in Britain. They represent the proud and liberated ‘90s, when a new wave of artists were boldly taking culture into an expansive new space, and for the first time in a good while, it felt as though the small island felt like the place to be.
But that was part of the problem, really. We Brits got a little bit too high on our own supply and have spent the subsequent decades telling everyone and anyone that Oasis were the only band of note in that decade. That’s not even true domestically, see Pulp, Blur, The Verve for more details, let alone globally.
As vibrant as Britpop may have felt, it didn’t really translate across the shores, and so the Oasis movement barely made a dent in the global music economy. The musical record books rightly show that there were a whole host of different artists pushing music forward, from Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam were all tapping into a new appetite for rock and roll that existed outside the realms of ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’.
But despite the sheer weight of these names and their legacy, none of them could boast the title of the decade’s biggest alternative seller. That is instead reserved for a quiet underdog, who disproved the idea that only a band could top the charts.
Who made the best-selling classic rock album of the 1990s?
A 21-year-old named Alanis Morrisette took down the hyper-machismo of rock and roll with her iconic debut album Jagged Little Pill, which sold 26.4 million copies. Alt-rock was blended with glossy pop sensibilities to make an album that cut through the flamboyance of the era and instead provided something intimate and emotionally complex.
“It was a massive permission given for someone to let their fallibility, vulnerability and humanity be what it is,” Morrissette recalled. “When I listen to it I think, ‘Wow, it’s such an empathic, validating record because no matter what flavour of emotionality I was cycling through in any given song or verse or chorus, it was a musical validation of those feelings.’”
Morrissette continued, “And we live in a culture still, but especially 25 years ago, that said female bodies weren’t allowed to be angry for sure. But also, they weren’t allowed to do other things. Like in my family culture I wasn’t allowed to be sad, I wasn’t allowed to say a lot of things. So this music, and you said it earlier about the unconscious was full permission to feel. And in so doing when people were listening they thought, ‘Oh, we have full permission to feel too. This is great, everybody wins’.”
Ignorant bliss was the overarching feeling in Britpop. Celebrating this new, exciting movement that distracted us from the things that matter. But Morrissette proved that no matter what the changing tides of culture tell us, vulnerability and honesty will always be important and timeless musical themes.
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