MUSIC-CANADA: Morissette’s Angry Tunes Win Awards but Not Critics

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Mar 5 1996 (IPS) - Canadian pop star Alanis Morissette ought to be happy: her angry songs of lost love and self-assertion won her most of the top U.S. music prizes at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles last week.

Morissette’s first U.S.-distributed album, ‘Jagged Little Pill’ (on Maverick/Reprise), won the award for best album of 1995, while Morissette’s first hit song, ‘You Oughta Know’, picked up the prize for best rock song.

Morissette won four prizes in all, a rarity for any Canadian artist, let alone a 21-year-old woman previously known, if at all, as a cute teenage singer of light, disco-style pop songs that were hits only in Canada.

And there lies the rub. Morissette’s award-winning album displays a caustic, defiant attitude toward life and a sly feminism that are nowhere to be found on her teenage songs. As a result, Morissette has become an icon of ‘alternative’ rock music while offending critics who accuse her of being a fake.

In rock music, where image is everything, Morissette is also found suspect because her co-songwriter and album producer, Glen Ballard, is more associated with big pop stars like Michael Jackson and Anita Baker than with rebellious youngsters.

Critics consequently have accused Morissette of riding on a bandwagon of angry-but-philosophical women, including Sinead O’Connor and Courtney Love. ‘The Village Voice’, a New York weekly, offered half a page of criticisms of Morissette in its special issue this month reviewing music in 1995.

The young singer’s credibility has been in such dispute that, in an appearance in New York this month, a publicist from her label, Maverick (owned by the image-conscious Madonna), reassured the press that Morissette was not the product of corporate hype.

Morissette, however, has proved a better defender of herself than the Maverick executives. At the Grammy Awards, she said of her album award, “I accept this on behalf of anyone who’s ever written a song from a very pure place, a very spiritual place.”

At the awards ceremony, Morissette also undercut her ‘angry young woman’ pose by performing ‘You Oughta Know’ — an anguished song of sexual betrayal — as a ballad with a string quartet, rather than the wailing rock version she recorded previously.

Even in its softer style, the song, which accuses an old lover of betraying a promise to die for love by finding someone else, remained shocking and blunt.

Morissette was censored in the internationally televised broadcast of the awards for a sexual reference in her song, and both ‘You Oughta Know’ and her second hit, ‘Hand in My Pocket’, have been censored for vulgarity. (MORE)

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