Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette
Jagged Little Pill is the third studio album and international debut album by Canadian singer Alanis Morissette, first released on June 13, 1995, through Maverick Records. Morissette had released two successful albums in Canada, after which she left MCA Records Canada and was introduced to manager Scott Welch. Morissette began work her next album after moving from her hometown of Ottawa to Toronto, but did not make much progress until she travelled to Los Angeles, where she met Glen Ballard. Morissette and Ballard had an instant connection, and began co-writing and experimenting with different sounds. The experimentation resulted in an alternative rock album that took influence from post-grunge and pop rock, and featured guitars, keyboards, drum machines, and harmonica. The album's lyrics touched upon themes of aggression and broken relationships, while Ballard introduced a pop sensibility to Morissette's bitter angst. The album went on to be a huge success, topping the charts in ten countries, and has gone on to sell over 33 million units worldwide and ranked on numerous best-selling lists. Jagged Little Pill received acclaim from music critics and was nominated for a total of nine Grammy Awards, of which Morissette won five, including Album of the Year, making her the youngest artist in history to win the honour—a record she held for 14 years; until country/pop singer Taylor Swift won Album of the Year at the 2010 Grammy Awards for her 2008 album Fearless. Rolling Stone ranked the album at number 327 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".
<b>100 Best Albums</b> Everyone has a moment on <i>Jagged Little Pill</i> that they feel like they belong to—a spitting wisecrack or rhetorical question that struck a nerve early on and continued to reveal its wisdom with age, time and experience. Alanis Morissette’s era-defining album is full of these moments—snarling, eye-rolling, ugly truths that feel so good to say out loud. Like Morissette, whose arrival bridged the gap between grunge, alternative and mainstream pop, much of the album’s enduring magnetism is in its embrace of chaos and contradiction. Her blockbuster third LP (following two teen-pop records that went Top 40 in her native Canada) was poetic and straightforward, cynical and idealistic, sarcastic and wide-eyed, lost but hopeful (baby!). It is also fearlessly confrontational, with sharp-edged criticisms of Catholicism, technology and boyish men that few artists since have had the guts to echo. So when the 21-year-old former Nickelodeon star released it in 1995 after being dropped by her label, MCA Canada, its fresh and unapologetic worldview just hit different.<br /> Beneath the record's radio-friendly hooks and shiny harmonies were startling observations on the messiness and banality of life. Human weakness is a theme—she’s hyperactive and distracted on “All I Really Want”, disoriented by happiness on “Head Over Feet”—but then, so is strength. On “Not the Doctor”, she refuses to play mother or babysitter for someone else’s problems. For women, many of Morissette's lyrics felt like a reckoning: “Right Through You” skewers a man for not taking her seriously (“You took a long hard look at my ass/And then played golf for a while”), and on “You Oughta Know”, the cheating-ex send-up lit with rage, she captures the fury felt from such blatant disrespect: “And every time I scratch my nails down someone else’s back I hope you feel it/Well, can you feel it?”<br /> Yet even if the album’s core spirit is disillusionment—a refusal to smile, play along or indulge—listeners seem to cling to its hopefulness, the idea that bleeding, screaming and learning is also, ultimately, living. Perhaps that’s why, for all her angst and anger, Morissette is relatively kind to herself. In the easygoing “Hand in My Pocket”, now a time capsule of cigarettes and taxi cabs, she forgives herself for not having it all figured out. Everything’s going to be fine, fine, fine.
