Alanis Morissette is a Big Deal

Someone comes out of left field every year in the music biz and sells several gazillion copies of a record to a market that didn't exist before. One year, it's the Beatles. Another year, it's Right Said Fred. In 1995, it was Alanis Morissette. This inherent volatility makes the music biz an unreliable place to work. In no other business do you find consumers suddenly trying to read the meaning of their lives in the next big thing.

You do find consumers of Morissette reading the meaning of their lives into her lyrics. I personally found those consumers this past summer during Morissette's first tour as a head-liner in small clubs. Her album Jagged Little Pill zipped into the top ten just after the tour was booked. Every club she played looked like the Alamo, with her fans scaling the walls, pounding on the windows, assaulting security guards, offering bribes of monetary and bodily natures--all to get a message to Morissette. Once inside the clubs, those fans sang along throughout the show, but they especially joined in on You Oughta Know, a harrowing howl of rage about being dumped for a more fabulous babe. Doing my own demographic research at shows in New York and Texas, I discovered that large numbers of young women are indeed thoroughly pissed off. And if you're a man, the song can induce a severe episode of manic depression. One second you're thinking, I'm ashamed of myself for following my dick around; the next second you're thinking, I don't exactly get cheerful when my significant other, in the throes of ecstasy, calls me Fabio. Maybe I should just forget Morissette is singing about a guy and just go with the sentiment.

So both sexes can identify strongly with the song. This is partly because radio and MTV have played it incessantly. But it also stems from Morissette's understanding of the panic behind the anger of sexual betrayal: "Did you forget about me, Mr. Duplicity?/I hate to bug you in the middle of dinner/It was a slap in the face how quickly I was replaced/Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?" She's worried about being forgotten, about being reduced to anonymity. It's the female echo of the male antihero in Kids, who is obsessed with deflowering girls on the theory that if he is their first, they will always remember him.

"I've come to terms with the fact that, yeah, I think I'm good in bed," Morissette told me. "But a lot of women are good in bed, and some guys are going to forget about me. And that's fine." Then she paused. Then a sarcastic: "Yeah, right." Then she laughed.

Vast sums of money and the adulation of millions--I hope they compensate Morissette for the difficult sex life she'll endure for the rest of her career. Like Madonna, who owns her record label, she'll either have to find lovers with real low SAT scores or go to bed with guys who are so intimidated at the prospect of getting ripped in her next song that they will just lie there staring at the ceiling.

"When I have sex with a guy now," she said, "I worry that if I scratch my nails on his back, he will think of You Oughta Know."

Her next big hit, I predict, will be You Oughta Get a Stiffie.

The other major problem she'll have to contend with is that lots of people are hugely annoyed that a 21-year-old could write such good songs and sing them so well. As you may have noticed during MTV's Video Music Awards show, she hits the notes like a laser-guided bomb. All that emotion on key in one so young is too much for the envious to bear. They compare her to Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. To which I reply, "Go get a stiffie." Tiffany couldn't sing half as well and couldn't write at all. And Debbie Gibson was managed by her mother. When Gibson tried to transform herself from the voice of virginal innocence to the purr of leather harness-clad experience, she had all the credibility of Tipper Gore proclaiming her deep commitment to freedom of speech. Morissette has been running her own life since she was ten, when she took the money she made acting on Nickelodeon and financed her first single. With all that energy and willpower, she'll probably be Madonna's boss in another couple of years. And then maybe she'll provoke a constitutional crisis as the first Canadian citizen to run for president of the U.S. I'd vote for her just to hear the state of the union address.