Now that most of the artists associated with the most recent wave of alternative rock have been commercially marginalized, it’s easy to lose sight of the remarkable succession of highs and lows that characterized the pop landscape in the mid ’90s. Kurt Cobain’s suicide was immediately followed by the Green Day/Hole/Nine Inch Nails windfall of ’94 — an outpouring of music so compelling it was almost eerie how Billie Joe, Trent Reznor, and Courtney Love picked up where the genre’s fallen hero had so jarringly left off. By the next year, however, things were already going downhill: corporate radio had tightened its grip on everything alternative, churning out an endless parade of one-hit wonders that eventually killed off the scene for good.
The first sign of the apocalypse may have been the ascendancy of granola-crunching folk-rockers Hootie and the Blowfish and the Dave Matthews Band, but the biggest star of the era was 21-year-old Canadian singer/songwriter Alanis Morissette, whose ’95 debut, Jagged Little Pill (Maverick), came out of nowhere to sell 16 million copies and win the Album of the Year Grammy. Her incredible ride started at alternative-rock radio, where the pissed-off break-up anthem "You Oughta Know" (featuring guest appearances by LA rock dudes Dave Navarro and Flea) was an instant smash. But the hits got soupier after that, from the trite parable "You Learn" to the dour love song "Head over Feet" to the smarmy power ballad "Ironic."
All of which made rock fans wonder whether Alanis wasn’t a fraud — especially when the pop pedigree of her producer, former Wilson Phillips collaborator Glen Ballard, was exposed. Alanis’s own past also came back to haunt her: she was a Canadian teen-pop star in the early ’90s, and before that she had jumped out of lockers on the Canadian-filmed Nickelodeon series You Can’t Do That on Television (which all alternakids grew up watching, whether they admitted it or not). These days, that might not seem like a big deal: Robbie Williams subsequently pulled off the same trick in the UK, Pink is doing a good job of it right now, and Justin Timberlake or someone will surely follow suit in the next year or so. But back then, the Morissette rŽsumŽ was an obvious affront to alternative-rock sensibilities.
Alanis was also a whiner, something that bothered critics almost as much as it seemed to please her fans. Courtney Love could have written the lyrics to "You Oughta Know," but Alanis’s other hits sounded more like a teenage girl crying into her diaries than a young woman raging against her oppressors. That was the vibe that carried over to Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (Maverick), her commercially disappointing ’98 follow-up. Unlike Hootie, she had emerged intact from the meatgrinder of freak superstardom, but her new music was more eagerly received in the locked bedrooms of bummed-out high-school girls than on the international pop charts.
As music, Junkie was not much of a departure for Alanis, and the same can be said of her new Under Rug Swept (Maverick). In fact, it doesn’t get more ’95-retro than the joint-puffing arena-rock riff from Stone Temple Pilots guitarist Dean Deleo that kicks off the disc’s opening track, "21 Things I Want in a Lover." It’s a rock-and-roll personal ad, with that familiar Alanis stamp of pretentiousness on the very first line: "Do you derive joy when someone else succeeds?" But at least she says "derive joy" only one other time in the song, and she does appear to be making a joke of her word choices in the second line of the chorus: "Not necessarily needs but qualities that I prefer."
Whimsical lyrics aside, "21 Things" makes a couple of important musical statements that hold up for the entire album. Alanis’s singing is more restrained than ever — she’s leaving the caterwauling to Shakira and letting her songs do the talking. And though the song’s bubblegrunge overtones are largely absent from the rest of the disc, another Jagged-era sonic stamp is in place: those crisp, mid-tempo drum loops that used to fall under the umbrella of trip-hop experimentation but can now be safely written off as mediocre adult contemporary. It’s Alanis’s first time writing and producing without Ballard, so you can hardly blame her for sticking with what works. But I wish she’d gone for something less dated and more adventurous.
The album’s first single, "Hands Clean," is the most glaring example of her conservative approach — think of it as a pumped-up version of your typical Ani Difranco folk lament. But it sure is pretty, and it brings Alanis’s trademark candor to a whole new level with its casual confession of an illicit love affair she had when she was underage. She’s been submitting herself to this kind of voyeurism ever since she bragged about sucking dick in public on "You Oughta Know," but she’s more wistful than angry these days. She even sounds as if she still harbored some affection for the guy, despite the handful of degrading comments she makes.
She’s still picking up the pieces of her shattered love life on Under Rug Swept’s most compelling ballad, "Flinch," which chronicles the discomfort she feels when an old flame moves to her town. "I’d be paralyzed if I ran into you," she admits of someone she hasn’t seen in more than a decade, marveling at how affected she remains by their time together. It’s the album’s most vulnerable moment, but she manages to pull herself together in the end: "Soon I’ll grow up and I won’t even flinch at your name."
The disc’s rock tunes are just as introspective, with Alanis favoring jangly U2 guitars and an unrelenting trip-hop pulse over raw power. She’s had pretty much the same band together since the Jagged Little Pill tour, and they’re a versatile if undistinguished crew. Former Jane’s Addiction bassist Eric Avery has been spotted on stage with her recently, and that’s a bit of a surprise since he’s repeatedly declined to take part in reunions with his old band. Avery and Deleo appear together on "Precious Illusions," a glittery descent into psychobabble that’s saved by its chirpy melodies. Alanis fares better in terms of lyrics on the similarly upbeat "Surrendering," which sports one of the disc’s best choruses and a coy punch line that couldn’t have been written by anyone else in pop: "I embrace you for your faith in the face of adversarial forces that I represent."
"So Unsexy" will have everyone but Alanis diehards screaming at her to get over herself, especially since it has an unforgettable chorus and the shiniest production on the album. "I can feel so unsexy for someone so beautiful" is the worst kind of Lilith Fair clichŽ, an irritating mix of arrogance and insecurity that’s almost too obvious to be a parody. Alanis is having a bad day again, and some of her sobbing ("One forgotten phone call and I’m deflated") hits the mark. But she takes the whole self-help thing way too far, and no army of guitar overdubs can wipe out the bad taste it leaves.
She ventures into equally played-out Lilith territory on the man-hating diatribe "Narcissus," but the results aren’t nearly as disastrous — if only because the song’s loping arrangement lends itself more readily to anger than to self-pity. The object of her scorn does sound as if he deserved it, and it’s easier to take her seriously now that she’s not going banshee on the mike all the time. She even has a little fun with the chorus, piling a bunch of vocal tracks on top of each other in a way that conveys the exasperation she feels toward "narcissus boy" without getting too catty about it.
In sum, Under Rug Swept is singer/songwriter mush disguised as state-of-the-art pop, and for the most part it succeeds on both counts. As a songwriter, Alanis has a special knack for knowing when life calls for bad poetry, and she’s pretty good at throwing the right amount of ear candy into the mix too. One thing she isn’t is the big bad rock mama she was mistaken for when "You Oughta Know" hit the airwaves. But as "21 Things" and "Precious Illusions" prove, rock continues to hold an important place in her Ïuvre, and she has a habit of stumbling across some choice bombast every once in a while. Her ’98 hit "Uninvited," from the City of Angels soundtrack, was an unexpected detour into hammer-of-the-gods exoticism, and the hellacious backbeat she appropriated there shows up again here on "A Man." This one’s monster guitars, trippy percussion track, and slippery Eastern harmonies are so uncharacteristically over the top, I wish she’d go on a "Kashmir" kick more often. The lyrics are equally drugged-out: "I am a man as a man I’ve been told/Bacon is brought to the house in this mold" could almost be a Syd Barrett verse, and the tune’s warped vibe redeems the potentially obnoxious device of Alanis playing a sensitive boy who’s come to apologize for the sins of his gender. She’s matured as a lyricist and a musician since "You Oughta Know." But she hasn’t gone entirely soft on us, and that’s a good thing.
