Why has Alanis Morissette denounced this documentary about her life?
An upcoming entry in the music-doc series that gave us Woodstock '99 is already pushing buttons
Film Features Alanis Morissette
To be honest, musical biodocs aren’t much of a priority at festivals. They usually come in with a distribution plan already in place—with some exceptions, like the Kickstarter-backed Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliche—and, more often than not, follow a familiar equation. We open on footage of the artist in their prime, performing before massive, screaming crowds. Cut to said artist now, looking wiser and more content sitting in luxurious surroundings paid for by all those sold-out stadium tours. They say something to the effect of, “That was a wild time in my life.” Cut to where it all began, whether that be rehearsals in someone’s basement or a baby picture.
Jagged is very much of this nature, so it’s odd that it’s become the documentary to stir up controversy at this year’s TIFF. Like Listening To Kenny G, which I reviewed earlier this week and which breaks the biodoc curse by actually being about something beyond dutiful recounting, Jagged is part of the Music Box series of docs produced for HBO by Bill Simmons. (Still to debut are films on late rappers DMX and Juice WRLD, as well as one on unsung disco tastemaker Robert Stigwood.) The first film in the series, Woodstock ’99: Peace, Love, And Rage, debuted on HBO Max in late July to huge social-media buzz. The rest are slated for “late fall”—although not if Alanis Morissette has anything to say about it.
The controversy began after Deadline ran an interview with Jagged director Alison Klayman yesterday morning in which Klayman confirmed rumors that Morissette would not be present at the film’s premiere. By mid-afternoon, Morissette had released a statement through her management saying the documentary has a “salacious agenda.” She goes on to say that Klayman violated her trust by pitching the project to her as a “piece about the celebration of Jagged Little Pill’s 25th anniversary,” and by interviewing her “during a very vulnerable time (while in the midst of my third postpartum depression during lockdown).” She adds:
this was not the story i agreed to tell. i sit here now experiencing the full impact of having trusted someone who did not warrant being trusted. i have chosen not to attend any event around this movie for two reasons: one is that i am on tour right now. the other is that, not unlike many “stories” and unauthorized biographies out there over the years, this one includes implications and facts that are simply not true. while there is beauty and some elements of accuracy in this/my story to be sure— i ultimately won’t be supporting someone else’s reductive take on a story much too nuanced for them to ever grasp or tell.
Since Morissette’s dismay over Jagged first began to bubble up last week, there’s been speculation about what exactly is in the documentary to make the singer so upset. For the most part, it is about Jagged Little Pill, to the extent that Morissette ends up looking like something of a one-album wonder. As for any “salacious agendas,” there is a segment in the middle of the film in which Morissette’s band admits to using fans’ admiration of the singer to lure them backstage and into bed, copping to a secret room at stadium shows where band members would take young women for sex. (For her part, Morissette says “It did feel disrespectful to me” when she found out about all this, and that she put a stop to it.) We see footage of drummer Taylor Hawkins flirting and signing autographs before a show, and while watching this segment all I could think about was how young these girls looked. And this speaks to why Alanis might be uncomfortable with Jagged.
The ’70s-style backstage debauchery on the Jagged Little Pill tour is one of a handful of ways that Jagged touches on how the ’90s were a different time, for women and for music. When “You Oughta Know” became an instant sensation on L.A. radio station KROQ in the summer of ’95, the station had a policy of never playing two women artists back to back. “That’s just how it was,” a female DJ says sadly. By being an anomaly in the industry, a woman singer who wore jeans and T-shirts on stage and whose album still massively outsold the boys’, Morissette was placed in many situations where what she calls a “scarcity mindset” was encouraged. It was just easier to be one of the guys, she says. This attitude is outdated, to be sure. But it was a survival mechanism. And given the ways in which she did push back, opening doors for artists like Garbage’s Shirley Manson (who praises Morissette like a god in the documentary), it’s forgivable. She’s even earned the right to talk a little bit of shit about Radiohead, as she does in the doc; she gave them their first big stadium gigs, opening for her on the Jagged Little Pill tour.
But when the topic veers from songwriting or performing, Morissette seems anxious. At one point, she states with great seriousness that “You were immediately shut down, and punished,” if you protested too much as a young woman in the industry. It was lonely being Alanis in the mid-’90s—she speaks of fame in terms of survival and alienation—and the wall she created to protect herself is still there. After watching the documentary, it’s sad but understandable to see her walk back what she says in it, given that she also says she never spoke publicly about the darker parts of her life because she “wanted to protect” her family, friends, and partners from the fallout. She still seems afraid of angering powerful men, even as the industry has changed in ways that make them less powerful than they used to be.
There’s a section in Jagged that knocked the breath out of me, where Morissette says it took decades of therapy for her to admit, even to herself, that she could not have consented to sex at the age of 15—an age where, as she puts it, “all bets were off” in terms of attention from older men. She may be concerned about legalities, as at the time the age of consent in Canada was 14. But she doesn’t name any names here, just like she’s never said who “You Oughta Know” is about. (It’s not about Dave Coulier. She will say that much.) “Women don’t wait. The culture doesn’t listen,” Morissette says, condemning everyone she ever told secrets to in private whose response convinced her to keep quiet in public.
Klayman has directed a handful of biographical documentaries, about subjects that include the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and Trump Svengali Steve Bannon. In her video introduction to the virtual screening of Jagged, she comes off like a fangirl, chucking at her own jokes as she works Alanis lyrics into her scripted statement about the film. And Jagged is a laudatory documentary—in fact, at times I felt like they were laying it on a little thick, especially when talking about how profound the lyrics to “Ironic” are. (Sorry, but really?)
That wouldn’t excuse Klayman breaking promises to her subject by including footage she agreed was off the record, of course. (Without any further interviews or statements from either party, it’s hard to say how the breach of trust went down.) But after watching Jagged, with the knowledge that Morissette had denounced it, my response was one of profound sadness. Morissette was so young, a child star who became an international sensation when she was barely old enough to drink. And she clearly experienced a trauma, if not multiple ones, during that time. If she’s not ready to talk about those things, that’s her call to make. She never has to talk about them, if she doesn’t want to. But she has nothing to be ashamed of, and she might be surprised at how her story—all of it—would be received now as compared to the ’90s. And if she’s out there and reading this, I want her to know that I believe her, and that I’m sorry.
183 Comments
I’m interested in what these “facts that are not true” are but, I guess I oughta know
She is a grown adult and knew what she was getting into. She didn’t like what she saw but did not say anything was untrue. If she said it was great it would likely be boring. We don’t need another soft bio like the last dance or Bohemian Rhapsody.
WTF is strategy cotton? Tactical wool?
Ah yes, the classic “you should’ve known there’d be a breach of trust you big baby” argument. Airtight.
I’m always saying, the real problem we have in this country is too many boring and soft music biopics.
Anyway, Morissette literally says (quoted in this article) this doc contains “facts that are simply not true”, so I really don’t know what you’re on about.
Well, then, how can they be facts?!? Ah ha!
How is it a fact if it’s not true?If it’s a fact then by definition it is true.
“They BOUGHT their tickets! I say: let’em crash!”
“And for good measure, sit on THIS, Alanis.”
I think you have to question the perspective of any documentary that tries to claim there’s any depth to “Ironic” beyond it’s complete lack of self-awareness.
She is a grown adult and knew what she was getting into.Ahh, I see you’re going with the patented “you oughta know” argument. Isn’t that ironic.
She was going thru postpartum depression, so she might not have known exactly what she was getting into, dick.
But she doesn’t name any names here, just like she’s never said who “You Oughta Know” is about. (It’s not about Dave Coulier. She will say that much.)I can only assume Mr. Coulier’s lawyers requested she cease and desist…or in the less-legal vernacular, “Cut it out.”
I believe the proper Latin legalese would be “how rude!”
Morrissette’s lawyers responded with a terse, “You got it, dude.”
Dave Coulier’s lawyer is a woodchuck puppet wearing a suit.
did someone say…wood?
A denim suit.
“Have MERCYYYY…”
Coulier seems to be represented by one *checks notes* Diz Aster, Esq.
The rumour among people I new was that it was Doug Gilmour. Most of us thought that was dumb.
He did get run out of St Louis after his 13 year old babysitter accused him of rape
Like every other kid in 1995 with a pulse and a Discman and MTV-dictated tastes, I had a copy of Jagged Little Pill. I think I got 3 copies for Christmas that year, and I definitely remember exchanging one of them for The Toadies’ Rubberneck. Rubberneck is a much better album that for some reason didn’t really grab hold of the zeitgeist.
i loved alanis (i was her target demographic), but i absolutely hated how that album sounded. to this day, i stay away from anything glen ballard is involved in.
The Youtuber Rick Beato did a “What Makes This Song Great” on “You Oughta Know”. I thought he involuntarily highlited how terrible the mixing is on that song/album. Yeah Flea’s playing on that song sounds great… when it’s isolated because otherwise it’s just a part of that wall of sludge.
I love his channel, and “You Outta Know” is awesome. The song is a bit on the melodramatic side, but I love her voice in this one. It’s unnerving and beautiful at the same time.
This is my favorite Morissette song (and sometimes one of my favorite songs period).
For my money, Uninvited is her best song, and for the longest time, it wasn’t available on any album of hers (only on the City of Angels soundtrack).
I love when Beato puts on his producer hat and breaks stuff like that down.
My little sister was a fan up until Jagged Little Pill.
Any idea why the first time I heard it on the radio I thought it was Ween?
The Toadies added next to nothing to the formula of The Pixies. That said, they were a good quality ripoff, unlike Bush of Nirvana, Godsmack of Alice In Chains, etc. Rubberneck has some great stuff. But if you have heard Where Is My Mind, you shouldn’t have any space for “Tyler”.
They’re no Pixies, but I wasn’t into the Pixies yet when I was 13. “Possum Kingdom” got a lot of MTV play though, so that was the CD I wanted.
Funnily enough, I can always count on someone trying to sing “Possum Kingdom” every time I go out to karaoke. Sometimes it’s even me.
It’s not saying much about Jagged Little Pill to say Rubberneck is the better album from that time. It’s probably in the top 5 albums of the decade, flawless in every way. But Jagged Little Pill is great as well. I still listen to both.
My memories of the 90s – and I was a teen at the time – is of a period when it still seemed vaguely “acceptable” or at least just-this-side or permissible for teenage girls to be getting involved with “older” “men” (sketchy guys in their 20s). I also think (hope?) this was the dying vestiges of that trend. Now that I’m 40, and all high schoolers look like 12-year-olds to me, the very notion sends chills down my spine.
I was a ‘teen’ until 1994, and you’re not at all wrong in your memories. It was WAY more prevalent in the 80’s. There were always girls in our HS that were dating guys who were already out of HS, and it was just commonplace. As fucking terrible as that sounds. When I was 16 my younger sister had a friend who I liked (she was 15) and I had no chance because she was dating this guy who was like 20. At least 19, and had graduated HS like a year or two before.
Now that I’m old and to your point all the HS folks look like 12 years old to me, it seems WAY fucking creepy.
I’m the same age, and not only that this was something that some girls apparently aspired to, whether or not they knew what they were getting into is certainly up for debate….I always found it weird. Like when I was like a couple years out of high school I couldn’t imagine being interested in a 14/15 year old girl.
Yeah, in my high school in the 80s, unless you were the cream of the crop of popular guys in your year, you dated girls in the year below you, because all the girls were dating guys older than them. Hell, both my HS girlfriends were a year younger than me.
I was one of the rare guys who actually dated girls a year or two older than me.They were all crazy, like threatening suicide pathological liar crazy.
They were all crazy, like threatening suicide pathological liar crazy. Been there, man.
ME: I can help!NARRATOR: He could not.
Yeah I would have been better off studying Maritime Law.
The one piece of advice I would give to every single person entering puberty is this:
The sex is never as good as the crazy is bad.
Just so you know, I’ll be stealing this. 😉
I mean, I’ve said the same thing many times – but never as succinctly.
Pretty much the trend at my school as well; the only reason my HS girlfriend was the same year is because she went to a different school and we were introduced by a mutual friend.
This + being on a military base for me. All the hot HS girls dated military guys, they were usually 18-19 and had cars and “money”.
Given that girls mature quicker than boys, a year, maybe two, generally restores a bit of balance in a relationship. It’s when it starts getting above that at high school age that it starts to feel a little creepy.
Back in ‘99 I knew girls who had been intimate at 14/15, which was my age back then. However, I was at a school with kids with moderate to severe psychiatric issues, and a lot of them came from rough backgrounds. When I went to mainstream high school most of the kids dated in their age group, and my first bf was my age (we were not intimate). However, when I was 18 I dated a 21-year-old coworker that I met at my afternoon big-box-store job. My father did a hit-the-brakes when I told him, but my parents did allow the relationship. My bf even ended up taking me to my prom. We did date for two-and-a-half years. We were intimate, and it was consensual, though I do think birth control was something I wish we had been a little more proactive in discussing (I should have been upfront about it from the beginning, but as the older and more experienced one he could’ve been a little more willing to discuss it). 14/15 seems way too young, and honestly an 18 year old still in high school like is a little risky when it comes to intimate relationships with older people. I definitely think emotional maturity needs to be taken into consideration, and if it is going to happen the person in question should be educated as to what to expect when it comes to things like consent and birth control.
We had this in my high school in the mid-’90’s, and while it went on, there was definitely an undercurrent acknowledging how creepy it was. The 19-20-year olds dating 15/16-year-olds were around, but were generally not dudes you looked up to.
I mean, my sister’s friend was insanely attractive: I did look up to the creep in that I was fucking envious he got to date her and I didn’t.But otherwise…yeah, those guys always seemed like super losers. The only thing they were good for was buying booze.
Same – when I was 16 there was a girl I liked the same age who was dating a fucking 25 year-old. What did I have to offer relative to that, except to ask her point-blank what kind of mid-20s loser dates a high school junior?
Try living in a smaller, single industry city when men greatly outnumber women (mining town in my case). So many men in their 20s-30s with high school or even junior high gfs. Simple economics. Not enough women their own age to go around. It’s just the way things were.
To be fair, even people in their early twenties look like 12 year olds to me now.
I was a teen girl in this era and we (girls I grew up around) wanted skeevy Motley Crue types to feel us up at the mall. It was a different time.
“Fast Times” features a high school freshman (15?) girl banging an adult 20-something man in a little league dugout. Parts of that movie are pretty twisted.
That movie is based though on a real ‘undercover’ experience by Cameron Crowe and was supposed to be very factual so…It was the 80’s. A terrible decade that was basically Reagan and AIDS.
And plastic. And Day-Glow. And the fucking moral majority. And Disney coming back from the brink of extinction and beginning its evolution into the soulless behemoth it is today.
Ariel’s supposed to be like 16 in Little Mermaid right? Checks out with the rest of the decade.
It was the 80’s. A terrible decade that was basically Reagan and AIDS. Gorgeous quote.
“Reagan and AIDS”. Tip of the hat to Hot Tub Time Machine.“I HATE this decade!!!”
So Cameron Crowe was the guy in the dugout??
Man I hope not…
I don’t think the Cameron Crowe stand-in is in the movie. He was passing as a teenager (he was in his early 20s) and attended high school with Mike Damone, Mark Ratner, Stacy Hamilton, etc.
Crowe was high school-aged at the time.
The 80s mixed pretty much the worst of the 60s and the worst of the 70s to the Reaganized version of the 50s: everything bad, dishonest, twisted, diseased (herpes, then upping the ante to AIDs) and also boring – as punk and post-punk had to endlessly point out.The 80s were like one of those snake-handler cult poison drinks.Alanis probably wouldn’t have survived them, tough as she very much seems.
It was the 80’s. A terrible decade that was basically Reagan and AIDS.
Sadly, we’ll see the continued effects of both for years to come.
Although the book was published in 1981, Crowe’s undercover high-school year was in 1979, long before AIDs and Reagan came to dominate American culture.
The old guy I took care of met his ex wife when he was 24 and she was 16, they got married as soon as she turned 18 with the blessing of her parents. That was like ‘73 or ‘74.
I recently read the memoir of a DJ from the 80s, Richard Blades, where he details cheating on Terri Nunn (she wrote No More Words about their breakup) and that his current wife’s parents are his age (she was an adult when they met at a club he was DJing at, so presumably 21.) He is actually older than her mother was (she died a day or two before their wedding.) Her parents liked him, so there was no friction there, but it’s just mind-boggling to me that someone would date a person whose parents were younger than they are. And that their parents would be OK with it. In my early 20s, I dated a guy 10 years older than me and my dad flipped.
1989 graduate. I remember a couple of women in my class dating college guys and one dating a 26-year-old (I think she was 18, FWIW)
What was funny is that us guys always made fun of the guys who dated freshmen. One guy our senior year broke up with his smokeshow girlfriend, who he’d been with all high school, to date an 8th-grader.
We did not think he was cool. We did not think he was a hero. We thought he was a fucking loon.
Anyway, my theory is that if you had 10,000 spoons, you could figure out how to cut your steak.
Damn. I turned 18 in 1990, and while I’ll admit to briefly dating a high school senior when I was a junior in college (we worked together at the Gap, if you want to bask in the full ‘80s/’90s oeuvre), even that felt like kind of a stretch. I can’t fathom wanting to date, say, a 16-year-old when I was 20.I’m not automatically skeeved by age differences, either. My dad was six years older than my mom; they started seeing each other when she was 18 and he was 24, and got married two years later. And there was a period of about a year when I was 24-25 and dated a few 19-year-olds.The difference between an 18- or 19-year-old and someone just a year or two younger is incredibly stark (well, I assume it still is, it certainly was in the early ‘90s).
I turned 18 in 1989 and I dated a high school senior while a sophomore in college. In fact, I was her date to senior prom, which made me really feel like a jackass.
Until I got there and two other guys from my high school graduating class were there. Funny thing, Mrs. DaBard is six years younger than I am. (We started dating when I was 35 and she was 29)
The only time it really comes up is when we realize things like her parents wouldn’t let her watch Gremlins because she was too young and that was one of my first “real date” movies. Or, that she didn’t know who El DeBarge was.
I will never get what anyone could talk about with an 8th grader :0 on a date as an adult. So, when do you have your braces removed? My god..!
At least a couple girls in my class brought guys who were close to 30 to our junior prom in ‘97. A buddy’s sister who graduated a couple years before me had been involved with one of our teachers and married him as soon as she turned 18, she wasn’t the only one who did that either. They are divorced now though.
The 7th grade science teacher did actually get busted and go to jail for molesting a girl in the class ahead of me over the course of a few years. One high school English teacher who got caught diddling students got shuffeled off to a principal job up north, the other one who we knew was doing it but didn’t get caught ended up leaving his family for the girl, moving across the country and actually writing a book on how cool it was to sleep with a high school girl and then leave his family for her.I guess what I’m saying is: We all knew it was pretty messed up but it was fairly commonplace and well known at the time.
“junior prom in ‘97″Oh man, always thought you were older than this. Explains a lot.
I’m a young GenXer but I have old school liberal/Marxist ideals 🙂
No, not that part.
Ok!
One of the best sketches of all time.
Well, that didn’t age too well for Horatio, did it?
Yep. Deeply weird. I will not date anyone I could have babysat for in high school (or who didn’t exist *when* I was in high school).
Nobody thought twice about it in the 90s, a good female friend of mine was 16 and dating a 24 year old loser who treated her like shit…nobody could quite put their finger on what was wrong about this situation because it was just accepted. In college, some of the freshman or sophomore girls would have their bf show up and the guy was like 32, it was in retrospect a very creepy time, though not so creepy as that Alabama judge guy stalking teens at the mall
In college, a friend’s roommate (we were maybe 20 at the time) was dating a 30 year old. While not as awful as some of the underage stories mentioned here, when my friends and I saw this dude literally lounging on her bed in a friggin’ dorm, it was just so……..fucking gross and wrong, we bolted out of there and laughed/shook our heads for the next hour. Seriously, dude, what the fuck is the appeal there???
I’m sorry to say that it’s a societal grooming. Dudes were like “when I’m 30 I’m going to want to date 18 year-olds, so I am not going to call this out” and the women were conditioned from the start for daddy issues. This one girl I was completely in love with, she showed me the professor she was thinking of banging who had a wife and a daughter (who she knew). He looked like the guy from the Men’s Wearhouse commercials. She was beautiful. He looked like he wore split pea soup. That wasn’t normal. But he was a PROFESSOR.A prof who dated/married/abused several women at my undergrad died a few years ago. I posted on the listserv “Figured he wouldn’t survive metoo”…people didn’t appreciate that for some reason
A girl I was madly in love with during the first couple years of college DID end up marrying her professor, who was also very much of the pea soup variety in terms of looks and personality. They are fortunately(?) still together and have a nice, stable life with a couple of kids. But it was seriously messed up, there’s a good 15 years between them and I couldn’t for the life of me understand the appeal.Having met the guy many times, he doesn’t SEEM like a creeper. He just seems like a major league dork. And the gal in question always was a bookish, introverted type, not the kind to usually chase after older men and she didn’t date much in college at all (I don’t think there were any guys between when she eventually ditched her high school boyfriend and this dude.)
Apparently it was a minor scandal in their school (I was in a different school at the same college, so wasn’t privy to any of the gossiping about it at the time.) And, while the age difference doesn’t matter now that everyone is old, I still couldn’t wrap my damn head around it.
That just kinda sounds like weirdos in love. Having an age gap, even a big one, isn’t automatically bad, it just usually is.
Yeah, at the end of the day, I agree. They wound up making a very boring couple.
I was discussing stuff like this with my wife yesterday. We’re both profs. I said ‘I can see someone and say that they are attractive, but I am in no way attracted to them’.
What appeal is there to a 30 year old dating a 20 year old? Is that a real question?
You know Moore only has photos of his wife as a teenager (when he first met her, he 29 and her 15).
And they’re stupid! If you’re involved with a teenager, at some point they have to open their mouth. They’re all stupid. My wife and I both work at at college. Talking to these people on a daily basis makes me want the voting age raised to 35.
My late and much lamented mate always said that (he narrowly escaped going out with a very young girl, when someone warned him that she just *looked* 20) – scared the hell out of him, for legal reasons, but also because, as he put it, “They may look good – but at some point, you have to talk to them.” – and he was smart enough to know that someone messed up enough to be in a bar flirting with guys ten years older than they are, is going to be a hot mess when it comes to disengaging from them. It still freaked him out, whenever the subject came up, when he was fifty.
just want to point out that it’s the older dudes being creepy in this situation.as a teen in the 90s, as soon as i realized a dude was hitting on me (to be fair, i was quite stupid, so it would take a while), i’d unceremoniously blurt out “i’m 14.” not one single time did they stop trying to hit on me. most times they’d just ask “are you sure?”
Oh yes – I’m not going to hold a 14 year old child to the same standards as a grown-ass man. Teenagers are dumb. They don’t know anything, but they think they do. Once you’re hitting yours 20s you should know better. You’re not being dumb anymore. You’re being predatory.
Oh, I’m sure it usually is – though in the case of the girl I mentioned in my comment above, that’s apparently what she did – dress to look older, hang out at the bar, and hit on older guys – hence another guy there knowing to warn him.
But even there, I suspect something – being molested, maybe? – in her history, had set her on that past. Just not caused by the guys she was hitting on, backed up by the fact that she made a point of *looking* older.
I was in high school in the late 90s. One of my classmates dated a senior in college when she was ~17. That shit is WEIRD
The thing is, when you’re in college and some dude starts talking about dating a 16 year old, you know that dude is either a creep or a fucking loser.
I agree. But on the other side, I’ve had conversations with women in their mid to late 30s who insist that it is condescending and patriarchal to say that all 16 year old girls are incapable of consent. I was surprised to hear that from multiple people, and saddened at the implication that they could be justifying or rationalizing relationships they had as teenagers with older men. So I suspect it isn’t completely “gone” (and maybe isn’t even that much less prevalent) now.
By the time I was in COLLEGE I found high schoolers to be insufferable and not worth my time, let alone now I”m in my 30s.
I finished listening to “Lolita Podcast” and I can’t recommend it enough. It talks a lot about the horrific abuse of girls in the entertainment industry, to the point where I’m just like… “is every guy actually a p*do???” because it seems anyone in charge from Jack Warner to Charlie Chaplin has a docket of young teen girls they sexually assaulted. And men in the industry SURE spent a LOT of time trying to redeem the child molester and man obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Humbert Humbert.
I’m not a guy. I genuinely do not know the answer. Is this a thing that a lot of 40 year old men DO?Becuase they’re teens. They are 1) stupid, irrational, and flighty, and 2) prooobably bad at sex stuff. Cuz they’re young and stupid.
That is an amazing podcast.
I’m not a guy. I genuinely do not know the answer. Is this a thing that a lot of 40 year old men DO?Guy who is young enough to still have memories of having been 40: No. As Brick Hardmeat put it in the post to which you are presumably replying (will I live to see Kinja make message threading graphically manifest? but I digress), “Once you’re hitting your 20s you should know better. You’re not being dumb anymore. You’re being predatory.”Normal 40 or 30 year old guys view underage girls with a mixture of fatherly emotions, such as protectiveness and exasperated annoyance. Even 20 year old guys ought to know, and usually do, where to draw this boundary. I like to think that that’s mostly true, and the creepers amount to a small number of outliers.
And the ‘70s, and ‘80s too. I remember I guy in his twenties telling me (at 15) that I must be “frigid” because I thought I was too young to have sex with him. The negging started early.
I’ll add my own story to this pile. I had a crush on this girl in my class since the 4th grade. We were friends throughout middle school and high school (although our middle school separated classes into two distinct groups so I didn’t have any classes with her for 3 years). She knew I liked her but never reciprocated. Anyway, come senior year in 2002 and I’m 17/18 and driving and she lived close and I would drive her to/from school. (She was one of the youngest in our grade, turning 17 two months before I turned 18). She starts dating some college guy (early/mid 20s) who was a DJ for the local radio station. She would tell me about the fun sex they were having. And I just.. I didn’t understand. And I still don’t understand.We drifted apart after high school, and are still “Facebook friends” but that’s it. She isn’t with that guy anymore and is married with some kids. But. I just don’t understand.
I’m nearing 40, so my experiences are similar. I was asked to sit with the local university’s wind ensemble this year, since they didn’t have any trombonists enrolled, and holy crap, it makes me feel old. There’s no way I would consider 18-21 year olds as a dating pool anymore, but back in the day, that totally would have been acceptable.
I graduated from high school in 2016 and I sincerely regret to inform you that it was an open secret in my high school that several girls were dating 25-30 year old men. It was definitely taboo to talk about (not sure how much more taboo it was than the ‘90s since I wasn’t in high school then) but still not non-existent sadly
The paragraph about Morissette being a woman in the industry is very confusing. What does a “scarcity mindset” mean? Why is her choice of attire and fitting in outdated? She outsold men at a time when there rules on the radio that impaired women’s chances at doing that and helped inspire other women in rock. Why does she need to be forgiven? Are these regrets Morissette has or does the author have a problem with them?
“Scarcity mindset” appears to be a quote from Morissette in the documentary itself. My guess is that it refers to a huge gender imbalance, perhaps just among artists in her genre, but probably also within all participants in the industry. She dealt with this by wearing a t-shirt and jeans, or “just being one of the guys”. Contrast the outfit to something Mariah Carey or Britney Spears might have worn, when their musical styles afforded them more freedom to express femininity. That survival instinct, to just try to fit in to a mostly male group, is almost non-existent now. Billie Eilish is still criticised for what her appearance, but it’s down to quiet murmurs from societal dregs. Gender expression nowadays looks nothing like what it did in the 90s for a variety of reasons, and nobody would think wearing a t-shirt and jeans to fit in with the boys is a useful strategy.The author also makes it clear that Alanis seems have some regrets about this time, but that she has no reason to. It’s not that Morissette needs to be forgiven, but that she should feel free to forgive herself. I don’t know how you could be confused about that, honestly.
Yeah, I gathered those were her words. I still find the paragraph to be confusing. That she was a woman in a male-dominated industry and wore jeans and a t-shirt are mentioned as being anomalies. But neither are presented as things she was forced into. Then it says she was encouraged to have a scarcity mindset and she thought it was easier to be one of the guys. What did that entail? Was her music and appearance actually a put-on? She enacted changes in her band who were “taking advantage” of women. Her lyrics were that of a woman. But later she says she was shut down when she protested. Protested what?
“…this attitude is outdated, to be sure…. it’s forgivable.”There are only two words from Morissette quoted in the paragraph, the aforementioned “scarcity mindset.” There are more words from a radio DJ and the rest is statements from the author, which include the above lines. So I can’t tell how much of the apparent criticism and problems are the author’s opinion or Morisette’s. That’s my confusion.
Contrast the outfit to something Mariah Carey or Britney Spears might have worn, when their musical styles afforded them more freedom to express femininity.That’s a weird example, given that during Morissette’s t-shirt and jeans phase, both Carey and Spears were being stage managed within an inch of their lives. Spears was being dressed in a way to make her an object of desire while she was still a minor, while Carey’s husband controlled her every move. They may have each wound up expressing a different image of femininity from Morissette, but there wasn’t much “freedom” involved.
That’s a good point. I don’t envy any female performer working before the aughts at all, and it isn’t like it’s perfect today either. But it might have looked like freedom to Morissette. This is about her perspective as a young performer after all.
What does a “scarcity mindset” mean?“Hey, how come we didn’t play a Madonna tune today?”“Can’t. I played two Alanis Morrisette songs yesterday, so we can’t play another chick tune until Thursday.”“Fuck.”“Yeah, my bad.”
haha yeah I get that the radio stations were limiting women’s music. But it said Morrisette was encouraged to have a scarcity mindset. What was she encouraged to do (or not do)?It sounds like an interesting documentary. I just felt like some explanations were missing from the review to provide a better understanding about Morrisette’s thoughts.
well that’s not really the point of the column, is it? if you want the whole story you gotta watch the doc and then form your own opinion.
Not the whole thing, just a better understanding of what the review was trying to say. Thankfully some folks helped clear it up for me.
I think what it’s supposed to mean is that she was encouraged to treat other female acts as her direct competition in a Highlander-like “there can only be one” way. Four sentences later, Katie describes helping Shirley Manson with her career as Morissette “pushing back,” presumably against that scarcity mindset. But yeah, not a great paragraph.
“I think what it’s supposed to mean is that she was encouraged to treat other female acts as her direct competition in a Highlander-like “there can only be one” way.”Liz Phair and Juliana Hatfield did some shows together a few years back, and now drop each other love on social media. At the time they started playing together, both talked about how they’d never met in the ‘90s because they were encouraged to think of each other as “the competition” or even as “foes.” It’s one of the reasons Sarah McLaughlin started Lilith Fair.Alanis was actually pretty great about supporting lesser-known women – I saw Phair open for her in ‘99 (which I was both grateful for because it meant Liz was coming to my town, and incensed at, cuz indie-hipster me couldn’t believe the bill wasn’t the other way around, lol!)
Ah, yes. Thank you! I didn’t make that connection, but rereading it after your post it makes
a lot more sense to me. The idea that she needed to be one of the few
female rockers to remain relevant certainly seems like what would be
pushed by the higher-ups and perhaps even true given the attitudes and restrictions in place.Stupid kinja won’t let me find bfred and frankstallone’s comments on here, but thanks as well to them.
So that time she tried to poison Marilyn Manson was just a big misunderstanding?
I took it to mean that women rockers stood out (the scarcity part) and so were marketable, but the industry wanted to keep the supply limited (so that the chosen artists remained marketable).
What does a “scarcity mindset” mean?Just generally that there was only one – or at least only a few – spots for big female rock/pop/indie stars at any given time. So by playing down her femininity, she was hoping not to be limited by that quota.
Well it’s not the most coherent piece of writing Katie has ever produced. Part of it feels like it is trying to skirt a no-review embargo or not add to whatever it is specifically Morissette is upset about. Does it include time from You Can’t Do That on Television?
“Scarcity mindset” is the idea that there is an extremely limited number of seats at the table (or even only one). If you are one of the few women (or POC, or LGBTQI+, etc.) that “make it” then you shouldn’t help other women, you should view them as your competition. It encourages you conform to the existing system, including enforcing the parts that exclude others, instead of making the system more welcoming and inclusive. Black actresses have spoken about how they were often encourage to compete against each other rather than collaborate.
That pic looks like a brunette Carly Simon.
After watching the video, I was thinking white Janet Jackson.
I bet she thinks that pic is about her. Incidentally, all of the Dave Couiller being the subject of “You Outta Know” jokes in the comment section made me think of “You’re So Vain”, which is about James Taylor.
Not according to Simon.
Not according to Simon, Simon nor Simon.
Didn’t she say it was about some record label exec?
Yes, David Geffen.
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/02/david-geffen-was-right-in-thinking-this-song-was-about-him
I like to think that it’s about Mick, since he’s actually singing on the track. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if he was so clueless that he didn’t realize that *ahem* this song is about you?
I might be wrong. My mother is a fan of both Simon and Taylor, and she was the one who told me it was about Taylor.
Wait, what? I’ve always heard it was about Warren Beatty.
I thought it was about Warren Beatty.
I think a good documentary or biography should ruffle its subject’s feathers a bit. Otherwise you’re getting an approved hagiography. I’m skeptical of Jagged because I just didn’t think Woodstock 99 was that good of a doc. It really didn’t have anything new or insightful to say. That said, Morissette all but guaranteed more people will watch this by denouncing it. I’m not sure if her allegations are true but it wouldn’t surprise me considering Bill Simmons isn’t exactly known for his forthright labor practices.
In that case, though, it looks like we’re getting the worst of both worlds: a laudatory biography made by a fangirl that pisses off its subject.
I’m not saying Alanis did this, but if I wanted to drive up sales of my biopic I could do a lot worse than calling it “salacious”, while saying it contains statements that simply aren’t true is a nice blanket CYA.I do think she experienced trauma as a young artist and if she was misled into revealing more about that than she was really comfortable with then that sucks and she has every right to complain.
Ooh tell me more about Simmons. I just started listening to The Rewatchables
The Rewatchables guests are the best part. Simmons doesn’t bring much to the discussion. He’s weirdly obsessed with whether or not the movies they cover could even get made today because of cancel culture, so that tells you where his head is at.Re: the labor practices, there was a NYT piece about the Ringer’s staff unionizing in 2019 and Simmons’ retaliatory efforts. After Spotify paid $200M for the Ringer, he brought in high-profile names as “independent contractors” instead of hiring them as staff members to weaken the union’s leverage when they were renegotiating their collective bargaining. The Ringer bled a lot of established, well-liked creators like Jason Concepcion and Haley O’Shaughnessy (among others). Other staffers have anonymously gone on record stating how employees who expressed support for the union were blacklisted by Simmons.
He’s weirdly obsessed with whether or not the movies they cover could even get made today because of cancel culture, so that tells you where his head is at.There’s nothing weird about it. There’s a lot of those movies that couldn’t be remade now, at least not without substantial changes, and claiming otherwise would be lying. Also, he doesn’t mention cancel culture all that often or as a scare term, so that might be more where your head’s at than his.Sad, but not surprised, about the union stuff, particularly if it’s really behind Concepcion leaving for Crooked Media. Binge Mode was my favorite podcast of theirs, and it ended very unceremoniously.
Peaked on Nickelodeon
It’s very weird that she became the most famous alum from You Can’t Do That on Television.
It’s probably more correct to say that it’s very weird that an alum from YCTDOTV became famous. I mean, didn’t they get sent to Barth’s when they got too old?
only alistair, that little shit
Is that true? I don’t know.(Lucky my avatar is already green.)
I mean, it doesn’t seem like a big mystery. Presumably she didn’t plan on getting into her history of sexual assault in a puff piece on the 25th anniversary of her biggest record. And yeah, she’s the one who said those things, but it seems likely that she had some degree of understanding they weren’t going to be given the spotlight they were.
I honestly thought that she had named names and that was the reason she was denouncing it now. I’m sure she didn’t mean it to, but the denouncement made me far more interested in what might be in it.
Total Streisand Effect.
Ironic; don’t you think?
NO!
It was just easier to be one of the guys, she says. This attitude is
outdated, to be sure. But it was a survival mechanism. And given the
ways in which she did push back, opening doors for artists like
Garbage’s Shirley Manson (who praises Morissette like a god in the
documentary), it’s forgivable. She’s even earned the right to talk a
little bit of shit about Radiohead, as she does in the doc; she gave
them their first big stadium gigs, opening for her on the Jagged Little Pill tour.
This is a weird paragraph considering Jagged Little Pill came out at the same time as Garbage’s multiplatinum first album, and that the doors were opened more for Manson – who’d already been in mid-level bands for a decade – by working with Butch ‘Nevermind’ Vig.
Having said that, how did she push back in a way that opened doors for Manson? The article doesn’t say. That’s before we get on to Radiohead, who’d obviously already had a big selling album by that time and who obviously didn’t get much in the way of commercial exposure playing to Alanis Morrissette fans.
And never mind that Radiohead spent most of ‘95 in stadiums opening for REM, and didn’t open for Alanis until 1996…
As a teenage Canadian in the 90s, I still hear “Always too hot, never too cold!” as her first songHuh, setlist fm said she played it in 2014 in Ottawa, neat!
Oh wow, it’s all very Paula Abdul.
yah I actually get it confused with Straight Up all the time too ahhaah
I remember “Feel Your Love” as having a video that probably lifted their choreo from Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation”.And of course “Walk Away”, featuring Matt LeBlanc as the boyfriend.Aside: I wonder if Alanis ever commented on Robin Sparkles/Daggers?
I’m a teenage Canadian of the 90s and I’d never heard this. Thank you for the discovery.
Hello Teenage Canadian of the 90’s!
I assume you didn’t have MuchMusic, as CanCon regulations effectively ensured that Alanis was in regular video rotation, along with Lisa Loughheed and Candi.
There was a retrospective on CBC about Big Shiny Tunes CDs and the ole Can Con regulations definitely had some Canadian artists like Sloan along with the tracks, which actually isn’t bad. I’ll listen the hell outta, Moist’s Resurrection and/or One More Astronaut and Another Sunday from I Mother Earth in a mix. (the video for Another Sunday is gold) Although Sloan admits their tune sounds a bit “dinky” in comparison to the international heavy hitters.
https://www.cbc.ca/music/an-oral-history-of-big-shiny-tunes-the-cd-that-defined-a-canadian-era-1.6166629
The 90’s seemed to be a boom period for Canadian music thanks to the CanCon regulations. Don’t know that we’d have ever heard of Moist or Sam Roberts or even BNL without it. We also got crap like the Tea Party, but you take the good with the bad.
Indeed, by then MusiquePlus had replaced MuchMusic. It’s weird because they did play a lot of canadian music but I don’t remember ever hearing any of the artists you mentionned.
Oh, so you got a lot of Mitsou and Roch Voisine then. (Kidding! Kind of)They were all bubblegum pop artists in a Tiffany/Debbie Gibson vein. So if that wasn’t your thing I can understand if you flipped the channel on them.
I did like Mitsou!And I was a big fan of Paula Abdul back then, so I’m not sure I would’ve flipped the channel on Too Hot. It really didn’t get any play. I checked with my sister and she only knew the song from retrospective shows in the early 2000s.So, no Too Hot, but The Tea Party did get a LOT of airplay back then.
I did like Mitsou!And I was a big fan of Paula Abdul back then, so I’m not sure I would’ve flipped the channel on Too Hot. It really didn’t get any play. I checked with my sister and she only knew the song from retrospective shows in the early 2000s.So, no Too Hot, but The Tea Party did get a LOT of airplay back then.A lot of teenage boys would’ve liked Mitsou back in the day.Interesting that Alanis didn’t get airplay on MusiquePlus. But I suppose I’m not that surprised.Surprising about The Tea Party though. Not sure why they had to make ]you suffer through that.
The Tea Party, I Mother Earth and Moist. Those were the three main alternative rock bands from Canada that they kept pushing.
I thought it was Alanis Morissett’s job to denounce everything?
I think a better question is why would anyone want to make a documentary about Morrissette. Maybe a VH-1 half-hour special, but a full-blown TIFF submission? No thanks.
You know you don’t have to watch it right?
Unless there was any ambiguity in my comment, let me be absolutely clear–I will never watch this.
Congrats!
We get it you think girl music is icky
I live a few blocks from where she went to high school and so feel weirdly, irrationally protective of her teenage self even though she’s ten years older than me (again, irrational!). I see kids from that school all the time and they’re just so young.
She’s even earned the right to talk a little bit of shit about Radiohead, as she does in the doc; she gave them their first big stadium gigs, opening for her on the Jagged Little Pill tour.I’d have to hear exactly what she said about them, but both Pablo Honey and The Bends came out before Jagged Little Pill, both of which had some huge hits (mostly to Radiohead’s chagrin). She didn’t exactly pluck some scrappy little band out of obscurity.This is coming from someone who thinks Radiohead is pretty over-rated. But they were a big deal before anyone outside of Canada had even heard of Alanis Morissette.
Alanis is a rich and powerful woman with decades of experience in the music business – why hasn’t she hired some big scary lawyers to fix this problem? Why not get her manager to send in the legal team until the film-makers edit the documentary to everyones satisfaction, then off you go to the premiere and everyone can smile for the camera. I bet that’s how Jordan signed off on Last Dance, and why Scotty wasn’t happy. Sorry it thats a bit cold, but wouldn’t that be a better solution than all this drama?
“…the culture doesn’t listen.” And nothing could be more apparent when you see and hear the testimony of the gymnasts regarding Larry Nassar and the inaction of the FBI for more than a year after reports of abuse – time during which he went on to abuse more young women and girls (as young as 8) while those in authority did nothing. Nothing. We simply are worth less than nothing in this culture. Objects to be used. See incel culture.
All I want to know is if Kevin revisits his cover of You Oughta Know? Seriously, IDK if I want an expose of a 90s era band at this point. Let’s leave the 90’s alone. They were a pleasanter time.
I completely believe Alanis that the doc doesn’t capture the nuance of her story, because I think even when someone makes a doc about themselves they’re rarely happy with it. Looking into a mirror too see someone who looks like you, but is not quite you, is intrinsically upsetting, there’s no way around it. And compressing a real life story into a movie invariably requires compromise.I think of it like watching a reality show, it’s fiction in the guise of non-fiction, no more “true story” than Fargo. If you’re a viewer you need to bring some skepticism to the table. Books are the better venue to do a biography that is true to life without unnecessary embellishment.
The point about her role in breaking gender rules is a great point but it’s not historically accurate. I remember a Cacie Cassem (?) who shared during his Top 40 weekend radio show that Janet was the female artist that broke the two song rule during the Control era. While AM might have broken this rule for rock stations, it’s hugely disrespectful of Janet’s legacy, a black woman, to have her contribution ignored. Furthermore, Janet also broke rock barriers by being the first black female artist to chart with a true rock song, Black Cat. The others who broke chart records, Dionne Summers, Diana Ross, Ms. Cimone, all did it with either fusion music or as in Nina’s case, with blues/classic hybrid. I think America is finally beginning to embrace black women who rock and I love it and think we have Janet, Bettye Lavette and the new Americana pioneers like Lavette, Valerie June and and Tangles Eye to thank for that.
I’m trying not to psychoanalyze a celebrity here, but it’s entirely possible that even if Alanis never names her abusers, they could still be alive, see the movie or find out about it secondhand, and retaliate in some way. It’s understandable to have a lingering fear of your abusers, even decades later.
She might also just be a very private person who doesn’t like baring too much of her soul to the public. Some artists are like that.
I’m sorry she feels mistreated by the documentarians, but I was under the impression her teen trauma was pretty out in the open. She’s done a lot of interviews about Under Rug Swept and the statuatory rape that inspired Hands Clean…. https://www.bustle.com/entertainment/alanis-morissette-on-hands-clean-relationships-touring