-by Fish

I'm listening to Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill". Alanis is here to remind me of the mess that I apparently left when I went away. I ought to know.

I don't own this disc, but my fiancée does, so I've pulled her copy out of the CD library, the one that was once separated into "her CDs" and "my CDs" and which has rapidly become a blended jumble. (Arguably a fitting metaphor for the two of us.)

I might have owned this CD. I might have gone out, plunked down my $12 and taken it home, back in 1995 when it came out. But I didn't, because in 1995, it was everywhere. "Jagged Little Pill" was absolutely inescapable in 1995: pop enough for the pop stations, rock enough for the rock stations, and so a favorite of both. And chock full of singles, each of which made their way into heavy rotation. On top of all that, in 1995 I worked in a laid-back office, one where we played CDs over the office stereo, and this CD was certainly one of the crew's favorites.

I might have bought this album if I weren't so totally sick of it, if it hadn't been so mercilessly overplayed.

Alanis is not alone in this regard. She stands in good company, beside the first two Garbage albums, Beck's "Odelay", the first Foo Fighters albums... all strong pieces of work, well-crafted, catchy and edgy in their own ways. All of which saturated the airwaves upon their release, beating back any urge I might have had to acquire them.

With a decade passed, though, I find my opinion has changed. No longer bombarded by these songs, I can listen to them with an open ear. Well, not quite an open ear, either: "Jagged Little Pill" defined 1995 and 1996, and in so doing, it wove its way into my memories of those times. These twelve tracks (okay, thirteen, counting the "hidden", alternate version of "You Oughta Know", the one that actually became the single) have become a mental soundtrack for that era. I can't listen to the album without being flooded with memories of that laid-back office, of inside jokes and long hours.

I listen to most radio in the car, so "You Oughta Know" makes me think of the office parking lot, and by extension, the night I walked out of the office to discover that my hubcaps had all been stolen, presumably by the residents of the projects two blocks down. "Hand In My Pocket" reminds me of one time when Harry was playing it at his desk when I went to check up on a bug report he'd filed; Harry was never especially cogent in his written bug reports, and you had to go talk them over with him to understand what was really going on. "Head Over Feet" makes me think of the video, back when MTV still played them, and thus the living room I lived in back then, in my first apartment in Boston, the second-hand TV propped up on a second-hand coffee table, a coffee table now relegated to holding up boxes of old crap in my musty basement.

The album also reminds me of a time when Alanis was writing lyrics that people could relate to. Your ex now with someone else? Feeling put down? Falling in love? "Jagged Little Pill" took off because people could project themselves upon the songs, the righteous anger of the jilted or the swooning mushiness of the enchanted. On subsequent albums, Alanis' singles were often incoherent: a big thank-you to India for helping her straighten herself out spiritually, or a big thank-you to the older man she dated when she first entered the music industry. I'm sure they're meaningful and cathartic to her, but to us, they're self-indulgent. (And if that older man is, as rumor holds, Dave Coulier, they might evoke images we'd all prefer not to think about.) Little surprise, then, that Alanis re-recorded "Jagged" acoustically to celebrate the album's tenth anniversary; nothing she's done since can top it.

Of course, if I'm to play the critic, can I really say I've done any better? Have I really improved upon myself creatively over the last decade? In 1995 and 1996 I created Grumble, tought myself Web skills and poured blood and sweat into several commercially-released computer games, a few of them successful. Since then I've toiled for the Man and done a lot of editing. My own musical output has been slightly higher since 1996 than before it, but I'm certainly not immune to self-indulgent lyrics, being the author of songs about, well, 15th-century politics, colonizing Mars, and the pretentiousness of vintage clothing. And, at about 100 units moved, I think I may have sold slightly fewer albums than Alanis. "Jagged Little Pill" has me trumped.

So as the disc winds its way to track 12, I find it's become not just an album, but a helpful tool for taking stock. I used to be sick of this album. But in being once overplayed, it now evokes nostalgia for those overplayed times. Isn't it ironic?