the way i could write a world-changing 33 1/3 about this album!!! oh my goodness. (this is the kind of album you write after achieving meteoric pop success if you are a serious person, in case any inescapably famous singer-songwriters are taking notes.)
but for real -- this album is at once a perfectly-preserved late 90s time capsule (neurotic, stylish, a hint of a sneer, but real hope underwriting it all) and also secretly about us, right now, in the year of our lord 2024. it's fierce and smart and darkly hilarious. it's about going to therapy and getting your dad to go to therapy, and then feeling weird imagining the kind of dark shit your dad must be working through in therapy. itâs about trying to search for the divine while watching a bunch of idiot rich people get influenced into paying $2000 for like past life regression readings or whatever and feeling weird about the idea that theyâre searching for the same divine you are, because if theyâre looking for it too then it canât possibly be the real thing, can it? itâs about being the bright young thing who wrote jagged little pill and suddenly finding all of your interpersonal relationships totally unworkable because everybody is too blinded by the brightness of the young thing who wrote jagged little pill to let you also be a human being. itâs about feeling so old already at 24 and looking back on your teenage self at a tender distance as if those days were a lifetime ago, as if youâre actually any wiser now. itâs about wondering if anything you will ever do is ever, ever going to be good enough. alanisâs lyrics here are biting and precocious and the songs are just so chatty (witness âfront rowâ in which she layers four entire extra verses behind the chorus, effectively writing a whole bonus song because the situation is just too complicated to explain in four minutes) and theyâre talking about all the same things we talk about now, in the same way we talk about them now, except without all the self-serious posturing so many of our contemporary songwriters fall prey to. (âthe couchâ is somehow both the most earnest and the least corny song anybody has ever written about therapy.) i know this album must have hit properly when it came out because it was the only thing my mom played in our house for the entire calendar year of 1999, but it feels so preternaturally tailor-made for the moment weâre in now that i canât believe it hasnât had one of those improbable tiktok renaissances or whatever that seem to keep happening. highly recommend a revisit or a first acquaintance if you havenât made one.