FEATURE:
Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill at Thirty
IN THIS PHOTO: Alanis Morissette in 1995/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Cummins/Getty Images
Inside the Iconic Ironic
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THERE is a whole…
Wikipedia section, that argues whether the lyrics in Alanis Morissette’s Ironic are, in fact, ‘ironic’. You know the scenarios: rain on the wedding day; a free ride when you’ve already paid; a cutlery conundrum. Taking away from the brilliance of the song, this argument and quibble has not really done a lot to emphasise the brilliance of Ironic. Alanis Morissette herself knows that the situations are ironic – though people didn’t quite grasp the type of irony and how clever the lyrics are. I will address some of that debate but, as the album the song is from, Jagged Little Pill, turns thirty on 13th June, I wanted to focus on its – in my opinion – most popular and known song. Released as a single on 27th February, 1996, it was the fourth (of six) singles released from the album. I want to actually start out with something from Wikipedia. In terms of the reaction the linguistic debate. That was all people talked about when the song came out. Rather than discuss the quality of the music, they were talking about whether Ironic has any irony in it:
“The song's usage of the word ironic attracted media attention; according to Jon Pareles of The New York Times, it gives a distinct "unironic" sense in its implications. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, irony is "a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what was or might be expected; an outcome cruelly, humorously, or strangely at odds with assumptions or expectations". From a prescriptivist perspective, lyrics such as "It's a free ride when you've already paid" and "A traffic jam when you're already late" are thus not ironic.
Morissette said: "For me the great debate on whether what I was saying in 'Ironic' was ironic wasn't a traumatic debate. I'd always embraced the fact that every once in a while I'd be the malapropism queen. And when Glen and I were writing it, we were not doggedly making sure that everything was technically ironic." In 2014, Michael Reid Roberts wrote a defense of the song for Salon, saying that it cites situational ironies: the "state of affairs or event[s] that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often wryly amusing as a result". Michael Stevens of the YouTube channel Vsauce devoted time to the discussion of irony in the 2014 episode "Dord". In this video, Stevens considers the difference between the typically cited "situational" irony, versus "dramatic" irony. According to him, the irony of the song may not necessarily be in the situations themselves, but rather in the dramatic irony – when someone is unaware of the significance of the event while others are: the situations aren't ironic themselves, but life itself is ironic”.
I am going to end with a couple of features that, for once and all, write why Ironic is actually filled with situations that are ironic. The fact people have misinterpreted the song and falsely taken against it. Is that ironic?! It is hard to find a feature about the song that does not solely focus on its lyrics and whether they are ironic. I guess it is important to highlight them. Before that, I want this review of Ironic:
“One of the things that surprises me most on returning to it with fresh ears is Morissette’s tuning, which is wayward enough that I’d expect almost any producer these days to correct it almost by reflex. However, the reason why it never bothered me at the time, and why a knee-jerk corrective impulse would have been particularly misguided in this instance, is that I really think that the tuning supports the performance. The unvarnished vagueness of the pitch centres in the ‘hai-ai-ai’ introduction and verses really cements the mood of whimsical cynicism there, for instance. Highlights in this respect include the wobbly pitch-rise of “Chardonnay” (0:26), the mocking exaggerations of “afraid to fly” (1:05), and the tetchy meandering of “cigarette break” (2:23). Furthermore, I think her general tendency to drift sharp in the choruses works well too, because it’s something many singers (and indeed instrumentalists) naturally do when they’re pushing the volume into straining territory, so I’d argue that it significantly reinforces the emotional intensity in this context.
Such beautifully judged manipulation of pitch is only one aspect of what is quite simply a phenomenal vocal performance. Just the variety of vocal deliveries used is tremendous, from the softest of head voices through to hard-edged belting, with moments of speech, whispers (“don’t you think” at 0:36), a fatalist half-laugh (2:37), sudden falsetto switches (1:08), and that trademark turbulent, whistling exhalation at the end of “thought” (1:48) thrown in for good measure. She even turns a breath into a hook, for heaven’s sake, when her big lungful at 2:43 mugs you into thinking the last chorus is coming two bars earlier than it actually does.
There’s some interesting panning during the first verse, with the lead vocal well to the right — solo the individual stereo channels and you’ll hear she’s at least 12dB down on the left side. However, given that the only other instrument in the mix is the acoustic guitar, which is panned in opposition, the only real casualty in terms of mass-market translation would be anyone hearing only one side of the mix. Even under those circumstances, though, mix engineer Chris Fogel’s sensible decision to avoid hard panning means that the left-side listener doesn’t lose the lyrics entirely. And the scheme isn’t without its pop-sensibility benefits either, because the sudden movement to the centre of the panorama for the first “It’s like rai-ee-ain…” flags up the switch to Alanis’s more powerful vocal delivery for stereo listeners, while single-speaker listeners get an additional level hike at the same point by virtue of the stereo-to-mono conversion”.
It is interesting how Alanis Morissette was not especially attached to Ironic. She did not want to put it out. This happens with many artists. They get this huge hit and then years later recall how they were not keen and wanted to leave it off an album. In a 2020 Rolling Stone Music Now episode, Morissette talked about Ironic and her feelings towards it at the time:
“In the latest episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Alanis Morissette discusses her powerful new album, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, 25 years of Jagged Little Pill, and much more, including a moment when she laughingly addresses years of “shaming” over those dubious examples of irony (a black fly in your Chardonnay?) in her hit song “Ironic.” To hear the entire episode, press play below or download and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify.
In the hit Broadway musical version of Jagged Little Pill (now shuttered indefinitely due to the current health crisis), the show’s characters echo years worth of mockery of the song: “That’s not irony,” one says. “That’s just, like, shitty.” Morissette says Diablo Cody, who wrote the show’s book, “nailed it” in that scene. The songwriter is hopeful that the musical will finally put the topic behind her: “Until the next generation kicks my ass! Until the next onslaught of shaming!”
In any case, Morissette was never particularly attached to “Ironic,” which largely stood apart from the autobiographical narrative of the Jagged Little Pill album. “I didn’t even want it on the record,” she explains. “And I remember a lot of people going, ‘Please please, please.’ So I said, OK. That was one of the first songs we wrote, almost like a demo to get our whistles wet. But people wound up really liking the melody, and I wasn’t that precious about it. And I came to realize later that perhaps I should have been,” she admits, laughing. “Whoops!”
“I guess one of the things that is the scariest for us in terms of our collective shame is being [seen as] stupid or uneducated or ignorant,” Morissette adds. “I can embrace, ‘I’m stupid,’ I can embrace that I’m really brilliant. It just depends on when you catch me!”.
I am going to finish with a couple of interesting features around the lyrics for Ironic. A classic written by Alanis Morissette and Glen Ballard, it was a huge chart success. Number one in her native Canada, it was a big success in the U.S. and U.K. I am going to move to the first of two features from Salon. Last year, they dissected the philosophy of Alanis Morissette:
“We don’t know whether Alanis read or cared about the Greeks, but she’s made hundreds of mentions of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung and how his pioneering theories of analytical psychology deeply influence her songwriting. Jung died in the early '60s before irony began trending as a fundamental human relation. Although he had no explicit definition of irony, he theorized that humans are strongly influenced by symbols expressed through myths and dreams or other cultural touchstones. In his emphasis on the gap between our surface words or actions and their deeper psychological meanings or feelings, Jung would probably say that irony questions and subverts normative cultural narratives. He would understand irony as an archetype drawn from our collective unconscious.
This is the way in to grasping how Alanis does effectively utilize irony. She has a deep understanding of and a postmodern comfort with cognitive dissonance, with lyrics that describe the affective landscape of the gap between our gestures and expectations. Sadly, one of the best defenses of “Ironic” comes to us from Vince Vaughn. The opening sequence of the 2013 film "The Internship," which Vaughn wrote and starred in, has “Ironic” blasting in a convertible with the top down as Vaughn and Owen Wilson head out for a night on the town. Wilson is dismayed that this song is on Vaughn’s “get psyched” playlist and they debate it. “I defy you to crush this chorus and not get psyched,” Vaughn says. Wilson does so and then is indeed psyched. One hundred percent of the examples given in “Ironic” are bummers, and yet the lyrics close with a reminder that life has a funny way of helping you out.
"Irony does not involve the simple substitution of the opposite for the literal meaning."
That’s Barthesian irony. Roland Barthes was a French literary critic who worked in semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, just as Jung did. Compared to the Greeks’ understanding of it, Barthesian irony is less concerned with opposites. He simply defined it as a rhetorical device involving a double meaning. The discrepancy between the two meanings generates ambiguity and this ambiguity can push a listener to interpret the lyrics of “Ironic” in a new way. You can sing about all the bummers in “Ironic,” but do so joyfully, embracing even the hard parts of life as inevitable or necessary. Our struggles help us out. Framing something bad as somehow yielding something good is a subversive move when it allows multiple, conflicting interpretations of a song at the same time. It offers ten thousand spoons instead of one knife. This multiplication of meaning is a form of linguistic play, a turning to imagine what one might do with the unexpected bounty of ten thousand spoons. When critics dismiss “Ironic” as made up of a failed set of literal opposites, they miss the point: irony is a rhetorical whirlwind that disrupts language and undermines normativity.
Dualistic dismissals of “Ironic” foreclose its vivacious, nonbinary complexity. “Irony does not involve the simple substitution of the opposite for the literal meaning,” said Barthes in "Elements of Semiology." “It is a form of semantic pivot which overturns the hierarchy of language, bringing into play the signified and the signifier, the explicit and the implicit, the internal and the external, the present and the absent.” By Barthesian standards, “Ironic” is ironic. This is especially true when Alanis questions whether life can be a little too ironic. The Greeks conceived of irony as pass/fail, but Alanis considers irony to be a spectrum, and she slides from side to side across the examples in the song in a manner that is definitely akin to Barthesian play. The most critics can really claim is that she didn’t do so on purpose.
Diablo Cody knew she wanted to directly address the decades of controversy about “Ironic,” especially given that Alanis consistently has a playful attitude about the criticism. Cody writes that Alanis was “always open” to poking gentle fun at the song and “there is such a discourse around the inaccuracy of that song.” The use of “inaccuracy” here is telling, as if a rhetorical device could be objectively correct or not. She set the debate in an English class because it absolutely does belong there. “I would not have taken that meta approach unless I had felt that the song demanded it,” she wrote. Rather than make fun of the song, Cody forthrightly admits she wanted to “make fun of the song’s critics.”
Celia Rose Gooding relates to the way criticism is deployed against her character, to shut her up in a grand sense just as critics tried to quiet Alanis. “People don’t like it when women speak their truth,” Gooding says in the musical book. “When you can find a little piece of something almost fractionally incorrect, it’s so easy to just say, ‘You’re wrong. You’re stupid. You don’t know what you’re talking about, girl.’” There’s the feminist seedling. We’ve covered why the broader French mode of irony that makes space for “Ironic” is superior to the Greek mode that excludes it, but we have not yet tied the irony issue to a larger conversation about sexism in the dismissal of Alanis’ work.
For this, we turn to the work of Lauren Berlant. Berlant was one of the most influential 21st century American cultural critics, known for pioneering the field of affect studies. Though they didn’t build upon Jung directly, their examination of how emotions are socially constructed is well aligned with Jung’s notion of how archetypes format human experience. Berlant theorizes that women’s feelings are simultaneously expressed and constrained by sentimentality. The portrayal of intense emotional states tied to women’s experiences is certainly a main mission of Alanis’ body of work and could also be considered a Jungian archetype. "Jagged Little Pill" is exemplary of the psychological landscaping Berlant is interested in as a cultural expression operating at the intersection of emotion, gender and power in public life. To silo or deride the mission of Alanis is to file it away as “female complaint”.
I am going to end with an earlier Salon feature. One that came a decade before the previous one. If some feel Ironic’s lyrics contain no irony, then retrospection and examination has proved otherwise. This is what Salon wrote in 2014. A song I first heard in 1995, I have loved it ever since. It never gets boring or loses any of its brilliance:
“First, let’s get this out of the way: calling Alanis Morissette’s lyrics unironic is wrong. From “irony” in the Oxford English Dictionary:
3. A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what was or might be expected; an outcome cruelly, humorously, or strangely at odds with assumptions or expectations.
This accurately and uncontroversially describes almost all of the song’s situations. For everyone I know, rain on one’s wedding day would indeed be cruelly, humorously, and strangely at odds with expectations. This sort of irony is usually called “situational irony,” and while I’m usually opposed to breaking irony apart into discrete kinds, the phrase works pretty well here to describe the many ironic examples that Alanis describes. Both that 98-year-old-man and Mr. Play-it-Safe possess fates that are truly ironic; they struggle to create a meaningful narrative in the face of a world that thwarts their intentions. The only moment in the song that doesn’t easily fit into this definition of irony is one of the last, with the “man of my dreams” and “his beautiful wife.” There is certainly a contrast there, but it doesn’t seem to be one of expectations; I’ll get to that later. In general, though, the song evokes the disparity of meaning that comes from the difference of expectation and actuality. Just because no one is being sarcastic doesn’t mean the song isn’t ironic.
But let’s not stop there. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that in writing this Alanis has a much deeper, more radical, and philosophical concept of irony. It seems to me that Ms. Morissette is remarkably well versed in the theories of irony from Erasmus to Paul de Man; if she hasn’t read their works herself, then she has certainly internalized much of the theory of irony not only as a trope but as a question of philosophy.
Take, for example: “It’s the good advice that you just didn’t take.” This is the vaguest line in the song, and it seems to pose a challenge to the ironist. Presumably the situational irony here is that the listener didn’t expect the advice to apply, whereas it did indeed. But why didn’t “you” take the advice? It’s possible that you thought the advice-giver was being ironic, and didn’t intend for you to heed the advice. Or you simply thought that the advice wasn’t “good” when it was; either way you don’t take it “seriously.” In fact that word, “seriously,” haunts the end of the lyric; the irony here is one of (mis)interpretation. Paul de Man addresses this difficulty of interpretation in his essay “The Concept of Irony” (not to be confused with Kierkegaard’s book of the same name): “what is at stake in irony is the possibility of understanding, the possibility of reading, the readability of texts, the possibility of deciding on A meaning or on a multiple set of meanings or on a controlled polysemy of meanings.” Doesn’t Alanis provide the perfect example of living in a world where we’re unsure of what to take seriously, and what not to? And who, really, would have thought it figures?
A more global question: what is “Ironic” really about, anyway? I turn to the bridge/outro: “Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you / Life has a funny, funny way of helping you out” What is she talking about here? How is life helping her out? It seems to me that this song, like so many songs on Jagged Little Pill, is describing the wistful emotional reflection that a Gen-Xer feels when distanced from her own life experience. Think Daria, think Reality Bites. It’s telling that the music video features three Alanises taking a road trip: Alanis sees herself from the outside. A friend once described this popular 1990s attitude as “the meaningfulness of meaninglessness.“ Come to think of it, that describes the poetry of T.S. Eliot pretty well too.
Or, put another way, Alanis is describing the affect of Kierkegaardian irony. From the philosopher’s book The Concept of Irony:
In irony, the subject is negatively free, since the actuality that is supposed to give the subject content is not there. He is free from the constraint in which the given actuality holds the subject, but he is negatively free and as such is suspended, because there is nothing that holds him. But this very freedom, this suspension, gives the ironist a certain enthusiasm, because he becomes intoxicated, so to speak, in the infinity of possibilities…”.
It is a shame more people have not properly talked about Ironic. As a piece of work and how it sits alongside other songs from the 1990s. Most of the features zone in on the debate around Ironic’s actually irony. I think Ironic is one of the standouts from Jagged Little Pill. As that album turns thirty on 13th June, I was keen to spotlight its biggest track. I may do another feature around the album but, for now, I am sticking with Ironic. A superb track that continues to be played around the world, I think it is important everyone…
SHOWS it some love.