June 13, 1995: the third album by a Canadian child star, Jagged Little Pill, is going to invade the world… At only 21 years old, Alanis Morissette breaks through the door of success with a bang.
Her third single from the album, ironicis bludgeoned on the radio.
The young woman is on all the covers, like RollingStones in November. “And the title is immediately ‘Angry white female’, an angry white womansays Mathilde Carton, head of department at the magazine Sheauthor of Riot Grrrl, Revolution Girl Style Nowa sum-book on this musical movement, at the crossroads of punk rock and alternative rock with feminist ideas, which emerged in the early 1990s. Alanis will embody this archetype. Criticism being a male sport, all the guardians of the temple take a dim view of female anger and find all these exits of the track where the girls go to talk about sex in an arch-graphic way rather trivial.
To build Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morissette resumed all her diaries, swallowed back her tears and let out her rage. Never had a young woman’s project sold so much in the world, 30 million copies sold, with many unstoppable hits.
For Mathilde Carton, the Canadian is as much a symbol as the logical continuation of the feminist punks of the Riot Grrrl: “The mainstream is always grinding underground ideas to sell them as well as possible, to package them as well as possible for a much wider audience. The anger of radical feminist anti-capitalist punks will be transformed into a much more audible version already, much more produced” .
“It’s really that youth, from the halftime of the 1990s, where for the first time you express who you like, who you don’t like, all those men who could have hurt you.”
Mathilde Carton, journalist and author of “Riot Grrrl”at franceinfo
“These messages, you keep them in you, that you had 20 years, 30 years, 40 years”, observes the journalist.
A quarter of a century later, Alanis Morissette even wrote a multi-award-winning musical around Jagged Little Pill. This liberating exclamation has not aged a bit. And Alanis Morissette will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the album (27 with the postponement of the two Covid years), Wednesday June 16, on the stage of the AccorArena in Paris.