Alanis Is More Than Dance Pop, At Least for Me
If anyone knows Alanis Morissette, please convince her to get her first albums on streaming.
At some point after 1991, my eldest brother came home from college with something I had never seen before. It was a CD player, it took these little silver discs instead of cassettes, and I heard that he had friends with hundreds of them. I don’t remember the complete collection that he brought home with him, but he definitely had the Barenaked Ladies’ Gordon - every single person in Canada owned Gordon - and he had Alanis Morissette’s first album, Alanis.
I’m not going to say it was the greatest album ever made, because it wasn’t. It was a silly little pop album released by a 16 year old - as referenced in the song Oh Yeah! where we learn that she’s no disco queen, but is 16. Her name is Alanis and she’s a white chick singer. It’s a dumb song, and it’s sung in a very silly way, but I couldn’t stop listening to it. There was just something compelling about it. She sung under vocal effects, with a very affected deep voice, singing about herself and the song she was singing. At one point there’s a strange laugh.
I laughed at Oh Yeah! I loved Oh Yeah!
The hit from the album was Too Hot, a song that has been wedged in my head for over 30 years. It’s one of those songs that is simultaneously genuinely good and ironically good. The lyrics are silly, but delivered with conviction - Morissette could sell the shit out of a song, even that young. I want to play Too Hot regularly. I want it on my Spotify playlists. But it’s not on Spotify. It’s not a lot of places. The only place to stream it is a low quality YouTube rip. It exists in Canadian thrift stores, but anywhere else? Good luck, it doesn’t exist.
And I hate that.
Lots of artists have albums they don’t like. R.E.M. doesn’t like Around the Sun, Elton John hates Leather Jackets. But those albums are available to stream. Lots of artists have albums that are considered before their “real” career - Janet Jackson’s first two albums, for example. Both albums easily streamed. We may not know Y Kant Tori Read, but we can easily stream the album. There’s a universe of albums that were poorly reviewed, or dismissed by the artists who made them, but are available.
Can we please have Alanis?
It’s even influential, Robin Sparkles from How I Met Your Mother was a definite play on early Alanis. Jagged Little Pill might have been a lot more influential - another album every single person in Canada owned - and its sound is a wild swerve from her first two albums, but that’s fine. Alanis era is different from the Alanis Morissette era, but it’s clear the same woman is behind both, even if the style, the emotions, and the maturity between the two phases is completely different.
Her record label at the time got her first two albums pulled from shelves because the shift was huge, and they didn’t want to confuse consumers. That made sense in 1991, but today we know who she is, we can handle a couple dance pop albums that don’t fit with her eventual style. She’s more varied than Jagged Little Pill, more established, you could even call her an icon. If anything, having the albums puts her breakthrough in context in a way that wouldn’t have made sense in 1991.
I can understand if she doesn’t want to relive that era, the music industry isn’t kind to fully grown people, let alone teenagers who are thrust into a world they’re not ready to tackle. Jagged Little Pill is an album born out of trauma, and the sessions for that began before she was 20. Morissette had clearly been through the ringer already.
It might be selfish of me to desperately want her first album to be easily streamed, but it’s art I connected to at an early age. It might have been immature, but so was I. It was often silly, but so was I. It was high energy and fun, and I’d like to think I was too. Between Alanis and Roxette’s Joyride, I had two pop albums that were mine, even if they also belonged to other people - and both actually belonged to my brothers. They were fun pop albums I had on repeat. Even as I was pulled away from them, towards a desire to be cool, to be alternative, to be someone that never quite matched who I was, I kept a little spot in my heart for Alanis.
In that spot, the song Too Hot burrowed in there, and never let go. I’ll reference it regularly, I will wake up with it running through my head, I’ll simply be too hot, never too cold. It lives inside of me. It was one of the first CDs I listened to, and I miss it. I have a lot of very complicated feelings about my childhood, but I don’t have a complicated relationship with Alanis - I liked it, I still like it, and it remains a fun album that I want to listen to.
But I can’t listen to it in my car, I can’t listen to it while walking around town, I don’t actually have the CD anymore. It’s another part of my childhood rendered inaccessible. My elementary school friends have been lost to time apart and words that can’t be taken back. My toys have been lost to moves and nephews. My dad died, my mom is in declining health. Time and space have kept me away from siblings, and one brother has crossed too many lines, too many times to be part of my life anymore. My childhood home is occupied by that brother, I’ll never be able to go back.
In a lot of ways, I don’t want my childhood. I don’t want the constant feeling that I don’t belong. I don’t want the feeling that I was too young for my siblings and cousins, too old for my nephews, existing as an outsider in my own family. I don’t want that feeling of being a gay kid in a world where I saw only people who wished I didn’t exist, who wanted to punish me for the reasons I would only play as Mike Haggar in Final Fight. I don’t want to feel like I couldn’t fit in the gay world either, as the thin men on TV talked about Bette Midler, while I was a chubby kid who dreamed of the day when he could grow a full beard and was afraid that day would never come. I don’t want to experience the feeling that I could never exist on my own in the world so I had to forge a new identity that would at least allow me to live.
But I do want the good parts. I want the fun parts. I want the things that made me happy. I want the rare moments where I felt like I belonged somewhere, that there was somewhere I could be happy. I want TaleSpin and Chip ‘n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers. I want Mega Man V and toy cars.
I want Alanis.