Roxanne Harde’s daughter Erin was in her late-teen years when Alanis Morissette’s exploded on the international music scene.
The groundbreaking 1995 album by the 21-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter was full of rage, a fierce affirmation of female agency that continues to reverberate in the lyrics of Taylor Swift and others.
Now a specialist in American literature and popular culture at the º£½ÇÉçÇø’s Augustana Campus, Harde watched her daughter benefit from Morissette’s unapologetic assertion of self-understanding and acceptance.
“As a competitive high-school athlete, she was hard on herself, and Morissette’s message of body positivity helped with that,” says .
Years later in 2013, as part of an annual event of the time called the Festival of Ideas, the º£½ÇÉçÇø staged a conversation between Morissette and Canadian author Margaret Atwood at the Winspear Centre. Harde was asked to give a talk on Morissette for an accompanying event at the Milner Library.
She jumped at the chance, especially since it allowed her to draw a research collaboration she had done with Erin when they were both still grad students, which ended up in a book called . Both were huge fans of Morissette and her potent strain of feminism. They produced a dialogue-style presentation entitled, “Voices and Visions: A Mother and Daughter Discuss Coming to Feminism and Being Feminist.”
“Jagged Little Pill stood as a feminist statement that changed the culture and transformed the recording industry,” Harde wrote in that paper, which she reworked for publication in Feminist Media Studies under the title, “.”
“There is overwhelming evidence that the generation contemporary to Jagged Little Pill and those following have learned from and been inspired, sometimes saved, by Morissette’s work,” she writes.
Most striking is that Morissette’s angry brand of feminism remains as relevant today as it was 30 years ago, says Harde. Its staying power is evident in the success of the recent Broadway musical, , and Morissette’s more recent recordings Such Pretty Forks in the Road (2020) and The Storm Before the Calm (2022).
She also continues to sell out stadiums, performing at festivals with the likes of Brandi Carlile, Chris Stapleton and Jack White. With sales over 33 million, Jagged Little Pill today sits at chart. Songs from the album have been streamed on Spotify almost 800 million times.
In Harde’s estimation, Morissette’s music speaks to diverse young people across generations. The song, “You Learn,” for example, encourages them to go after what they desire, especially when it comes to fulfilling relationships: “I recommend getting your heart trampled on to anyone.... You love, you learn/You cry, you learn.”
“You Oughta Know,” the lead single from Jagged Little Pill, still in regular radio rotation, “offers young women a vision of empowered female sexuality,” Harde says, at a time when they were starting to “challenge cultural trends that positioned women as products for male consumption.”
The album was an angry repudiation of restrictive and harmful gender construction, argues Harde, with Morissette claiming her space as a “liberated sexual agent.”
The fury of her lyrics is no doubt partly explained her experience of sexual abuse at age 15, says Harde, revealed in the 2019 HBO documentary film, Jagged, in which she confessed, “It took me years in therapy to even admit there had been any kind of victimization on my part.”
“As with many victims of sexual assault, it took her a long time to recognize it as such,” says Harde. “It’s clear that she understands the sexual double standards, the misogyny and the culture of patriarchy.”
Harde contends that our musical landscape might have looked very different without Morissette paving the way for subsequent female songwriters such as Taylor Swift. In a forthcoming chapter in a book on Swift to be published by Ohio University Press, she writes about the evolution of the pop icon’s feminism, expressed in the rejection of rape culture in her lyrics — a perspective partly rooted in her own experience of sexual abuse and “slut shaming.”
“Songs like ‘Mad Woman’ (on Swift’s 2014 album 1989) detail feminist anger and its transformative possibilities,” writes Harde, “as she encourages her fans to join her in getting ‘more angry’ as she responds to criticism of her albeit justifiable anger in her own lived experiences of sexual harassment.”
Swift grew increasingly political on subsequent albums Lover (2019) and Folklore (2020) that preceded the 2020 U.S. presidential election, says Harde. As did Morissette, Swift continued to embrace the 2SLGBTQ+ community and encourage her fans to be active citizens.
“The songs on those albums drew on her disappointment over the midterms and her hope for the 2020 election,” says Harde. “They also showed that Swift understood that patriarchy and misogyny were a serious threat to American democracy.”
As Harde demonstrates, the voices of Morissette and Swift remain powerfully influential in the lives of young people, continuing to imbue validation and empowerment in a culture that has seen a disturbing rise in toxic masculinity.
“Morissette’s songs are still moving through the airwaves and into kids’ heads, and Taylor Swift is doing pretty good work to (carry on that resistance).
“Is she still timely? The answer was always yes.”