With her glorious new single "Everything" and her equally breathtaking album So-Called Chaos Alanis Morissette emerges finally from the shadow of a song that cast her as the poster girl for every angry young woman everywhere, which she never really was. In fact, "You Oughta Know" the first, and oddly, third single from the mega-selling album Jagged Little Pill as well as the majority of the album's twelve tracks symbolized a well-thought out catharsis rather than the much publicized man-hating anger management course that it was reported to have been.
Sadly, it was her reputation as a reckless banshee that detracted attention from her last two studio albums, which each proved Morissette was an artist to be reckoned with. Her sadly overlooked 2002 album Under Rug Swept was, until now her strongest effort, far outpacing Pill in lyrical power and musical know-how. So-Called Chaos is impressive not so much for any expansive growth Morissette has experienced as an artist, but for the growth she seems to have experienced as a person, and that growth is evident everywhere, but no more so than in the first single, "Everything." It is a song of hope and abandon, of acknowledgement and acceptance, and of blame and responsibility and it is the most effective single of her career (begrudgingly, I place it above "Thank U").
Morissette's power has always been best expressed through her magnificent lyrical vocabulary and her desire to place those lyrics within a musical landscape that incorporates a continually growing worldview. Chaos then is an album full of violins, sitars, cellos and a variety of other instruments not found on today's average rock album.
Chaos opens with "Eight Easy Steps" an Indian influenced rocker with a driving chorus that serves as an instruction manual on how become an expert at surviving the corpses of unhealthy relationships. The track serves as a potent beginning but some of awkward lyrical segues do not render it wholly accessible as the sing-along rocker that it seems to have been intended to be. The tone is set here, however, for "Chaos" is an album of personal examination, as well as an exploration of relationships both broken and successful, and while that might sound like familiar ground for Morissette it must be said that it is not the material that is different here, but the point-of-view. Instead of finger pointing (a decidedly human reaction to all failed relationships) or door-mat becoming, Morissette has reached the point in life and love where she has at last allowed her mind to join her heart in her examination of where she has been and where she is going.
In the moving "Not All Me" she tells an ex-lover or maybe friend, that she will happily help them sort through the wreckage of their destroyed relationship but that she refuses to act as punching bag to a person not willing to approach the task with thought and care. As she sings, "I am the perfect target screen/For your blindly fueled rage/I bare the brunt of your long buried pain/I don't mind helping you out/But I want you to remember my name/It's not all me /It's not all my fault /I need remind you, but I won't take it all on," you almost want to offer a hug to a woman who has at last become that.
"Spineless" examines the initial and critical period of relationship building where sometimes one partner's interests and desires begin to take precedence over the ideas and wants of the other, and how, later, those acts serve as the mortar casings for a doomed relationship and provide piles of fodder for therapy sessions well into mid-life. "Doth I Protest Too Much?" acts as a letter to a current/former lover where Morissette outlines who she is, or maybe who she tries to be, inside of relationships where outside pressures and personal insecurities are a constant battering hammer against the fabric of love. "This Grudge" another letter to a failed relationship might be the most moving song of Morissette's career. It is a song to that person, present in almost all of our lives, who for whatever reason still sits in the back of our head, the person who no matter how we try effects everything we do in every following relationship. It is about the inability to let go of hurt, and ultimately of our inability to let go of our one great excuse for every failed relationship since its end: "I want to be big and let go/of this grudge that's grown old," she sings and they are words that resound through the caverns of thought of any self-aware human being.
Whether it is realized now, or years from now, Morissette has emerged as a potent rock genius on par with the likes of Sting. She has much to say and provides consistently amazing new ways to share her soul's scars and celebrations. Watching her new video, "Everything" is moving and cathartic for both singer and viewer. We watch as Morissette loses the baggage of her old long hair and walks ever forward with a smile and a beauty that many did not know she possessed.
It is not hard to imagine, given Morissette's open book policy to her soul, that it is us, the listener that she addresses in the aforementioned "Everything" when she sings, "You see everything, you see every part/You see all my light and you love my dark/You dig everything of which I'm ashamed/There's not anything to which you can't relate/And you're still here." Sadly for them, most the seventeen million plus who hopped on the Morissette bandwagon in 1995 have long since abandoned one of the most enduring voices of their generation. It is her remaining fan base, however, that continue to reap the rewards of an artist constantly questioning who she is and what she knows. And while that fan base is decidedly smaller than it once was, it is a fact that Morissette now seems comfortable with, making the future seem very bright indeed.
Alanis Morissette So Called Chaos
