Issue #26: ALANIS & ANGER

Alanis Morissette, Country music, Morgan Wade & the gatekeeping of women's rage

Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for CMT

A lot of things (very pleasantly) surprise me about Morgan Wade, but seeing a song called “Alanis” on her new album wasn’t one of them. Even before she showed up at the CMT awards, I’ve always felt like Alanis Morissette was somehow adjacent to a certain corner of country music, my corner of country music – the corner where women express their rage, where they take no shit from the men that wronged them, where they make space to be unapologetically forthright about exactly what was going on in their heads at any given moment. There’s not so much daylight between “You Oughta Know” and “Goodbye Earl,” is there, really? Earl had to die, and whoever broke up with Alanis in that song deserved his own metaphorical death, too. And, unsurprisingly, pop culture was scared and apprehensive of both Alanis and the Chicks – nothing more that people hate, from the coast of California to the Mississippi Delta, than women with opinions.

I saw a YouTube video recently making the case that we are now in country music’s “Nirvana Moment,” whatever that means. Aside from the fact that it skipped over the power of (women) artists like Kacey Musgraves and the deep influence her work has had on the current crop of indie-ish folks like Zach Bryan, even in just carving out space for them to exist, it always makes me reflect on how frequently, when we want to talk about success in the nineties, we talk about Nirvana and The Men. I mean this in no shape or way to take away from Nirvana – a brilliant, legendary band, come on now, I do not have to qualify this because we can hold several thoughts in our heads at once. But so many women I know – so many people I know – who either grew up in that era or take reference in it were founded and bloomed from artists like Alanis, Fiona Apple, Liz Phair, Indigo Girls, Courtney Love, Sheryl Crow, Tracy Chapman. I’m exploring this now in my second book: how would history look if we, women, defined it? What if we shaped our memory with women at the center? If our opinions, our rage, our love, mattered equally?

I’ve written before about the foundational force of Sheryl Crow, and I’m glad that Morgan’s song opens up this conversation to the world of country music: there is a through line from Loretta Lynn’s “Fist City” to Alanis, and both hold an equal degree of importance to so many working artists today (and regular ol’ women, like me).

In the mid-nineties, I fell in love with Alanis and her debut album, Jagged Little Pill. I was, of course, not alone. I remember the agency that grew inside me when I saw the video for the first single, the way her hair hung in a curtain over her face but nothing else was in hiding. And I remember how it felt to just as quickly see the world react to her, to place her success on the shoulders of men, to do anything they could to shut the Pandora’s box of women’s feelings back snug and tight. We knew, of course. We knew where the power came from, Alanis’ power. We knew it was all her own.

Scream on the stage and let out the rage
Till the lights go dark
Fame is hollow, jagged pill's hard to swallow
While they pick you apart

-Morgan Wade, “Alanis”

We are only marginally comfortable with women expressing rage in country music, and it has to be under one very specific circumstance: in a car-bashing, revenge-seeking, blond white lady way. There was a brief period in time in the past two decades where, in the wake of “Redneck Women,” some public anger (or house burning down) was allowed, but even then, this was limited, and always publicly understood not as storytelling, but as a “rage” product, a moody thing that comes from a moody woman. We don’t talk about angry songs by angry men, even though they exist in plentiful amounts, because we don’t put a post-it on that emotion when the delivery vehicle is a cishet white dude.

Women in country music have a lot to be angry about these days. All days. We talk non-stop about the country music “explosion,” and how country artists like Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan and Oliver Anthony are dominating the charts. Meanwhile, Lainey Wilson is only now on the verge of her first solo number one - the first in two years.

Radio won’t play them, but women in country music are singing their rage anyway. Margo Price’s “Lydia.” Amanda Shires “The Problem.” Maren Morris “The Tree.” Mickey Guyton “Black Like Me.” Morgan Wade. It wasn’t just songs with steel guitar that got them there, either. It was Alanis, too.

I’m here, to remind you.