Alanis Morissette and the Commodification of Women in Rock

Any girl who listens to “Right Through You” understands that it contains a series of checkboxes for all the awful grownup types that Alanis had already met. Alanis grew up to be the very successful Miss Thing, but she is still a thing—the monstrosity inherently associated with being a woman. According to Jess Zimmerman’s Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology, women are going to be treated as monstrous no matter what we do and the inevitability of this means we must work with our monstrosity rather than fight it or pretend it isn’t there. This is especially true for creatives—those of us with generative instincts to build a manifesto out of the facets of our lives that sadden and terrify men who don’t know how to witness us, don’t know how to read us or love us or employ us. They can’t handle all the information before they turn us away. Let those men keep fearing when women like Alanis put their shoulder to the wheel.

Every woman who truly serves excellence leaves a trail of carnage in her wake. Not that we want to hurt people, although hurt people do often hurt people. It’s just that for a woman to succeed in her own life, she first must get beyond the very many standard males who simply prefer that she not do so. My resolve to do no harm is often at odds with my resolve to take no shit. Even though I could go on and on in a litany of the bleached bones and hollowed-out shells of the many copies of Mr. Man lying there on the road behind me that make it hard to glance in the rearview mirror sometimes, let us recall that the particular forms of masculinity indicted by “Right Through You” are primarily enabled by their infusion into a capitalist system, which we might usefully narrow to focus on the music business.

In this case, Alanis understands that the record company execs are appraising her prospective commodification, and she argues that this is at the expense of her humanity. In other words, she feels invisible. The song performs an “I’m rubber, you’re glue” conceit of reversal and leaves the exec feeling invisible instead: “Now that I’m a zillionaire / You scan the credits for your name / And wonder why it’s not there.” She goes right through him, gets beyond him. The music business has always defaulted to a baseline of dismissiveness regarding the talent of female musicians, treating them like a joke or a child, even as they are being used to generate massive profits. The harsh evaluation of this tension performed by the lyrics is a clever counter to the appraisals that were placed on Alanis, wherein the pot and the kettle succeeded in calling each other black. Yet this was a gamble when she wrote it because she was not Miss Thing at the time, so the song’s revenge moment was intended more as campy self-deprecation, due to no one expecting the album to rocket her to such a level.

Jagged Little Pill ended up undercutting the classic commodification model, as the marketing department, hilariously, had to scramble to get out in front of the album’s instantly enormous fan base. For example, Alanis ended up on the covers of both Spin and Rolling Stone that November, an extremely rare feat usually reserved for recently deceased icons. The album was still several weeks away from being shipped out to record stores or even other radio stations when KROQ Los Angeles played the first single on air for the first time and the phones immediately started ringing. The woman we must credit for this is Lisa Worden, who was at that moment in the very first year of her two decades as music director for the legendary alternative rock radio station. It was apparent that the album had a momentum all its own as the execs at Warner belatedly fought to steer it.

But all of this treats Alanis like an artist in a vacuum, analyzing her on her singular merits as if they had no wider context. The nineties are known as “the decade of women in rock,” and it’s of course difficult to excavate JLP from the amber of that sticky gimmick. For starters, there was the ancient dictum that only one female musician shall appear on a rock radio station’s playlist at any given time. The scarcity vibes were immense, each team vying to push their productized human through the few doors that were open. Women who wanted to cooperate with each other for the sake of their art forms instead of competing for the sake of their sales figures had a hell of a time convincing their execs to let it happen. The message I got as a high school student and fledgling creative watching Sarah McLachlan put together Lilith Fair is that women who rock are at best considered separate but equal—which is of course never properly equitable. Given how deeply I felt my femaleness and my feminism at that time, being a writer seemed easier than being a rock star.

Look how far into this discussion we got without putting Alanis into a sentence with Liz Phair—one the queen of mainstream magazines and one the queen of indie college radio, both stomping the demand for Sheryl Crow and throwing scraps to Paula Cole while Melissa Etheridge was taking a break to make babies and Ani DiFranco was establishing Righteous Babe Records, et cetera. And that’s just a handful of only the white women. No artist is an island: they suss out networks and form cohorts and mentor each other just like in any other profession. As much as I’m overcome with a swoony urge to rhapsodize on the siren wailings of Alanis and Sinead O’Connor as two peas in a pod, a lot of this work to contextualize women artists feels like it does as much harm as good. The passage of time has not lessened this hunch. Every time JLP has an anniversary, there are a handful of think pieces on why it was the greatest album of its time and then a deluge of unkind retorts for which titles like “Ten 90s Albums More Feminist than Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill” from Collapse Board are typical.

This notion that one could be “more feminist” presumes that women can be located along a spectrum of palatability, the monstrous reality of riot grrrls at one end and the pleasing fiction of “Stepford wives” at the other. The Stepford wives are utterly compliant robots based on the female characters from Ira Levin’s 1975 satirical horror story of the same name, and this excerpt from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s 1999 classic Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women gives a sweetly idyllic description of riot grrrls: “So sometime in the early nineties, the girls all by themselves, with no assistance from any international conglomerates, invented the Riot Girl movement, starting punk-rock bands and fanzines in suburban garages and rec rooms just like boys used to do, linking up with other girls in disparate cities like Washington, D.C., and Vancouver and Olympia and Toronto through Internet chat rooms and newsletters. And they forged a manifesto.”

This continuum of acceptability is applied to every facet of the musician’s work, from the way they interact with execs and promoters to the way their products and performances are judged by media and fans. Alanis somehow reached this minimum threshold of acceptability, leading English professor Sara Marcus to theorize about the transmutation of ideology from the original riot grrrls of Bikini Kill: “Some women are never going to access Bikini Kill, but they’re aware of Hole. Some women aren’t aware of Hole, but they’re listening to Alanis Morissette. Now we’re at a third-generation degraded copy, and at the same time, there’s an embrace of anger and obscenity that does something for people. Even the Spice Girls are like a fourth-generation degraded copy from Riot Grrrl.” We can admit that the feminist messaging gets watered down, but we must admire that the seedling still survives with enough to grow on.

Excerpted from Chapter 5: “All the Information” of Why Alanis Morissette Matters by Megan Volpert. Copyright © 2025 by Megan Volpert. Excerpted with permission from University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.