feeling listless

Music It’s 1998. October. 31st. Halloween. My birthday. I’m standing in the Virgin Megastore in Manchester City Centre standing before a rack of CDs. In front of me are five hundred or so copies of the album I’ve been waiting to hear for nearly four years. Alanis Morissette’s new album, 'Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie'. I’m financially challenged, so the gift voucher from my best friend and some pocket change are the only way I’m going to actually buy the thing. I select a copy from the back (untouched by fewer human hands) and almost reverentially carry it to the counter and pay for it. I stand outside, take the CD out of the bag. The plastic casing glistened in the sun, the glare flashing against the teeth printed on the cover. Then I play it. Long. Seventeen tracks. Rhythmically messy. Impenetrable difficult to follow lyrics. Annoying percussion. It seemed angry, pissed off that I had the audacity to buy it. What had Alanis been doing?

Was this the girl who’d created my almost favourite album of all time?

I first heard ‘Jagged Little Pill’ on a copy my best university friend had been given by a course mate. We were playing our usual session of the PC game ‘Worms’ and I’d just turned on whatever cassette was in his machine. My friend Bambi (a nickname, we’ll leave it at that) knew I had a generalised taste in rock music (Queen, REM, U2) but had evidently decided this was too hard for me and I wouldn’t like it (which was true of much of his CD collection, all 'Embrace’ and ‘The Red Hot Chilli Peppers’). But as I sat there trying to bazooka Boggy B.

From pixels away, I realised I was being distracted by the music. What were these lyrics? What was she singing about? Eventually the tape ended I got back my game. I asked if he knew who she was. When he told me the name it meant nothing. When he told me she was the Canadian Debbie Gibson, it sounded too wrong.

I couldn’t put my finger on what struck most about the music, even as I bought the CD as soon as my student loan came through. I think I listened five times that night. For someone brought up on folk, especially ‘The Spinners’, who’d been a card carrying member of ‘The Hit Factory’, for someone who thought Alannah Miles or Robin Beck were as good as so-called chick-rock got this kind of rock was a revelation. No traditional guitar solos. The voice an instrument at times. At no point did she think singing La was a valid way to continue a song to fade. No fades! Learning lyrics. What drew me to this more than Sheryl Crow in many ways? The honesty? The imagery? The vocal eccentricity? The fact we never knew whether the Canadian Debbie Gibson was playing with us? Did she know that few or more of the lines in ‘Ironic’ weren’t at all and that was an extra layer of Irony? That repetitive lyrics were not only quicker to learn but rhythmically easier to sing, almost chant like. And why was the second track repeated identically at the end before the two minute wait for ‘You House’, the ‘hidden’ track? Why not stick it directly after ‘Wake Up’? Or would that have been two quite numbers in a row, a no-no for home compilations let alone studio releases. I think it was all of these. The enigma. The idiosyncrasy. The lack of easy answers. It was this which had drawn me to abstract art, to 2001: A Space Odyssey, to Virginia Woolf. And until I met Tori Amos (musically speaking), the album filled all the empty holes left gaping in my musical taste when the real Debbie Gibson thought that sexing it up like Madonna would sell more records, when in fact it just made her look like some desperately trying to hold onto a recording career. I’d found an album I could love. Which always sounded fresh to me and would speak to over and over in different ways over the coming years. I idolised it out of all proportion.

Which is why as I sat trying to listen to ‘Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie’ a second time, I wondered what I’d done to deserve it. The CD actually had a naked photo of her in the faetal position on it. Why? The enigma was still, there, but in a different way. I didn’t actually finish the second listen. It took me a full year to play it again, when I heard ‘Thank U’ again at a club and thought perhaps it wasn’t that bad. Now I think I may have been too harsh. Everything is a bit over produced. But you have to marvel at someone who can write coherent lyrics and lines which are so long they barely fit into the width of a page in a lyric book. But it’s all just a bit too much ‘The Phantom Menace’. Not as great as the original Star Wars.

‘Pill’ still sounds great, even now, six years later, as all good albums should. And I have grown with it. I now understand what ‘Not The Doctor’ is talking about – it’s no good fathering someone who can quite happily make their own decisions. I follow the sordid imagery of ‘Right Through You’. I know that some of the songs are actually about men she’s been out with. But I see in girls I’ve met what she saw in these boys. And I’m sure in five years time actually what she ‘really wants’.

What, you’ve never heard it? You really should.

[I just found this review knocking around my hard disk, and since it's a Thursday (and you know what they're like), I thought I'd best post this rather than any new incoherent ramblings. Apologies if you've already read it.]