LET'S face it, women in rock often make their male counterparts look like Neanderthals. At least when it comes artists like Tori Amos, P.J. Harvey and Bjork, who create music that is stylistically more innovative and rippling with the kind of socio sexual truths that make a mockery of the relatively infantile ramblings of most white boy guitar bands. And now we have another name to add to that list - Alanis Morissette, who has shot to superstardom in less than six months, selling a phenomenal 30,000 copies of her album Jagged Little Pill in Ireland, and seven million copies world wide.
Obviously, her often vengeful lyrics have struck a responsive chord in the collective psyche of women, in particular, who probably find it easy to relate to widely quoted lines about the "Mr Man who "took me out to wine, dine and 69 me/But didn't hear a damn word I said". Or similar invective in the hit single, You Oughta Know, where Morissette asks of her ex lover's new girlfriend, would she perform sexual acts with him in a theatre - the way she did - lyrics that, unfortunately, have already prompted her to claim that "jokes about me taking guys out to the theatre are not funny".
If these are the type of lyrics for which Alanis is already well known, she is adamant that they "have more to do with exorcism than sensationalism", though she understands why newspapers like The Irish Times might feel morally obliged to censor them. "The fact that they might tells me a little more about the country I'm coming to," she says, speaking on the phone from Stuttgart, and referring to her upcoming Irish concerts.
"There will probably be hesitation in relation to such lyrics but, at the same time, I think there will be a lot more people in Ireland who, because they have been brought up Catholic, will relate to what I say. But what I do say really has more to do with my discharging a lot of stuff, questioning it, because so often I was made to feel guilty about things I could have been revelling in, particularly sexuality."
The latter is especially true of tracks like Forgiven, in which Alan is sings about how, as a young girl, she used to confess her "darkest deeds" to a voyeuristic priest, claiming "my brothers they never went blind for what they did/But I might as well have" - obviously referring to masturbation. Elaborating now, she explains that "as a human, part of being alive is celebrating your sexuality and if you were told, and made to believe that you can't, then there is something seriously wrong with that kind of teaching.
Not surprisingly Alanis puts a lot of emphasis on the word "seriously". But then the twin themes on Jagged Little Pill are sexuality and religion and, maybe even more specifically, the points at which they collide. However, although a predictably inordinate amount of media attention has been paid to Morissette's "sexy lyrics, rarely quoted is that pivotal line from the song All I Really Want, where she emphatically sets her sexual longing in a spiritual context, crying out "and all I really want is deliverance". But from what?
"Well, Catholicism, basically, because a lot of what I was brought up believing was so stringent and left so little room for human error, for allowing myself to deviate, to figure out whether I even wanted to be or was capable of being a person with morals and values," she responds.
"A lot of what this religion teaches you is very moralistic, but if it's at the expense of feeling that you can stretch your arms and feel flee for a long time, then I really don't know if it's worth it."
So is Alanis also talking here of the tyranny of idealised patterns of behaviour she sings about in Perfect, which focusses on the pressures that are put on children, particularly in a family situation? "Yes, but that was imposed by several forces, especially society and the fact that I was immersed in the record industry from the time I was very young," she says, alluding to the fact that she released her first single before her eleventh birthday. Alanis is now 21.
It was the singer songwriter Tori Amos who liberated Alanis, particularly through her debut album, Little Earthquakes. Indeed, Alanis has revealed that the first time she heard that album, she wept and "felt like it was the first time I could relate to a woman on that level through her music because she'd been through a lot of the things I'd gone through". But what, exactly, was it about Tori's exploration of sexual and religious oppression, and even rape, that hit Alanis so hard?
"My response was as an artist as well as a woman," she says. "Apart from identifying with the subject matter of her songs I also had spent many years writing with people who wrote from a very conscious, structured sort of place. And I knew there was more to songwriting than that, because I'd experienced that stream of consciousness, spiritual way of writing in my own poetry. What was exciting about Tori was that she wrote in a very sub conscious way and, from what I hear, seems to believe that the song area written through, not by, her."
Alanis Morissette has no problem with commentators who have drawn parallels between her style of singing and that of Sine ad O'Connor and Dolores O'Riordan, though she agrees that the "links probably have more to do with the energy of a need for self expression rather than simply our vocal chords" adding that "the best thing is that there are women like us who can express these things, whereas many people don't have a place they can go to release that". So is that how Alanis perceives her role as an artist, speaking for those who have yet to find their own voices?
"Definitely," she says. "And people do say `thank you' for specific songs and I know that's because of what I've tapped into, in their lives. On stage, too, it's less about me being up there than what they see in me that reminds them of themselves."
IN this context, perhaps most important of all is the fact that Alanis Morissette has become a spokesperson for "Generation X", those children of the 1980s who frequently figure in suicide statistics. She herself is no stranger to shadows, having suffered "a few breakdowns" in her teens.
"The pressures I wrote about often relate directly to `Generation X'," she elaborates. "As in people questioning why there is so much negativity. Sometimes it is hard to see beyond the shadows to the hope, though that's what I'm trying to do right now, though I suspect there will always be that dysfunctional part of my subconscious writing songs. And I do now realise you can't be fully alive, without first having felt pain. Yet what saved me along the way was that I always had music. And I always knew that some day it could put food on my table, so I clung to that. But I don't know what I would have done if I didn't have my creativity. By nature, I am innately positive but I know a lot of people of my generation who weren't instilled with that kind of spirit."
What about "food" for her soul? Is it true that Alanis has resolved some of her tensions in relation to religion to such a degree that she also now believes that when she is on stage singing, it is the closest she comes to God?
"Yes," she concludes. "For a long time I just got rid of everything and there was a definite void in my spiritual self until I reinvestigated it all, on my own terms. So, I do believe in God now. Yet it's not the God Catholics believe in. It's not a man, or woman, it's an `it' with no word I know that fits that force. But, yes, the closest I come to connecting with it all is when I am on singing."
