In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. As Scott explains here, the column is now biweekly, alternating with The Number Ones on Mondays.
Winona Ryder needs a job. She really wants to be a documentary filmmaker, but she’s just doing that in her free time for now. Ryder used to be a production assistant on a local TV morning show, but her boss, the dad from Frasier, was an absolute dick. So she tricked him into saying that he’s a pedophile on live TV, and she got fired. She’s out there on the local media landscape, looking for work. But this is the movie Reality Bites, so she’s obviously going to have to learn that reality bites. When you try to make your living in the media, it’s a lesson that you’ll have to learn many times.
Winona Ryder’s job search takes her to a local newspaper, but the icy editor lady, who’s played by Reality Bites director Ben Stiller’s mom Anne Meara, doesn’t think she has what it takes to pivot from video. (Isn’t it ironic?) In a last-ditch effort, Ryder says how important newspapers are to a functional democracy, so Meara gives her another chance. She says, “Define irony.” With the elevator doors about to close in her face, Ryder splutters adorably for a few seconds: “It’s when something is ironic.” As the doors close on her promising newspaper career, Ryder can only say, “I know it when I see it!”
Her ego crushed, Winona Ryder walks into a diner and finds her chronically unemployed ’90s-slacker friend Ethan Hawke. She vents about her job-interview humiliations, and she asks him, “Can you define irony?” Without hesitation, Hawke calmly replies, “It’s when the actual meaning is the complete opposite of the literal meaning.” But he doesn’t go get a job in a newspaper, either. He can’t even hold a job at a newsstand, and that is a little too ironic. Don’tcha think?
Reality Bites came to movie theaters in February 1994, and I bet Alanis Morissette went to see it a few months before she met producer Glen Ballard and started recording the demos that would become her 1995 mega-blockbuster Jagged Little Pill. I have a hard time imagining teenage Morissette not going to see Reality Bites. But maybe she just wasn’t paying close attention during that scene. This is not a setup for a bit about Morissette doing other things in theaters. That’s a hack joke. We’re not making that joke here. It’s just that Reality Bites is a wordy movie, you know? Maybe every scene doesn’t immediately stick with you.
In any case, Alanis Morissette did not have an Ethan Hawke in her life. If she did, then that person might’ve told her that the situations she describes in her song “Ironic” are not proper examples of literary irony. They’re coincidences, dramatic turns of fate, funny little nothings. So when “Ironic” blew up to inescapable cultural-staple levels, the song became a popular intellectual punching bag, an excuse for smug pedantry. It became a reason for people to point out all the ways in which they were smarter than this enormously popular song — a thing that people loved to do in the ’90s. But if a very popular song called “Ironic” is full of examples of things that are not ironic, isn’t that ironic?
Here’s a shameful secret: I don’t actually give a fuck about the definition of “irony.” My parents were both college professors who were extremely particular about language — we were strongly discouraged from saying “pee” instead of “urine,” for instance — so I now instinctively bristle at anyone’s attempt to police anyone else’s language for any reason except those related to discrimination and moral shittiness. When people try to dunk on each other for using words in ways that aren’t technically correct, I hate that shit. My thing is: You know what they meant. Stop acting like you’re special.
But “Ironic” puts itself in a tough situation. If you give it the most generous possible reading, the song has a vague message about how our fates change constantly: “Well, life has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you think everything’s okay and everything’s going right/ And life has a funny way of helping you out when you think everything’s gone wrong and everything blows up in your face.” By extension, then, you shouldn’t stress too much about bad things or get too comfortable with good things. Fine. OK. But that’s not the message that people actually take away from “Ironic.” The message that people take away is that irony is like rayyy-ee-yaeeeyn on your wedding day. That message isn’t just incorrect. It also ensures that anytime it rains on somebody’s wedding day, somebody is going to sing that song at them.
In a way, the lyrical structure of “Ironic” is a bit like the one that the Crash Test Dummies used for “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm.” Much like lead Crash Test Dummy and fellow Canadian Brad Roberts, Alanis Morissette merely tells brief stories about people who have suffered some fucked-up fates — the old man who won the lottery and then died the next day, Mr. Play-It-Safe who was afraid to fly and then died in a plane crash. She compares those events to a black fly in your chardonnay and the good advice that you just didn’t take, and she dooms herself to an entire lifetime of people asking if she has since learned the definition of irony.
She has, by the way. You are not going to get one over on Alanis Morissette so easily. There are many, many interviews in which Morissette shrugs off her malapropism regret. Glen Ballard, her co-writer, has done the same thing. In a 2020 Songfacts interview, Ballard said, “I have a degree in English. I did my dissertation on T. S. Eliot, so I understand that the way we used irony was a much more conventional use of it and it wasn’t technically right, but I think it’s wonderful that everybody sort of jumped in on it and wanted to really define it as a literary term. So I’m fine with that. I think it’s really funny, and I just enjoyed the hell out of it, for sure.” So they’re good sports about it. I would not be a good sport about it. If I was Alanis Morissette, I would’ve gone blind decades ago just from rolling my eyes into the back of my head everytime somebody tried to ask me about that word.
To be fair to Morissette, she could not have known that “Ironic” would help define her in the public eye for decades. Songs about literary devices do not typically become all-conquering radio behemoths. If Morissette had any inkling that “Ironic” would become a big enough hit to become a pedants’ punching bag, she might have spent a little more time considering the dictionary definition of the word “ironic” before writing the song. But if she’d done that, then “Ironic” presumably would not exist. I wouldn’t want that because “Ironic” is a pretty good song.
Here’s one thing that “Ironic” does not have in common with “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”: It has a fucking chorus. By that, I don’t mean that the entire hook isn’t just Morissette humming for a couple of bars, though I do mean to heavily imply that criticism. (No irony here.) I mean that “Ironic” has the kind of hook that explodes out of a speaker and grabs you around the neck. With “You Oughta Know,” Morissette used her bazooka yodel to call down the hordes of hell on her shitty ex-boyfriend. When she uncorks that motherfucker on “Ironic,” she’s really just playing around, but it has that same volcanic force. It has come to my attention that many people cannot stand Morissette’s voice, and I have to imagine that “Ironic” is the main offender in these people’s minds. But as a man who always enjoys hearing someone just go off, I love that voice, and I love that she’s willing to use all that force to sell some silly bullshit like “Ironic.”
For my money, “Ironic” works a lot better when you stop thinking of it as an exploration of a linguistic concept. Instead, it’s a showcase piece for this voice and for the personality that the voice comes out of. In her opening “Ironic” verse, Morissette sings with soft, quiet precision over a sparkly acoustic guitar. She’s got the sharp elocution of the NPR folk singers that my parents used to play in the car all the time, and my attention would wander if she weren’t singing berserk shit about a death row pardon two minutes too late. She makes a meal just out of the c sound at the end of the word “ironic.” And then that chorus hits, the power-chords and big drums hurtling in just a split-second after she sinks her teeth into the word “rain.”
The actual music on “Ironic” is pretty functional and forgettable, but Glen Ballard knows how to build a pop songs. He understands exactly where the power chord needs to go. He knows that even a contemplative track needs to keep moving and that some vaguely hip-hop drum-machine programming can make sure that happens. For her part, Alanis Morissette gets how communication works. You never forget her weird little intonations, her popped plosives, the feral syncopation that comes into her voice on the bridge. The lyrics are almost just a vehicle for all that starpower. She could be singing anything, but what she’s singing is: “Isn’t it ironic?”
“Ironic” was one of the first songs that Alanis Morissette and Glen Ballard wrote and demo’ed together when they first started making music. They were just having fun and messing around. Ballard later remembered realizing that they were making music that didn’t fit into any particular genre, and he was happy about that. When the “Ironic” single came out, Morissette had already gone back-to-back with two Modern Rock chart-toppers, “You Oughta Know” and “Hand In My Pocket,” and her Jagged Little Pill album was a runaway pop blockbuster.
The “Ironic” single dropped in February 1996. The day of its release, Jagged Little Pill went platinum for the sixth time. The next day, Morissette sang “You Oughta Know” at the Grammys and won Album Of The Year. Her label actually released “Ironic” as a retail single, something a lot of that era’s alt-rock hits didn’t get. On some versions, they even included the live Grammys version of “You Oughta Know” as a B-side. As a result, “Ironic” went all the way to #4 on the Hot 100. It got play across radio formats — pop, adult contemporary, mainstream rock. And it became Morissette’s third and final Modern Rock chart-topper.
“Alternative rock,” unlike “ironic,” is a term with no fixed definition. “You Oughta Know” made perfect sense on alt-rock radio. “Hand In My Pocket” and “Ironic” felt a little more out of place, as if they’d just been grandfathered in. Morissette first broke out on the Modern Rock chart and then became this runaway cultural phenomenon, so modern rock stations kept playing her. That’s my read on it.
Or maybe Jagged Little Pill was just the last great blockbuster made by a woman before the Telecommunications Act made the radio landscape a whole lot bleaker. That law was already in place when “Ironic” reached #1. Very quickly, the Clear Channel empire bought up newly deregulated radio stations and targeted their alt-rock playlists specifically at the young-man demographic. This column will follow all the bleak things that happened after that, and maybe it’s only in retrospect that I don’t think of “Ironic” as an alternative rock song. Maybe my definition of “alternative rock” is tainted by what came after.
In any case, “Ironic” was just a big, fat cross-genre hit, and the video had a lot to do with that. All of the Jagged Little Pill singles have striking videos, but the one for “Ironic” is probably the most memorable. It’s Alanis Morissette driving a little shitbucket car down some freezing highway. In the car riding with her, there are three different Alanis Morissettes, all of whom have different personalities, communicated through dress, action, and facial expression. At the end of the video, the camera pulls back, and we see that there’s only one Alanis Morissette, in the car by herself. The other ones are all just different sides of her personality.
You will not be surprised to learn that Alanis Morissette is big on therapy. A few years ago, she wrote the intro to No Bad Parts, Dr. Richard Schwartz’s book about internal family systems therapy. My wife is a therapist who specializes in IFS, and my basic and probably-wrong understanding of the technique is that it’s about honoring and communicating with all the different parts inside your head. Every feeling you have is a part of yourself, and those parts come to the fore at different times, like in Inside Out. The “Ironic” video basically works as an illustration of the IFS idea, even though hardly anyone knew about the IFS model at the time.
The success of “Ironic” made a big album even bigger. Jagged Little Pill continued to sell in absurd numbers. At this point, it’s platinum 17 times over. It’s one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. Once “Ironic” had its run, the album still wasn’t done spinning off hits. Shortly thereafter, “You Learn” made it to #7 on both the Modern Rock chart and the Hot 100. (It’s a 7.) “Head Over Feet,” one last song from Jagged Little Pill, went #25 Modern Rock late in 1996, well over a year after the album came out.
Those Jagged Little Pill hits have never left us. When I took my kids to see Predator: Badlands last weekend — pretty good movie — I noticed a familiar song playing in the theater lobby. I was like, “Isn’t it ‘Ironic’?” In just the past few days, I have encountered both “Ironic” and “You Oughta Know” in the wild. Those songs are just part of our shared cultural language now, but Alanis Morissette has never made anything else even remotely that successful. At this point, she’s the lady who made Jagged Little Pill. I hope she’s OK with that, since Jagged Little Pill is a great thing to have made.
Morissette spent most of 1996 touring hard, playing bigger and bigger venues. For much of that time, her opening act was Radiohead. (Their biggest Modern Rock hit is “Creep,” which peaked at #2 in 1993. It’s a 10.) In 1998, she sang backup on a couple of songs from the Dave Matthews Band, including “Don’t Drink The Water,” their biggest-ever alt-rock hit. (“Don’t Drink The Water” peaked at #4. It’s a non-ironic 6.) That same year, Morissette made it to #26 with “Uninvited,” a song that she contributed to the City Of Angels soundtrack. (Another City Of Angels soundtrack song will appear in this column.)
At the end of 1998, Alanis Morissette dropped her all-important Jagged Little Pill follow-up. She re-teamed with Glen Ballard for Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, and it was heavily inspired by a trip to India that she took in between album cycles. The record eventually went triple platinum, which is nothing to sneeze at but also not even in the same solar system as its predecessor. The big single was “Thank U,” which got most of its attention from its video, in which Morissette walks naked around city streets in a non-sexy kind of way. Both video and song were easy to mock. In this case, I’m not going to cape up. I think “Thank U” is pretty self-parodic and bad. On the Modern Rock chart, the song peaked at #12.
“Joining You,” another Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie track, reached #16, and then Alanis Morissette never made it onto the Modern Rock chart again. She played Woodstock ’99 right before Limp Bizkit. Is that ironic? The same year, she made her big-screen debut, literally playing a silent God in Kevin Smith’s Dogma. This led to a decent little acting side-hustle for Morissette. She’s had arcs on a few TV shows and done one off-Broadway play. She produced her own 2002 album Under Rug Swept, and I really don’t know anything about that one, even though it went platinum. I also don’t know anything about 2004’s So-Called Chaos, which did not go platinum.
As early as 2005, Alanis Morissette moved into the legacy-artist phase of her career. That’s when she released a 10th-anniversary acoustic re-recording of Jagged Little Pill. She was engaged to Ryan Reynolds for a long time in the ’00s — 2004 to 2007, so roughly Blade: Trinity through the Amityville Horror remake, Waiting…, Just Friends, Smokin’ Aces, and The Nines. I never even heard of The Nines. Since 2010, she has been married to a rapper named Souleye. I don’t know anything about Souleye, but I’d say she traded up. Any rapper would be preferable to Ryan Reynolds. Perhaps any human being be preferable to Ryan Reynolds. I’d take a shattered iPhone screen and an ingrown toenail over a lifetime of mutually supportive romantic love with Deadpool.
There have been seven Alanis Morissette studio albums since Jagged Little Pill, but Jagged Little Pill will always be the one. Morissette has continued to celebrate the album, popping up to sing “You Oughta Know” with various pop stars and participating in different commemorative situations. In 2015, for instance, she was game enough to go on James Corden and sing a version of “Ironic” that was updated for a social-media era: “An old friend sends you a Facebook request/ You only find out they’re racist after you accept,” that kind of thing. She even added a line about “it’s like singing ‘Ironic’ but there’s no ironies.” I’m not embedding it because James Corden is ass. See? No irony here. Real talk only.
In 2020, Morissette participated in Jagged, an HBO documentary about Jagged Little Pill. Sean Fennessey, an old friend of mine, was one of its executive producers. (When will someone hire me as an executive producer? I could executive produce the shit out of whatever you want.) Diablo Cody wrote the script for a Jagged Little Pill jukebox musical, which opened on Broadway in 2021 and won a couple of Tonys. They’re still out here playing the Jagged Little Pill hits in movie theater lobbies, and they will probably keep doing that until we have no movie theater lobbies left. Maybe by then, they’ll invent some other public space, where they will continue to pipe in Jagged Little Pill hits. Maybe hundreds of years from now, some evolved version of humanity will continue to wonder if any of the things described in “Ironic” are actually ironic. Maybe they won’t be such dicks about it.
GRADE: 7/10
BONUS BEATS: For whatever reason, there were prominent “Ironic” needledrops in two different 2013 motion pictures. Here’s Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson debating whether “Ironic” belongs on a get-psyched playlist during the opening scene of the Shawn Levy film The Internship:
And here’s an extremely young Saoirse Ronan singing a Daily Show-ass “Ironic” parody to Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd in the Amy Heckerling picture I Could Never Be Your Woman:
BONUS BONUS BEATS: I have come to understand that lots of TNOCs heads are into this conceptual-mashup YouTube guy Neil Cicierega. I don’t know anything about this person, but I listened to “10,000 Spoons,” the track where Cicierega mashes “Ironic” up with the Knight Rider theme, and I think I kind of get it. Here it is:
BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s something that really struck me while I was researching this: Alanis Morissette was the last artist ever to play the Chicago version of the Pitchfork Music Festival, an annual ritual that used to mean a great deal to me. That’s fucking weird. It happened last year. Here’s fan footage of Morissette singing “Ironic” with fellow festival act MUNA that night:
(MUNA’s only hit on what’s now called the Alternative Airplay chart is the 2021 Phoebe Bridgers collab “Silk Chiffon,” which peaked at #35.)
THE NUMBER TWOS: Spacehog’s tingle-stomping, hiccuping, woo-woo-ing guitars-and-keyboards tidal wave “In The Meantime” peaked at #2 behind “Ironic.” It’s a 9.
