60 Songs That Explain the '90s - Alanis Morissette—"You Oughta Know"

Episode Date: October 15, 2020

Rob explores the iconic 1995 single "You Oughta Know" by Canadian singer Alanis Morissette by examining its cultural influence and distinct sound. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Amanda Dobbins Producer: Isaac Lee and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I miss radio edits. For like three solid years, starting in 1995, every 20 minutes or so on alternative rock radio, you got to hear Alanis Morissette sing, if the word sing does her justice, the following. Except, of course, on the radio, it sounded like this. Which isn't any better, really. Nobody's confused about what she's saying.

As a 17-year-old dumbass from suburban Cleveland, I certainly wasn't confused. I'm Rob Harvilla, by the way. I'm a staff writer at The Ringer. I write about pop music a lot. I think about pop music way too much. And this podcast is called 60 songs that explain the 90s.

That's a lot of songs. I didn't think this through. Maybe you two lived through the 90s or maybe you're a young person who just has to put up with a lot of old people constantly gnatering on about the 90s. I am here to bring us all together.

When I do it, it's not nattering. it's podcasting. The goal is to cast light on your old favorites or help you find some new favorites. So welcome or welcome back. Anyway, in accomplishing all this, I will try to avoid hyperbole and huge sweeping statements

that I contradict later, but what you just heard is the second best radio edit of the 90s after Green Day's Longview, which went like this. Big deal in the suburbs. That whek. But Alanis Morset was an even bigger deal.

In the mid-90s, punk, quote-unquote, is in. Grunge is in. Alternative rock is in. Guitars, distortion, disdain, terrible attitudes, strategic profanity, and just a hint of PG-13 perversity. We will spend a great deal of this podcast discussing a great deal of that. Also, women in rock, quote-unquote, were in, too, a media concept that was never not condescending. But nonetheless, for rock critics anyway, the single biggest album of 1993 was

Liz Faire's exile in Guyville, which was extra sexually explicit, and the single biggest album of 1994 was Holes Live Through This, which was extra everything. And now comes Alonis with a song that consolidates all of it. In 1995, she was a 21-year-old Ottawa-born singer-songwriter who'd already put out two albums in Canada that did fine in Canada. It's more like dance pop. She sounds like Taylor Dane if you spend any time walking through a mall or driving to a mall

or if you ever got your haircut in the 80s. Those early, Alonis albums aren't disowned exactly, but her origin story really begins when she lands in L.A. and meets her new producer and co-writer, Glenn Ballard, and learns to channel her disillusionment and her anger

and her general uncouthness into a new batch of songs, the biggest and angriest of which was called You Ought a Know. It is a song of heartbreak. It is a song of romantic betrayal. It is a song about a crap dude and in essence serves as the public execution of a crap dude in the guise of a series of questions posed to the crap dude about the girl he spurned Alanis Moriss set for. There are radio edits where Down on You is censored also. which was mystifying if you'd never heard the song before,

but delightful if you had, which of course you had, because very soon, Alonis Morse set would be on the cover of Rolling Stone with the cover line, Angry White Female. It's a movie reference, because her third album,

Jagged Little Pill, had hit number one on the Billboard album chart in October of 95, nearly four months after it was released. The music business used to work like that. The biggest hits used to take a while to kick in. It came out on Maverick Records, a new label under the Warner Brothers umbrella founded by Madonna a few years back,

and Jagged Little Pill would go on to sell 30 million copies worldwide. It is my professional opinion that in the year 2020, it is impossible to explain, to rationalize, to wrap one's head around the idea of selling 30 million copies of one album, and selling them, which is to say you handed over 1699 or so, in American currency for a plastic disc that had just those 12 songs on it. And you did this gladly in large part because one of those songs was You O'Don Know, which is one of the most important singles of the decade,

despite not even cracking even the top five of Billboard's Hot 100 biggest singles. It peaked at number six. The Macarena was big around then, also, if that helps explain anything, which maybe it doesn't. See, this is why I just thought of a better radio edit than either Green Day or Alanis in its digital undergrounds of the Humpty Dance when they bleep out Burger King and I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom. I'm sure it didn't happen this way, but the historical document that I would love to have framed

and hanging in my house is the cease and desist from Burger King, preferably on Burger King letterhead with a logo and everything, insisting that the words Burger King be not just bleeped out but like eradicated from space. That is what I want. In the 90s music magazines, back when it was music magazines, plural, put together somewhere between 50 and 800 women in rock packages, which were well-meaning, but pretty reductive, just as it's reductive to say that what came to set Alanis apart, even from the Lilith Fair crowd to come, was how angry and messy, and for that matter, how perverted she.

was. But for sure she was jarring on the radio in 1995, both for what she was willing to say and how she was willing to sound when she said it. So in 1990, Mariah Carey's first album came out, and that would sell 15 million copies worldwide and have a bunch of gigantic hit singles, my favorite of which was Someday, which ends with Mariah Carey doing this. In junior high, I watched a girl, her name was Amy, do someday at a talent show in the gym, and Amy absolutely bomb. that last note, of course. And then she either collapsed to the ground or ran out of the gym or both.

And I wasn't sure at the time whether that was on purpose, like whether she was devastated, like she thought she was going to get there. But I was reminded of that, five years or so later, when the first song on Jagged Little Pill, it's called All I Really Want, ends with Alonis doing this.

It's a different way of doing things. Jagged Little Pill is a great deal of anger and perversion and messiness and, you know, vivacity. And there's a song called ironic that describes a number of scenarios that are not strictly speaking ironic, but primarily it's about you ought to know. It's the worst when you're the kind of person like the angrier you get, the funnier it is unintentionally. But with you ought to know, the angrier she gets, the funnier she gets on purpose, such that my personal favorite line in the song is, Did you forget about me?

Mr. Dilplicity, I hate to forget. It's just it's not a joke, but if it were a joke, she's definitely in. on the joke, and the crap dude in question was not. And at the time, the pre-internet rumor mail insisted that the aforementioned crap dude was Dave Cooley, one of the stars of the huge ABC sitcom Full House, which ended after eight hit seasons in 1995. If you'd been told at the time that a Canadian woman had written a pissed off and sexually explicit song about one of the male leads of Full House, Dave Cooleyer would have been your third choice after Bob Sagitt, who was the most perverted and John Stamos, who had the foxiest haircut.

But no, allegedly, Dave Cooley. You know, this guy. Because you had me worried sick and you don't seem to care. Do we don't have a cow. Don't have a cow. That's it. This weekend, you are grounded. This weekend is my karate tournament. Cut it out. DJ gets to go to the karate tournament. She gets grounded the following weekend. It's fine. Now, I personally did not want to think about Dave Cooillet thinking about fucking someone while fucking someone else.

But in the 90s, before streaming, before the internet, really, you often did not get to choose what you were listening to or thinking about. But I say allegedly because Alonis Morissette has never said on the record who you ought to know is about. She's been famous for 25 years. There's even a jukebox musical on Broadway called Jagged Little Pill. And in July 2020, she put out her ninth album. And of course, people still talk about Jagged Little Pill, the album, whenever it hits a round-numbered anniversary. But you won't say. Though in 2018, Dave Cooleyer, finally, definitively told the Huffington Post that he thinks you ought to know is about him, mostly because she once bugged him in the middle of dinner.

My high school girlfriend loved Jagged Little Pill, and she'd play it constantly around her house, and I'd be there, and also her mother would be there. And so my girlfriend would cough strategically to cover up the F-bomb and you ought to know. And even at the time, it didn't seem to me like that would work, but I appreciated the effort, and I appreciated that everyone, everywhere, was trying to censor Alonis Moressett one way or another, but it only made her stronger.

So I wanted to talk to someone with studio experience who can speak to the technical side of things and further explain why, from a production standpoint, this song works as well as it does. And so here with us now is one of our producers, Isaac Lee, a professional musician and an audiophile. Is that description? All right. Sorry. Welcome and sorry. Audio file, I don't like the connotation that audio file has, but I would describe myself as an audio purist of some sort. Like, I think people should care more about audio than they do. Okay, I respect

that. So there are millions of songs from the 90s and before and beyond that start out really quiet and then get really loud. It's one of the oldest tricks in pop music, rock and roll, whatever. You pile on the distortion when the chorus hits. But I do think you ought to know, like the first time you hear it, there's this sensation if you're

having to lean forward. Like Alonis, like she starts out singing so calm, so gentle, like her voice is barely above a murmur. And you physically lean into it and lean into her. So from the production side, like what strikes you about her vocals and the way her

vocals are recorded. Yeah, it's a good point that you're making about it being quiet, but not only is it quiet to start. Her lead vocal is dry, dry meaning that it doesn't have any reverb and or if there is, it's tight and mixed at a very low level. So I can't even demonstrate that because this is an audio-only medium. And this is what my voice sounds dry. There's no reverb on it and it sounds the way that it sounds.

And if I do put reverb on it, this is how I would sound. I sound like I'm in a large room. I sound like maybe I'm on stage. And people would call this a wet vocal. Without the reverb, it makes you sound like the vocalist is right in front of you. And practically speaking, what this dry vocal accomplishes, especially as the music behind the lead vocal, Alonis, gets bigger and bigger as the song goes on, is create a feeling of intense intimacy, right?

Especially when it's quiet in the beginning. That feeling of wanting to lean in, it's accomplished because it sounds like Shia's right. in front of you. And I also want to say that like it's mixed to sit a bit more on top of the instruments than usually is so that the intimacy is even more amplified. You feel like you can tap into her vulnerability because of how close the vocals seems to sound. Right.

It always struck me like you're driving and she's sitting shotgun and she's constantly trying to grab the wheel from you. Like it's intimacy. It's vulnerability, but it's also like she may actually kill me. also. Right. I don't know if you enjoy that, but it's certainly

the effect that's created from a psych acoustic standpoint. Do people sound better or worse with a dry vocal? Generally speaking, like reverb is something they can help out like a subpar vocalist,

which Alonis is an excellent vocalist, but it seems like she's really emphasizing, you know, the rawness of her voice here, like trying to make herself, not make herself sound worse, but just make herself sound more immediate. Right.

In our pre-production discussions, I pointed out that she's kind of ruining her voice on purpose in this song. And yeah, like, reverb generally helps vocalists sound bigger and fuller. And it hides a lot of things that the dry vocal, because it is so stripped of anything else, it'll highlight the imperfection. So it really exposes her. And I think it's very effective.

Yeah. And overall, you know, the loud, quiet, loud, quiet, like dynamic quality of the song, like there's a real roller coaster effect to it overall. Like in the studio, like, how do you create that sense of space and that enormity? Yeah, so the stereo image is something that mixers have to think about a lot because we have two years. And so therefore, most audio is mixed in stereo, left and right, which kind of raises the challenge for mixing engineers to say, what am I going to put in the?

middle what am I going to put a little bit to the left a little bit to the right maybe completely spread out and something common rock is spreading guitars left and right so this is what the mixer Chris Vogel does actually is he has either the guitars or the amps panned left and right so that it creates this kind of vacuum in the middle for the lead vocal obviously but also the kick and the snare that's going to come down the middle it makes the entire mix sound bigger and fuller and highlights the centerpiece of the mix, which is the vocal. Yeah.

An audio purist. I will keep that in mind. Thank you very much, Isaac. Thank you. My main guest today is Amanda Dobbins, Ringer Podcast, Luminary, The Big Picture, Jam Session, The Rwatchables, etc. Amanda, thank you very much for being here. It is an honor, of course.

You had shared with me that Jagged Little Pill was your first grown-up album. And I wonder what you meant by that. So after telling you that, I realized that I probably lied to you. And my first actual grown-up album was The Sign by Ace of Bass, which I was given as a birthday present by my godfather, Joe, is the first CD I ever owned. Wow. But I suppose you could make an argument of whether that counts as grown-up. Jagged Little Pill is the first album that I remember really campaigning to buy. Like I had some sort of awareness of Alana's Morcette and this album and these songs.

And I knew that I as a 10-year-old needed to beg my parents to drive me to the Tower Records on Peachtree Road and Atlanta, Georgia, and pay the dollar amount that I didn't have because I was 10 years old in order to have this physical album. And then I have vivid memories of going through the liner notes. I think it was a courier font. Oh, you remember the font. It's a courier font in my memory, and I didn't fact-check it. And, like, please, like, you know, let me have some nostalgia. But in terms of seeking it out on my own and then also really engaging with the entirety of the album, as opposed to, like, what I heard on the radio and, like, you know, tried to record on a tape deck,

this is the original album for me. What was your pitch to your parents? Like, did you try and frame it as, like, essential to your growth as a human? Or, like, how did you go about rallying them to do this? Great question. And I think there was probably drama in it because I don't remember my pitch, but I desperately, I remember so vividly, there was another kid in my class, Peter McKenzie. I haven't talked to Peter McKenzie in 30 years. And I hope he's really well.

But he was not allowed to buy this album. And the reason of that had nothing to do with you ought to know, because I don't even think his mother was like a way. of the contents of you ought to know, but because ironic was a huge hit and the lyric Black Fly in your Chardonnay was troubling to Peter McKenzie's mom, I believe, because of the alcohol and it was too young. So I remember being like, this is going to be a problem, but I need to convince my parents that it's going to be okay for me to own it. And it somehow it worked. I don't know. I guess shout out to my progressive parents. I'm worried about Peter now and how Peter did grow up, if that's what he was dealing with already at 10. A Chardonnay reference.

Yeah. He was a lovely guy. I mean, it was Atlanta, Georgia in the 90s. And I grew... That's right. Okay. I grew up in a conservative pocket of Atlanta, Georgia, which is going to maybe explain some of the other things I shared with you about my experience with you ought to know. Yes. Because I understand that you also had to personally censor you ought to know in the presence of your mother. And like, what was your strategy there? Were you a coffer as well, or how'd you go about it? It was 100% unsubtle.

I knew that the F word was coming. And I knew that the F word was bad. Though we'll talk more about what I learned from, you ought to know. But I think maybe this is the song that taught me that fuck was a verb. But anyway, I know. Well, well, I don't know. Right. You were 10 in Georgia. Yes.

And like I said, I was really engaging with the lyrics in a way that I had not engaged before. So I'm sure I heard it, but it's situated grammatically in a way that's pretty evocative. Anyway, I knew it was a bad word. I knew it was not going to be okay with my mother. And so I would wait. This is so stupid. I have like, I can tell you what block we were on when I tried this nonsense because I have the vivid memory sitting up front and my mother's driving. And as soon as the line comes, I just reach over and I fully turn the dial on the volume like all the way down. Like I did my own radio edit. It was just, and are you thinking of me when you turn all the way down?

Just the word. Just the word. Okay. You know, I want to say, like, I was taking a lot of music lessons at the time. So, like, I had some sense of rhythm. I think I really did get the volume back up by her. Like, it was a really, you know. That's precise.

And I remember my thinking at the time of just being like, I want my mother to know that I know that this is not appropriate, but everything else, like, is okay. I'm grown up enough to handle this and to self-sensor. Okay, so it's not that you didn't want your mother to know that she said it. You knew that your mother knew that she said it. You just didn't want her to hear it with you present? Yeah, I wanted her to know that I understood the rules of what was appropriate for me and what was appropriate for us to share together, which I guess now we're just doing therapy

about my relationship with my mother. But I just remember that if I acknowledge like, no, no, no. I know that this particular thing is not okay, but like everything else is fine, then I'll still get to listen to this album. Did she ever acknowledge any of this? No, here's the thing that my mother is not really a musical person or a pop culture person. So I have no idea if she even knew what was going on the song. She could have not been listening. Okay.

She had no appreciation for all that you were doing for her. That's very sad in its way. Did Alanis sound grown up, or did she make you feel? feel grown up? Like, did this record change you in any tangible way, if only to make like the childish shit that you'd been listening to before feel more childish? I'm sure it did, though at the time, everything feels grown up to a 10-year-old, right? Like, I was 10. I was 10 and I was like begging my parents to buy me anything. So I think I understood that there was something that was mature and beyond my age. I think it probably sounded exactly like that. I think it probably sounded exactly

like what adults do to me at the time. I listened to the entirety of Jagged Little Pill yesterday in preparation for this podcast. Thank you. And Alonis does sound a lot younger to me now as an adult than she did at the time. Well, yeah, I guess so. But I think also the thing that was really revelatory to me, in addition to the different type of sound and learning specific lyrical things from it, was the anger. and the idea that someone had this rage

and was also pretty clever about the rage. I think even at the time, I found, well, you're still alive, funny? Like, that's a good joke, you know? And I understood that there was this emotion that as a kid, you definitely never see in real life or in pop culture, but particularly as a woman,

you don't see a lot of people being very angry or a lot of women being very angry in public. I definitely didn't as a 10-year-old in a conservative part of Atlanta, Georgia. Yeah. And responding to that and being like, oh, I didn't know that you could do this. And I didn't also know that you could do it

and people would respond positively to it. That people would find it like interesting and real and maybe even like entertaining. Right. Did you have to self-censor the would she go down on you in a theater line? as well in the presence of your mother? Rob, I've thought so much about this.

Okay. So I don't think at the beginning that I self-censored because I don't think that I understood what it meant for a long time. And I have a very vivid memory of someone explaining to me what it meant. And I want to credit Alanus Morseid with teaching me what a blowjob was.

This is how I learned. Okay, let's unpack this. What did you think, what did you think it meant at the time? Like, what did you vision? What did you see in your mind's eye? No, I don't think I'd ever heard of it. I don't know. Is that embarrassing to admit that a 10-year-old had never heard of a blowjob before?

Or maybe I'd heard about it. Like, I had definitely consumed a lot of culture that referenced it, but it flies over your head when you're a little kid. You don't know. and I think that this was the album where I was engaging enough with the content that I remember a friend being like, hey, you know what that means? And I was like, no, I don't know what it means. And you can tell in the way that she sings it, that it's like something that most people don't do and something that would be a little daring. And so I was like, oh, tell me more. Yes.

What was your relationship with Full House? Oh, God. Full House is where I learned everything I know about music, okay? Because. Okay. That's not good. But yeah, go ahead. Oh, I'm sorry. Uncle Jesse, the world's number one Beach Boys fan. Yes. I too. I'm one of the many music critic adjacent individuals who thinks Pet Sounds is the most important album of all time. And do you know where I learned about pet sounds from Uncle Jesse? So thank you to Full House. But in addition to learning about the Beach Boys from Full House, I also obviously learned about Uncle Joey. And I will tell you, I think it was. maybe five or six years later when I learned the rumor that you ought to know was about Dave Kulier, aka Uncle Joey. Okay, we didn't have the internet or I didn't. And once again, I was 10.

So I don't know. Where were you learning that you ought to know was about Uncle Joey? I was, again, in my memory, like all of this information arrived at once. You know, like everybody was just born with the knowledge that this song was about Dave Kouilley. But I don't remember, honestly, where that came from, like, People magazine. Like, did somebody tell me at school? Like, yeah, like, pre-internet, I don't know how anyone learned anything ever. So that was pretty mind-blowing because it's really a one-two punch, right?

Because you're learning what a blowjob is. And then you're learning that it is somehow related to Uncle Joey, who you know as the guy who's just like, cut it out on full house. Yeah, I tried to do that. And I couldn't. I failed. That was pretty good. If people aren't familiar with Full House, we really don't have to get into it, except to say that even within the universe of Full House,

Uncle Joey was the least sexualized of the three uncles, which this is a kid's show. So, like, talking about sexualization is weird. But, like, Uncle Jesse was a bit of a heartthrob, and he liked the Beach Boys, and that was cool. And Uncle Joey literally lived in the basement and was, like, an aspiring stand-up comedian. Oh my God. I just realized that an entire generation of men just like watched Uncle Joey and then grew into Uncle Joey. That's profound. Yes. That's tough. Influential figure. That is tough.

That's extremely tough. Anyway, learning those two facts and having them be connected was more than my preteen brain could handle. Absolutely. Is it in contention for the best single greatest fuck you song of all time. The way I explain it was it's halfway between Yerso Vane and Taylor Swift's Dear John. Is it in that lineage? Is it in the pantheon? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I was trying to think of some others and Yerso Vane is obviously up there. There are some other classic ones. There's like the entirety of rumors, the album, which is pretty good. And there's more recent stuff like, you know, Cry Me River, which is Justin Timberlake about presumably. Bredney Spears, you know, all of this is like allegedly, we should say.

And then I think that you really can't underestimate the fact that Beyonce wrote an entire album, like an entire incredible album about JZ while still being married to JZ. and they're still married. And if you want to talk about art and personal life as performance, and I mean, that's incredible. But you mentioned Dear John. And Dear John is a really, really special song to me. And I think that it is my personal favorite in this genre because of the inside jokiness, which is if you listen to it and you don't know the backstory, it's like an affecting song of a young girl being like, you broke my heart. Right.

Yeah. And there's like a little bit of pettiness. But if you know that the song is about John Mayer, then. And number one, the title, Dear John, hilarious. Yes. Great play on words. And then the guitar solos that are so clearly mocking John Mayer within the context of this song. I didn't think about that, but you're absolutely right.

Oh, shit. It is next level sub-treating. It is a level of pettiness that really only Taylor Swift can achieve. And at the end of the day is what I respond to most in Taylor Swift's music. which maybe Alana's more set set me up for. But you do have to know all of that. And I think what's amazing about you want to know is that if you know the Uncle Joey stuff, great.

If not, you're still just like, wow, this is like a pretty righteous and really poppy kiss-off song that everyone can put their emotions onto. Yeah. What do you make of Alana's, like her enduring popularity? She has a Broadway show, you know, the new Dixie Chicks, the Chicks album.

I don't know if you've heard it, but like it sounds like an Alonismore. set album. Like, you can picture her just singing the entire thing. Like, is this the person you expected to endure long beyond the 90s themselves? Definitely not, because to me, it feels like such a specific 90s moment. And I know you've talked about this a lot, but like this album sold over 30 million copies. That's nuts. That's really nuts. That is hard to imagine. And I think it's really hard for me. I remember what it was like. like to be a part of a pop cultural moment that was that kind of all-consuming because it was just

everywhere, you couldn't avoid it. But we are in such a different space now that it's hard to remember that, oh, yeah, just like everyone listened to this album and everyone of a certain age ingested it. And so, of course, you see it in different permutations throughout music and, you know, I guess Broadway and everywhere else because it was just such a flashpoint. Yeah. I'm sitting here now. I'm picturing the guitar solos and Dear John and John Mayer's guitar face. Like, this is, this is, you've changed my life forever with this. Yeah, absolutely.

But again, Taylor Swift gets a lot of that from Alanus as well. So thank you, Alanus. And thank you, Amanda. This has been profound, honestly, in so many different ways. Thank you very much. Thank you for sharing. Of course. This is Rob Harvilla with 60 songs that explain the 90s.

Thanks very much to Amanda Dobbins and our producer is Isaac. Lee and Justin Sales and to you for listening. You've heard enough of us talking about the song. So now, here's You Wought a Know.