If you’re a Gen Xer of a certain age, you remember exactly where you were when Alanis Morissette took her place in pop music history with “You Oughta Know,” off her album Jagged Little Pill. (I was a college student in Arizona, riding my bike to campus, listening to my Discman.) That particular song felt like a reckoning and gave a generation its own primal scream—raw, unflinching, undeniably cathartic.
The album reshaped what pop music could sound like. Morissette didn’t just sing about heartbreak; she excavated it, turning personal pain into universal, shriekable anthems. When she reminded you of the mess you left when you went away or proclaimed that life had a funny way of sneaking up on you, she was speaking truths that hit so deep some of us are still belting out these songs in the car 30 years on.
Without Jagged Little Pill to bust down the door, the musical landscape would have looked very different for the female artists that came after her. Morissette opened space for everything from Taylor Swift’s autobiographical storytelling to Olivia Rodrigo’s unfiltered heartbreak, turning raw emotion into a commercial force. She showed that vulnerability—and yes, rage—weren’t character flaws to apologize for but powerful tools for artistic expression.
Her cultural impact was profound. “Ironic,” another single from Jagged, became a generational touchstone with its litany of life’s cruel twists. Sticklers can debate whether her examples were technically ironic, but they miss the point entirely. Morissette was simply singing about the absurdity of everyday life.
Jagged’s staggering success—it remains the second bestselling album by a woman artist, with more than 33 million copies sold worldwide, more than any album by The Beatles, the Rolling Stones or Elvis—could have defined Morissette’s entire career. Instead, she channeled her honesty across nine more albums, chasing new sounds and deeper truths, from the reflective Such Pretty Forks in the Road to the meditative The Storm Before the Calm.
She’s acted (playing God in Kevin Smith’s Dogma), written, raised a family and built a second career as a podcaster in Conversations with Alanis Morissette. She’s been a mental health advocate, speaking openly about postpartum depression and perimenopause, continuing to beat the drum of radical honesty. Even Broadway gave her props when Jagged Little Pill: The Musical debuted in 2019 and earned 15 Tony nominations,
Now, 30 years after Jagged’s release, the seven-time Grammy winner is still blazing new trails when she launches her eight-night residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace. But for Morissette, this isn’t about looking backward.
“There’s a perception that we’ve gone somewhere or that this is a comeback or whatever the words are,” she recently told ELLE Canada magazine. “Well, I’ve been here the whole time, and I’ve been evolving and growing and falling on my face and getting back up 100 times. That’s just kind of what I’ve always done.”
Her approach to live performance remains as open as ever, telling the magazine that her concerts are “a space where if you want to cry through the whole thing, punch the air through the whole thing—whatever you need to do, I’m doing it with you.”
For fans Gen X and beyond, it’s an invitation to sing and scream—pure catharsis, no irony required.
Caesars Palace, 8 p.m. Oct. 15, 17-18, starting at $79 plus tax and fee. caesars.com
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