Flak Magazine: Alanis Morissette's Under Rug Swept, 03.07.02

In 1995, Morisette's Jagged Little Pill made an incredible impact on the music world. It sold by the truckloads and perched, arms akimbo, atop the confessional singer-songwriter resurgence of the mid '90s. Her follow-up, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, came and went without much to-do, with the exception of "Thank U," possibly Morissette's greatest song, in which she "thanks" forces both positive and negative for helping her grow.

"Thank U" might have been a new beginning for Morissette, one in which, coming to terms with the myriad dilemmas of Pill, she found acceptance and clarity, moving from inward-looking self-involvement to a vision more altruistic — but with the same pop hooks and hip-hop beats, if you please. Instead, Under Rug Swept is a regressive, reductive album that reveals Morissette as someone either unwilling or unable to grow.

The album is meant to be a testament to the individual working through personal problems and — after cleaning house — turning to community and global concerns. Thus, the final track of the album, "Utopia," describes Morissette's ideal world, her "end in sight." To get to this track, we pass through such songs as "21 Things I Want in a Lover," a musical personal ad; "Narcissus," a catalog of boyfriends past; and "Surrendering," a hopeful track about budding love. Morissette wrote and produced all of the songs without the help of Glen Ballard, a major force on her first two albums.

That the disc is such a striking disappointment may be the result of going it alone. Morissette's lyrics have always been unruly, but on Pill her unkempt verbosity fuels her rage, as when she tells a record exec in "Right Through You" that he "took a long hard look at my ass and then played golf for a while." Now, it's just words, torrents of them, stubbornly arrhythmic at times and other times too clinical to have any emotional impact. Such is the case with "Surrendering," in which Morissette sings, "And I embrace you for your faith in the face of adversarial forces I represent." Wow. One longs for the days of "I'm sitting here, la-la, waiting for my ya-ya."

The lyrics aren't particularly good. Gone is the cutting wit of the Alanis Morissette who recommends walking around naked in your living room; gone is the relaxed Morissette, who has one hand in her pocket and the other one playing a piano. Now, her digs at the men of her past are not unlike the text of many a folded note in a high school history class; her globally aware lyricism is so generic as to be meaningless. In Morissette's utopia, people "would stay and respond and expand and include and allow and forgive and enjoy and evolve and discern and inquire and accept and admit…." It's hard to avoid thinking these criteria can be met in highly imperfect settings; for example, people likely did all these things at Enron.

By contrast, John Lennon once asked us to imagine some very specific things, like the absence of a heaven, no possessions and the lack of things to kill and die for. I suspect that if he asked us to imagine "responding and expanding," we might be less inclined to revisit his song in times of trouble. Morissette is out in Lou Gramm empty-lyric territory, where people spend their days "chasin' down a dream" and have "fire in their veins."

The production further weighs down Under Rug Swept. Listen to Jagged Little Pill, and you'll hear poppy melodies among its tunes that, in the hands of a Backstreet Boys producer, might make you want to break things. But Ballard's production is deliberately rough, raw, and threadbare: the perfect way to take the curse off the melodies, which are beautifully crafted, bringing into focus more of young Morissette's rage and energy. Yet on Under Rug Swept, the production is facile, slick, polished; nothing is wrong, per se, but the songs don't build; there are no surprises in the instrumentation. "That Particular Time" is particularly victimized by Morissette's tendency to lay it on thick from the word "go"; this song about the end of a relationship might have been affecting, but as produced here, it is a drone.

The saddest thing about Under Rug Swept is its joylessness. On her first two albums, Morissette was vocally unafraid. She howled and grunted and made some of the oddest sounds the Top 40 has ever heard. At times, she sounded like a Muppet being throttled. This lack of polish was immediate and edgy, and it was truly an exciting "love it or hate it" proposition.

On this disc, Morissette sings well (for her). There are only a few strangled screams. Maybe a couple of hair-raising octave leaps. This is the singing Alanis that pre-dates even Pill, the Alanis of her Canadian albums, recorded in her mid-teens. It's dutiful singing.

It's hard not to wonder if Morissette is aware of the regression this disc represents. Does she want to stay 13 for good? In a recent New York Times article she says, "…oftentimes people have said, 'What's with the self-absorption?' But I see that as Step 1 in a two-step process. The second step would be me being of value to other people's lives and being able to share compassion in very tangible ways. And I can't skip over Step 1 to get to Step 2." How long is Step 1 to last?

One wonders if Morissette could make better use of her time until Step 2 is achieved. She reveals in the current issue of Mojo that her first musical hero was Leonard Cohen. Cohen recently emerged from a five-year apprenticeship at Mt. Baldy Zen Center in Southern California, where the repetitiveness of daily menial tasks taught him humility and focused his mind. At no time in those five years at the Zen Center did he release an album. It's just a thought…

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)