All My CDs, pt 82: Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie

Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie - Alanis Morissette

I like this album a lot more than Jagged Little Pill, and I think that’s mainly because it’s so much longer. As a general rule, if I like something, I like to have a lot of it, so the hour-and-ten runtime of this album is quite satisfying to me. Maybe it’s just me, but the songs also seem like much more fertile ground for analysis as well. For instance...

In Baba is a barrage of imagery of Hindu worship and descipleship, but in a scathingly cynical tone. Worshippers are portrayed as self-serving, focused on ritual and physical trappings, seeing absolution and enlightenment as goals with definite steps and a clear endpoint - spirituality as a mechanized, heirarchical process, rather than a state of mind and way of life. The whole song uses Hindu terminology and imagery, so it looks like it's critical of Hinduism, or at least of the more mechanized and heirarchical aspects of the religion.

So why is it that, halfway through, the rock music curtain parts to make way for an ave Maria - a distinct reference to Christianity?  It sounds totally out of place, until you realize that many of the same cynical observations have been made for centuries against Christianity, and Catholicism especially: the mechanized path to salvation, "righteousness mixed without loving compassion", top-down heirarchical structures, focus on physical trappings at the expense of true meaning. These criticisms date back at least as far as the Protestant Reformation, and are still being openly contested even now. Many Western practitioners of Eastern faiths converted explicitly to escape those very same problems, but this song implies that they will find the same problems even half a world away in a completely foreign belief system. Could it be that the corruption (or the purity) of a faith lies in the heart of the practitioner, not in the religion itself?

The rest of the songs here are at least as worthy of analysis (and perhaps one day I will give each of them the critical treatment they deserve), but most are more personal than political, continuing the diary-like vibe from Jagged Little Pill. This is especially true of songs like I Was Hoping, structured so much like narrative prose that it's hard to believe it works so well as music (but it does).

If you think the mostly-two-sided conversational storytelling in I Was Hoping is hard to follow, try The Couch, which seems to change perspectives impossibly fast without changing its intensely angst-ridden tone. I first heard this album as a kid, so it took me an embarassingly long time to realize that the title referred to the couch in a psychiatrist's office, and that all these divergent monologues are by psychiatric patients connected by their common need.

After so many years I still find this album to be an endless rabbit-hole for contemplation, revelation, and deep intellectual pleasure. May it remain so for many years to come.

Next: Under Rug Swept