My name is Alanis, I'm a white chick singer
The drums are a-smokin' and so's the bass
Shake your thing (chika chika chika, cha)
When you sing (chika chika chika, ooh yeah)
Just sixteen (chika chika chika, cha)
No disco queen (chika chika chika, oh yeah)
That's from "Oh Yeah," from the album Alanis released in Canada in 1992. If that wasn't frightening enough on its own, try and imagine it being sung to an electronic backing track that sounds as though it's been pulled from an early '90s Commodore Amiga game. Then imagine it sung by Alanis Morissette doing a bad impersonation of Sean Connery. Now imagine it not so much sung, as rapped. If you're imagining it correctly, you should now have a thin trickle of blood running out of each ear.
A year after inflicting this upon the Canadian public, Alanis returned with Now Is the Time, an album where Alanis proved she could branch out from terrible dance songs and could make terrible ballads as well. Here's a sampling of lyrics from the track "Big Bad Love":
I'm having dreams in the night of you baby
And Sigmund Freud would have thought I was crazy
I wonder why you've become an obsession
All I know is that I need to have your big bad love
The Canadian public decided it wasn't funny any more, and refused to buy the album. Alanis, growing out of the "teen pop sensation" phase, reinvented herself. When Jagged Little Pill became a monster hit in 1995, her label actually got all copies of Alanis and Now Is the Time pulled from circulation. Who would think the music industry could do something so Orwellian?
Oh, wait. Everyone.
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