You Live, You Learn
A braided essay exploring how artists speak to the most personal parts of each of us.
When Laura invites me, it’s a no-brainer. Jagged Little Pill, start to finish at Tipitina’s in New Orleans. The cover band is Sweet Crude, a zydeco group who recently performed for President Macron on Frenchman street while he was touring our fair city and, judging from the photos of him standing in one, our pool-sized potholes. They strike the first chord and the harmonica twists itself around the reverb. That’s when something shifts in the crowd. It’s a reverence but also an anticipation: a 28-year-old private ritual making a public appearance. This is shower karaoke, windows-down road trip singalongs, secret closed-door moments on full, public display.
They did this as a joke, Laura told me earlier. No one expected it to become a thing and yet, it sells out every time. It’s not something to miss. No shit. The energy is palpable, communal — like going out on New Year’s Eve or walking the Quarter on Mardi Gras day. It feels strange, this realization that so many people seem to have the exact relationship to this record that I do. I look back at Laura dumbfounded that she knows all the words, even though we grew up sharing records and hearing each other’s music through the walls. There’s something deeply personal and also universal happening as the surprise turns to solidarity.
This sold out room holds two sticky floors of people screaming their heads off as Alexis Marceaux takes the stage. She wraps a flannel around her waist, cutting a baggy t-shirt in half, and channels Alanis, right down to the combat boots. She gives a little punch in the air before thrusting her body to the ground, long black hair flying, and croons, “Do I stress you out? Your sweater is on backwards and inside out and you say hoooooowwwww appropriate.”
It’s like being slingshot to two places, the Sliding Doors split screen with current me here in the present and the seventh grade me in a past that’s happening simultaneously. I’m tearing open a mailer from the Columbia Records CD Club, ripping cellophane off of the collection I never would have been able to afford: Bjork’s Debut, The Breeders’ Last Splash, Beck’s Mellow Gold and Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette. That time of wobbly independence and self-expression, walking the line between being interesting and being weird in a place that didn’t value either. Even though I looked the same in my goofy private school uniform — pleated navy shorts that cinched just below my ribs and then flared into a FUPA — I felt different from this place, this school, this small town. I wore my uniform with baby doll Doc Martens that Lesley’s dad said looked like orthopedic shoes. I cut my hair short like Demi Moore in Ghost even though I was told that the boys might call me a lesbian. I didn’t listen to country, I listened to Alanis Morissette.
Soon after I received that shipment of CDs, I boarded a bus for a school field trip to Houston with a boom box, extra DD batteries and Jagged Little Pill. It was a free dress day and I had swung for the sartorial fences. I chose a ladybug print – skin tight, shimmery sateen with a rainbow of ladybugs smattered across — tucked under baggy overalls. There’s a photo of me surrounded by four other girls on the bus. Each of them are wearing a navy blue shirt, khaki shorts and long hair pulled into a pony. Then there’s me, beaming in the middle behind Elton John sunglasses decked out in insects. What’s funny is that I thought I was passing but it’s so clear, so incredibly obvious that I was very, very different. By the time we got to Houston, I had played Alanis back-to-back nearly four times, strategically lowering the volume for four-letter words, like when she sings, “I’m brave but I’m chicken shit,” or goes, “And are you thinking of me, when you fuck her?”
The first time I heard that line, my stomach became water and my jaw literally fell off of my face. Did she just admit to going down on him in a theater? The guts of this woman, saying it all, naming it all and turning it into art. Not just art, but wild, angry art using all the things that hurt her. Here was a woman making a song — a really bad ass song — about being depraved and rejected; about being an angry woman with a bone to pick; about insisting that this dude look at the shreds of her dignity and own up to his role in tearing her apart. And yet, her voice is clear. She is defiant in her rage and insistent in her desire to be seen through it. She doesn’t shrink and disappear into a corner. She doesn’t grit her teeth and go cut or starve herself. No, she stands in front of him — whoever he is — with her broken heart and twisted face demanding that he see her pain. And then she rises bloody and bruised and resurrects herself in front of the world. She names the ugly thing. She claims the truth of her animal anger and is reborn through her bravery. Not just an artist. A beloved, powerful artist who spoke her truth about religion, sex, perfectionism, betrayal — all the angry woman shit we aren’t supposed to say out loud. I didn’t even give myself permission to think half the stuff she was talking about. Like when Alanis sings about how she’s sure the woman that’s replaced her would make a really excellent mother. You can hear it in her voice. It’s not just about this woman who has replaced her. Her tone says it’s about the entire system — a system in which this man is complicit — where women’s value rests on their relationship to motherhood and whether they would be good at it. And yet, the same line reveals the self-conscious reflection that perhaps she doesn’t believe she will be an excellent mother. And it is through that reflection, the honesty about her humanity, the truth of her suffering and pain, that we begin to see the parts of ourselves that we've been hiding rise to the surface. Her voice became a voice for all of us.
There’s a lot we weren’t supposed to talk about. I had heard rumors about girls who went down on guys at prom after too much whatever and after the boys finished their rounds of brags and high fives, there was very little dignity left for those girls. They usually went through a period of sitting by themselves at lunch tables or throwing up in the bathroom until the next dance came around. Then they would be asked out by a guy named Chad who was hoping to get a BJ and a high five too. It was my first exposure to the operating paradox of a culture that tells us that the actions that turn girls into dirty, shameful sluts are the very acts that turn boys into men and men into powerful, desired men.
It is by this act of perpetual conquest that boys and girls, men and women, are pitted against each other — the hunter and the prey — from the very beginning. And so you learn early how to sniff out predators, how to protect yourself. You build up impenetrable walls that protect your heart. You analyze every action to make sure it’s flawless, foolproof. And you never, ever let them know that they have hurt you. You do what you have to do to swallow it down because boys will be boys, after all. It’s just locker room talk. You will only be hurt twice if you come forward publicly and no one believes you. And we see that a lot. Women coming forward with stories of sexual wrongdoing and facing public shaming, backlash and a twisting of reality so severe that it ripples silence through the rest of us who are watching. Women like Anita Hill, like Christine Blasey Ford. But we dragged those women and we made those men Supreme Court Justices.
“When we speak,” Audre Lorde says, “we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid, so it is better to speak." I wonder if the women who came forward would agree. Was it better for their mental health, career, family, future to name the thing even if they weren’t believed? Is it different when we name the person and call for consequences, as they did? Is the reason Alanis succeeded precisely because he went unnamed and therefore unaccountable? And does this anonymity make him the Everyman for all of our secret pain?
As much as I wanted to be brave, I was chicken shit. As much as I wanted to call out what I saw — to take up for the Heathers and Amys who I watched being stripped down and humiliated in public by the boys who used them — I was not Alanis. I was not Audre. I was not Anita or Christine. I was wearing the “I don’t give a shit what you think of me” outfit and attitude, but I kept my head down and mouth shut. I kept away from the women who became sexual pariahs. I didn’t want to be guilty by association. I didn’t want that kind of attention, so I didn’t call out the double standard. I didn’t sit with the girls alone at the lunch table or ask them about their side of the story. I looked away because it was easier to pretend it was an isolated incident, something they brought on themselves. This is how you become part of the problem, part of the program that asks girls what they were wearing the night they were raped.
I was wearing overalls. The same overalls I wore on that bus to Houston. Because it turns out, it doesn’t matter what you wear, how short your skirt is, how much you have to drink, or whether you were asking for it. What matters is the story our culture believes about women’s sovereignty. What matters is the conquest for our deepest parts. What matters is the dynamic between power, shame and silence. I didn’t say anything when he bragged that he’d taken my virginity. It was over and there was nothing I could do now that I saw him fully. I also didn’t know how to explain it — what it felt like to love someone so much for so long and then to realize that for him, I was just something to be conquered, owned, taken, discarded the second it was over. I didn’t have words for that kind of betrayal or the mess it left in its wake. I didn’t have the words, but Alanis did.
In the sticky theater, we’ve gone through the record’s ups and downs, exploring Alanis’ emotional landscape as a proxy for our own. Many of the women in the front row are red faced as they sing. We occasionally catch each other’s eyes and there’s a flash of recognition in the glance. Oh yeah, it says, Me Too.
It’s like we are back in 1995, in whatever grade, dealing with whatever drama, feeling like the world was so small and unfair. And yet, here we are. Together despite whatever happened to bring us here and we are wrapping ourselves in the truth of her words, making them our own. That’s when you realize that this vulnerable, shattered, angry, human album — the one you thought only you really understood — speaks to the soul of nearly every person in that huge place. Somehow, magically, her story has become our story, woven into the memories and moments where we listened to these words to figure out and process our own feelings. Maybe they are remembering, whatever it is they remember, as they close their eyes and sing. Maybe they are channeling the strength of this artist and using her words to finally say the things they couldn’t. What if, they are re-writing their history, and using these stories to reimagine themselves and their own power or comfort that little girl in overalls blaming herself. I know, I am.
I used to think that speaking up made it worse — that it made the hurt more public and made women more vulnerable to social attacks. Then you have Alanis, who was vulnerable and willing enough to be called an angry woman, a shameless slut, a blasphemous Catholic, a thankless daughter, a crazy bitch and whatever else they threw at her. She created a haven for us to be right there with her. And even though we each thought our experience was incredibly personal, perhaps even isolating, it’s clearly not. There are so many others with tears in their eyes, so many others lifting their fists in sacred rage. It’s both horrifying and human to realize that this was a shared experience: this experience you thought was incredibly personal, perhaps even isolating, was actually something relatively commonplace, normalized, protected. And that is the magic of speaking up: we learn that we aren’t usually alone in what happened. There’s camaraderie in that. And also a fair amount of horror.
“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be,” Audre Lorde said. “Priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences.
Me too, Audre. Me too.
Thank you to Catapult for hosting The Radical First Person, and to author and teacher, Mallika Rao, for her wisdom and support in making this piece come to life.