Alanis, JKnapp, and my 90s Renaissance

I’ve already mentioned that my grandparents often had music happening in their house in some way. My mom was similar. When I was with her, she always had the radio on or MTV (ya know back when they actually played music). So, I was surrounded by music. I have no clue what was the first thing I listened to. There are stories of me and music from right after I learned to talk. I got my mom in trouble with my grandmother by singing Manhunt. I embarrassed my mom on a regular basis in the stores by singing to the top of my lungs. The most memorable to her being my loud solo of Never or These Dreams by Heart in the checkout line of the Piggly Wiggly. I’m sure it was embarrassing having a three-year-old stand in the cart and pretend she was singing for millions of adoring fans.

Everyone has that first album. Not the first one they buy with their own money. Or the first one they ever listen to. I mean that first album that leaves you going, “oh shit, I am seen. I am known. I am not alone.” I don’t remember the first album I bought with my own money. It was probably Tiffany or Paula Abdul or New Kids on the Block. The album for me, the one, was Jagged Little Pill. I was 13 when the it released. It was a precarious point in my life. I don’t think I was supposed to listen to the CD. So, I snuck a copy of my friend’s CD home to listen to. (I did this with a TLC album as well.) The album was catharsis. I listened on repeat. There was something in the anger and the annoyance there that felt like home. I didn’t have a way to express, safely, those feelings so I let Jagged Little Pill do it for me. I didn’t totally get the album. I was 13, of course I didn’t. But whatever Alanis was expressing resonated and echoed all throughout me.

I don’t remember when I bought the album for myself. I do remember though, at 14 I think, I corralled all my “secular” albums in a pile. I broke every last one. The only time my resolve was tested was when I got to Jagged Little Pill. All the other albums, I had cruised through, breaking and collecting the shards, feeling holy in the process. I felt like God was telling me that I needed to only listen to Christian musicians. I hesitated and asked God to exclude this one album. “Please don’t make me do it,” I asked. Thinking myself some modern-day Abraham begging for the life of his son, I pleaded. Silence. Like Abraham, I obeyed, despite my hopes, a heavenly host never descended to stay my hand at the last moment.

I purchased the album again a year later. It was the only album throughout my teens that I obsessively came back to. Had I known I would only repeat the destruction process again in 10^th grade, I’d’ve never wasted the money. I hesitated less the second time. By then, I had Christian “equivalents” to the albums I loved. I convinced myself that Rebecca St. James was just as good as Alanis. Rebecca’s album, God, copied Jagged Little Pill stylistically enough that I was mostly placated. It was never the same. I tried to force my expressions to fit what I thought I was supposed to be, how Christians were supposed to look and act. I did my damnedest to emulate the other girls at church. I held them up on a pedestal. I wanted to listen to what they did, dress the way they dressed, and be their friends. I never managed to get there.

I sang in the choir with them. I hoped that proximity would result in achieving some of their, what I considered, godliness. They mostly weren’t terribly nice people. I don’t know why I held them in such high regard. But I did and it hurt that I could never make myself good enough to be accepted by them. I tried. Oh, but I tried. Where I tried to force Rebecca St. James to fit the hole that Jagged Little Pill left in me, Jennifer Knapp’s album Kansas was an actual balm to all the feelings I felt. It was the second album to imprint on me. There was something there in Jennifer that—like with Alanis—felt like home. The songs still make me cry. The first song I taught myself to play on guitar was Martyrs & Thieves.

I remember not long after the album released, Jennifer Knapp came and played a concert at my church. I was so nervous. I wanted to speak to her so badly. To tell her how Kansas was like Jagged Little Pill for me. That her songs spoke to me in ways that I couldn’t fully articulate. Instead I just sat at the back of the room and watched her talk to others and eventually walk away without ever approaching her. It wasn’t even a large venue. The building held a max of a hundred or so people and there were only maybe thirty of us there. I sang every song quietly with her during the show. And after, prayed to God for the courage to talk to her or for her to see me. Neither happened and I let her walk on past without ever telling her how much her music meant to me.

By the time I got to my senior year, I started to shift again. I reintroduced secular music into my life. I rediscovered a love for Judy Garland and musicals. One of my friends invited me to her house to listen to RENT. I felt something start to crack open inside of me in the ways that, up until that point, only music could cause. I wondered what all I had missed in my self-imposed seclusion. I listened to the radio in the car my grandmother gave me. I was angry so most of it was hard rock. I also listened to the Dixie Chicks. They were the first secular concert I went to. The show was marred by a fight my mother picked with me earlier the day of the show.

College marked more of the same. I listened almost exclusively to Christian music after my freshman year of “debauchery.” I drank alcohol *gasp* the sin and shame of it all. After that first year, I recommitted myself to my faith (yet again?) and doubled down on the holiness track. I didn’t break my CDs this time, but I did return to only Christian bands. Skillet, Jars of Clay, Newsboys, Audio Adrenaline, Chevelle, Plumb, Element 101, Living Sacrifice, Flight 180, and Superchic[k]. The latter became the college obsession. I found an online community for the band and made several friends. I struggled to find people to relate to and this group welcomed me like family. It was my first real experience of finding people like myself online. It would not be the last.

In 2005 I found Tori Amos. I’m not going to talk about Tori here. She will have her own post. Tori led me to a renaissance of music from the 90s that I missed out on (and some I was aware of but didn’t dare listen to) as well as several musicians I still adore and follow religiously. From Tori and a community of her fans, I found Ani DiFranco, Fiona Apple, PJ Harvey, Bjork, Garbage, Radiohead, Muse, Imogen Heap, Jorane, Led Zeppelin, and Metric.

My 90s renaissance lasted a long time. I mourned for myself, all the voices I missed who were there to speak for me in ways that Jagged Little Pill had. In the 90s, I dressed the part of grunge. I was teased for it in my middle school. The kids called me Lifetime Girl and asked regularly when I was going to kill myself. I guess part of me wanted to fight back against them in some way, so I didn’t listen to the music they expected me to. I rebelled against bands I knew (and liked) who fit the label of alternative. I stayed mostly away from Nirvana and Green Day. I loved Garbage’s music, but I couldn’t bring myself to buy their CDs at the time though I could and would sing along with every single they released. Shirley appealed to me the way Alanis did, but it felt too much like a self-fulfilling prophecy to listen to them too. The first of their albums that I bought was Bleed Like Me from, you guessed it, 2005.

I gave myself permission for the first time to fully feel all the anger that boiled inside me. I let music speak for me. I sang out my rage and pain. I stopped trying to pretend it wasn’t there. I stopped piling bandages on wounds that were festering beneath smiles and fakeness. Each album felt like a layer being peeled away. And Tori was the antiseptic that I found to, at last, kill the infection that left me itching and uncomfortable in my own skin.