But Morissette instantly demonstrates her gift for the catchy, crunching out a guitar riff and then revealing 21 "not necessarily needs but things that I prefer" in a lover. The pop-rock here lacks the faux-punk edge Glen Ballard got on the debut and the expansive grandeur he manufactured for the follow-up. Once dissed as the voice of pseudofeminist exploitation, Morissette was in fact a thinking original in a showbiz context she had the stuff to make something of. Why do you think they love her? because she's lovable, stupid ("Princes Familiar," "You Learn"). Here's hoping lots of young men feel the same. And in this context I suck it up, feeling privileged to listen along with all the young women whose struggles Morissette blows up to such a scale. The mammoth riffs, diaristic self-analysis, and pretentious Middle Eastern sonorities of this music mark it as "rock," albeit rock with tunes. As a SoundScan-certified megadeal, she's outgrown the bright appeal of pop the way she's outgrown the punky abrasions that gave the debut its traction off the blocks. If "pop" means anything anymore, it ain't this.
That is, I approved when she played the pissed-off spikehead and recoiled from such candid self-dramatizations as "Perfect" and "Mary Jane." But with help from six or seven arrantly effective songs, she's happy to help 15 million girls of many ages stick a basic feminist truth in our faces: privileged phonies have identity problems too. I was down with the Riot Grrrl Appreciation Society on this reluctant refugee from Canadian children's television, who some say was invented by Madonna herself so she could distract the publicity machine while raising her own biological girl.
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