Alanis Morissette was incredibly angry for precisely four minutes and nine seconds in 1995, but the reputation has stuck. The remarkable kiss-off “You Oughta Know” ripped a hole in the pop-rock world, becoming a feminist battle cry for the ages. Then Morissette went to India, found some version of God and now, 30 years later, exists as a kind of ethereally blissful philosopher slash doula type; a crunchy granola goddess with shockingly crystal-clear pipes and a frankly enviable ability to switch between performative rage and pretty wailing. Her Pyramid Stage set on Friday evening, marking (somewhat inexplicably) her Glastonbury debut, was a case in point: Morissette at her most radiant and breezy, yet a bulletproof run of Nineties smashes bringing out the beast in her.
“Here we go, real music,” goes a (possibly mean, definitely middle-aged, maybe sorta kinda right) gentleman behind me at the top of this set, Morissette launching into “Hand In My Pocket”, an accordion-filled soft-rock banger, underpinned by cries of being young and underpaid and eager for some kind of reprieve from life’s blows.
Morissette is not an amazing talker, her crowd-work at a minimum. She wears a shirt decorated in sparkles, a pair of leather trousers and some comfortable yellow sneakers, and spins in circles around the stage, bounding from left to right like a live-action Looney Toon. Behind her are screens showing a number of dismal statistics about women today: domestic violence, the gender pay gap, sex trafficking. It’s the closest the set gets to a political message outside of Morissette’s material, but if anything that speaks to the eternal power of her opus, 1995’s Jagged Little Pill. Why add anything more to a conversation that has sadly remained relevant for more than three decades?
Much of this evening’s set stems from that record: the sentimental “You Learn”, “Ironic”, the English teacher’s least favourite linguistic ditty, with its verses of cosmic pratfalls so wedged into the cultural consciousness that Morissette barely sings most of them; instead she hands them off to the crowd, who scream back every lyric. Apart from one line, notably, which she’s changed in support of gay marriage for the last decade or so: the irony of “meeting the man of my dreams, then meeting his beautiful… husband”. “Many, many times,” Morissette jokes.
There is a welcome acknowledgment, via this set list, that people are very much here for Jagged Little Pill, with its elongated pronunciations and soul-ferrying poetry. I imagine every person here has screamed each track into a hairbrush in their bedroom at least once, surely? But even the songs outside of that seminal work spark real joy in the crowd: the wordy brilliance of “Hands Clean”, from her underrated 2002 record Under Rug Swept, and the stark, practically instrument-less ballad “Uninvited”, which signals the back end of the set.
“You Oughta Know”, of course, remains a marvel. Morissette still spits each line with glorious venom: “Every time I scratch my nails down someone’s else back, I hope you feel it,” she shrieks. “I hope you feel it!” everyone around me shrieks right back.
The Morissette of today very much signs the set off, performing the treacly but also undeniably majestic “Thank U” (as in, “thank you India / thank you frailty / thank you absolutely every synonym for ‘gratitude’ in the dictionary”) alongside a slideshow of earnest tweets from individuals changed by her records. It’s the granola goddess at her finest, long removed from the rageful youngster who was propelled to fame all those years ago. But it’s hard to find fault in Morissette’s pride here: her lyrics raised a generation, giving voice to feelings that many of us possess but tend to lay dormant until someone gives us permission to let them rip. Long may she wail.
