” Volcano girls, we really ca n’t be beat / Warm us up and watch us blow”. – Veruca Salt
In Into Thin Air, his first accounts of the Mount Everest climbing crisis in 1996, Jon Krakauer wrote that “readers are frequently mistreated when an author writes as an act of catharsis.” This phrase kept popping into my mind as I slogged through Andrea Warner‘s We Oughta Know: How Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah Ruled the ‘ 90s and Transformed Music. Although it may seem a stretch to compare a mountaineering devastation to the sexist music scene of the 1990s, this book was unable to overcome its own obstacles.
Equal parts narrative, oeuvre, and therapy book, We Oughta Know is the “act of emotion” hinted at below. Andrea Warner wants to emulate the pioneering French music movement that ruled the world by Céline Dion, Shania Twain, Alanis Morissette, and Sarah McLachlan. Warner acknowledges that the job of these designers was a part of” the battle to proceed beyond a time” and this is a fast revision of the classic 2015 release. I want to support her claim that this new model is released at a time when” there’s more cultural curiosity in responsibilities and how these ladies were created”
Like Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish ( 1975 ), perhaps the subtitle of We Oughta Know should have been Repentance and Absolution. Andrea Warner wants to let us understand how disrespected she was of Twain and Dion at the time of their 90s writing, and why Warner wants to compensate with a review of both writers. Accordingly,” Morissette and McLachlan were real musicians and my feminist champions, while Dion was a sweet ghoul of vapid question and Twain was a tits-and-ass state cross who personified the Madonna/ bitch complex”.
We Oughta Know is a difficult study, and I kept wondering if that was the place. Andrea Warner openly acknowledges her puzzling teenage years and how she believed she knew what was right, who to love, and who to detest. Why then be transferred to this guide, though? ” There’s interest in Dion’s music. But it’s a virginal interest, like a Ken statue’s grey vaginal wasteland”, writes Warner. But in the next article, the writer changes her head, begging the reader to take that “it’s impossible to deny how much Dion means to her fans, yet now, years into her job. She grants the listener’s consent to allow someone to enter in a secure, risk-free manner. What? Is the publisher attempting to unfairly treat us?
My high school years, 1993-97, even overlapped with the writer’s, but our positionalities differ greatly. Although I am not typically a but men, I did feel what Andrea Warner was saying when I read this book. When she talked about watching McLachlan’s video for” Hold On” and its” sexy feelings”, I was reminded of being 13 and seeing Janet Jackson’s music video,” If“. Speak about turning on without understanding what it actually means. Warner’s portrayal of McLachlan’s” I May Consider You” as” a death staple” is accurate, it was played at the death of a friend who died by suicide, and I still associate the song with grief actually now, 23 years later.
We Oughta Know‘s main attraction is recognizing how much Alanis Morissette had influenced music. By using her memories and recollections from interviews with Shirley Manson and other women who acknowledge their debt, Warner accomplishes this. This text serves as a reminder of how significant Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette was when it first appeared in 1995:
” It was n’t pretty, not always, nor was it soft all the time. It was ugly, sexy, vulnerable, and honest … The theatrics seeped out of every enunciation, like she was channeling a feral beast, a wildling – how girls and women sometimes sounded on the inside, where no one could hear us. Another apparent contrast that is really an obvious and commonplace duality was the sound of both total abandon and calculated emotional manipulation.
We Oughta Know frequently lost its appeal as a result of these brilliant writing moments. The “low points” are detailed, soporific track-by-track album reviews to give Dion and Twain the alleged respect they deserved and Morissette and McLachlan a relisten. Warner undoubtedly persuaded me of how poorly the music industry and journalists, particularly Rolling Stone, treated these four women. Still, I do n’t see the point now of these revisionist album reviews.
Andrea Warner claims that she had unintentionally internalized systemic sexism and misogyny. I was a tool of the patriarchy. What a mindfuck”. She also admits that “white, cis women like me benefit from white supremacy”. Then why focus We Oughta Know on the experiences of four white women, including Shania Twain, who once falsely claimed indigeneity? Why not make the book’s last quarter, arguably the most salient, the focus?
Why do we need another white woman telling us the stories she believes need to be told and the musicians who must represent that time if We Oughta Know was written in response to the very real ways that patriarchy and misogynoir have silenced Black, Indigenous, and people of color ( BIPOC ) and other marginalized artists? That is the mindfuck.