With the anguished cries and screams of a woman way beyond the verge, Alanis Morissette works the stage at New York City's Roseland Ballroom like a padded cell. As she flails her arms at some unseen tormentor, keening and ranting about sexual and emortional betrayal, the sellout crowd of young, ecstatic fans, all of whom seem to know her songs by heart, chant the risque lyrics along with her. It's a riveting, heart-and-head-banging performance and something of a coming-out for the 22-year-old Canadian, who started her career as a sweet-as-cream, children's-TV star. Nominated for six Grammy Awards, Morissette has sold 8 million copies of her uneasy-listening album Jagged Little Pill, currently No. 1 in Billboard. The buzz began last year when Morissette's controversial single "You Oughta Know," a hate letter to an ex-beau, became a radio hit despite lyric content that would curl Tipper Gore's hair. "Is she perverted like me?" Morissette sings in an angry snarl. "Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?"
For those who recall her previous turns as a fresh-faced 10-year-old on Nickelodeon's You Can't Do That On Television and later, as a teen disco queen known in her homeland as the Canadian Debbie Gibson, Morissette has come a shockingly long way, baby. "When I first heard 'You Oughta Know,' " says Geoffrey Darby, one of Morissette's Nickelodeon directors, "I thought, 'That came out of the mouth of our sweet little girl?' "
Raised in Ottawa by schoolteacher parents, Morissette, Darby remembers, "was smart, pretty and fun-loving. She lit up the screen." Canadians saw the same G-rated smile six years later when Morissette released the first of two peppy dance albums. "Back then I was a lot more worried about people's perception of me," she told the Los Angeles Time last year. "I wanted their approval, so I came across happy. When [old fans] finally heard this more honest part of me, I think they were like, 'Yikes!' "
Now living in Los Angeles, Morissette makes no apologies for the sexual woman she is or the teenybopper she was. "It's all part of who I am now," she said. "And I like who I am."
