Gossip girl

Most of the attention Alanis Morissette has received so far for her new album, Flavors of Entanglement, has come in the form of celebrity gossip. Morissette reportedly made the record as a reaction to her recent breakup with actor Ryan Reynolds and his subsequent engagement to actress Scarlett Johansson, whose own album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, was released in May.

This sort of coverage is understandable. Morissette's music is both unremittingly autobiographical and frustratingly elliptical. One gets the impression that the Ottawa-born singer is not only skilled at deflecting questions about her song inspirations, but also a little bit pleased by the ongoing speculation. She has even played it for laughs. A 2002 episode of the HBO comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm had star Larry David cajoling Morissette into revealing the identity of the subject of her biggest hit, You Oughta Know the recipient, notoriously, of a public sex act. "I can tell you, but you can't tell anybody," she says to David, before whispering the name in his ear. Morissette is content to keep people guessing.

You Oughta Know was one of the tracks on Jagged Little Pill, Morissette's massively successful breakout album, which has sold 30 million copies since its 1995 release. It, too, was recorded in the wake of a breakup and articles about Flavors of Entanglement have been quick to point that out. And yet despite the hype, her new release isn't another monument to scorn and reheated misery like Jagged Little Pill. Rather, in form and content, it's consistent with the work Morissette has made since that album.

While angry, the lyrics in Flavors deal more with self-affirmation and self-questioning than they do with admonishing and accusing others. And whereas Morissette's personal lyrics in Pill were neatly tucked into conventionally structured songs with a modern-rock sheen, Flavors, like her later work, weaves synths and sitars in amongst the guitars, trading hooky choruses for wordy, grammatically bewildering mantras. "I declare a moratorium on things relationship / I declare a respite from the toils of liaison," she sings over a pulsing trance drumbeat in the new song Moratorium. "I do need a breather from the flavours of entanglement / I declare a full timeout from all things commitment."

Some of us who entered adulthood cringing at the sound of Morissette's hectoring she-wail find ourselves witnessing her enduring presence with a measure of grudging respect. Ever since she abandoned the teen-queen persona of her first two albums, Alanis and Now is the Time, Morissette's motivations and credentials have been routinely mocked. Her Debbie Gibson-style videos; her child-actor roots; her choice in boyfriends; the forked inflections of her singing voice; her wholesale appropriation of the attitude and sexual frankness of infinitely cooler female songwriters like Liz Phair and P.J. Harvey; her amateurish harmonica playing and her shaky grasp on the concept of irony have all been sources of ridicule and parody for music critics and comedians most of whom, not coincidentally, are male. And yet Morissette's stubbornness and evolving body of work have disproved the critics who felt Jagged Little Pill was a calculated grab at post-grunge stardom.

If Morissette were truly interested in reclaiming her place atop the pop-culture dog pile, she could've long ago aligned herself with a popular producer (as Nelly Furtado did with Timbaland on her 2006 album, Loose) or a trendy songwriting team (like Liz Phair's crossover attempts with the Matrix collective in 2003) to suit shifting tastes. In interviews, Morissette often refers to herself as an artist, and for better or for worse, it's her highly distinctive persona that saturates every track of her new album.

Morissette's definition of artistry obviously includes a disproportionate amount of soul-baring. The singer has described some of her earlier songs as "amazingly self-indulgent" and her detractors would happily concur; but they can't deny that extreme navel-gazing is a time-honoured rock tradition. Neil Young can make three albums' worth of morose songs nicknamed the "ditch trilogy" about how terrible it is to be a rock star, and yet still be lauded for his emotional honesty and artistic daring. Some listeners see themselves in John Lennon's self-involved songs about his dead mother and his steadfast belief in "me." Morissette is definitely no Young or Lennon she's not even a Loudon Wainwright III but she seldom gets credit for trying. And nowadays, her adherence to this self-reflective formula seems quaint compared with the ironical, polished and iPod-commercial friendly musical stylings of Feist or Yael Naim.

What seems to rile music critics the most are the singer's lyrics. Taken at face value, Morissette's abuse of the English language is only rivalled by the work of L. Ron Hubbard. The gnarled syntax and garbled abstractions in her songs "Your way's making me mental," she sings in another new song, Straitjacket, "How you filter as skewed interpret" read like something translated via Babel Fish from a foreign language.

Her lyrics aren't so much embodiments of self-help clichs (in the manner of R. Kelly's I Believe I Can Fly or Wilson Phillipss Hold On) as they are recited transcripts of a consciousness that has been entirely informed by them. "Every song features at least one line so clumsy it makes you want to chew your knuckles off," writes Guardian pop critic Alexis Petredis in a funny and scathing review of 2005's Jagged Little Pill Acoustic. In the liner notes to that album, Morissette admits to being a "malapropism queen."

But picking apart Morissette's lyrics makes as much sense as criticizing Johnny Ramone for his lack of guitar virtuosity or Bob Dylan for his bad singing or Morissette again, for her harmonica-playing. She makes a virtue of lyrical inelegance by turning it into a badge of authenticity. Moreover, there seem to be millions of people who not only tolerate but seem to enjoy her music because of the lyrics. A quick glance at the fan page devoted to Morissette on Facebook shows comments that include: "I've been convinced that Alanis' lyrics are similar to really personal and honest poetry for years" and "Alanis, I think you are an incredlbe [sic] poet.... Your word's [sic] sing to me."

It could be that some of these listeners know exactly what Morissette means when she sings something like, "There's no fundamental excuse for the granted I'm taken for," on Wake Up from Jagged Little Pill. Or perhaps they see her talent lies in an ability to regurgitate the aggregate wisdom of all the New Age philosophy books in the world and still sound lost, like when she sings in Incomplete from Flavors: "One day I will speak freely / I'll be less afraid / And measured outside of my poems and lyrics and art / One day I will be faith-filled / I'll be trusting and spacious authentic and grounded and home." To misquote Hamlet and one of her own songs, the lady doth affirm too much. The more she tells us how hopeful she is about the future, the less we believe her and the more we sympathize with her.

Now, isn't that ironic?

Flavors of Entanglement is in stores now.

Kevin Chong is a Vancouver writer.