YOU OUGHTA KNOW HER

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

IN THE VIDEO FOR HER NEW SINGLE, Ironic, singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette is seen riding in a car, singing to herself. Literally to herself. Through trick photography, there appear to be several Alanis Morissettes. One is an unruly child, another a calm "good" sister, and in the driver's seat, Morissette is also the attentive parent--one eye on the road, one eye on the rear-view mirror to keep watch over the kids. It's a charming clip and an apt metaphor for Morissette's career. As a teen star in her native Canada, she played the part of the well-behaved good sister. Now, on her U.S. debut album, Jagged Little Pill, she has transformed herself into a passionate and unruly rocker. But like the parent in the front seat, Morissette, 21, has kept her disparate selves in check and stayed on the road to success: this week Jagged Little Pill hits No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and in next week's Grammys it will be up for six awards, including Album of the Year.

The Ottawa-born Morissette got started early and took off quickly. At 10 she was performing on Nickelodeon's children's program You Can't Do That on Television; at 16 she had signed with MCA Records Canada and released her first album, Alanis. That CD and its 1992 follow-up Now Is the Time consisted mostly of Paula Abdul-esque melodies and merciless drum machines--the kind of soulless pop one might play during an aerobic workout on the Love Boat. During this pop-lite phase, Morissette also opened for pseudo-rapper Vanilla Ice in a 1991 concert and appeared with Brat Packish actor Corey Haim in the 1993 Fox-TV comedy Just One of the Girls.

Through it all, she was looking to improve, mature, branch out. "The next album I release, people could go, 'Boo, hiss, hiss, this girl's like another Tiffany or whatever,'" she told the Calgary Herald in 1991. "But the way I look at it...people will like your next album if it's a kick-ass one." In 1994 Morissette signed with Maverick records--run by Madonna, who knows a thing or two about musical makeovers--and with Jagged Little Pill has delivered the butt-kicking album she wanted. The sound is more muscular; her voice is rawer, the guitar work more aggressive. The songs are about such topics as postbreakup rage (You Oughta Know) and overbearing parents (Perfect), and while the words are rarely as smart as they seem to think they are, this is straight-ahead rock, sweetened somewhat with pop melodiousness.

But it is the transformation of Morissette's persona that makes Jagged Little Pill so intriguing. Rebellion--against society, against one's past--is, after all, the essence of rock. When, on Right Through You, she sings, "You took me for a joke/ You took me for a child/ You took a long hard look at my ass/ And then played golf for a while," it's as startling as Chelsea Clinton with a Mohawk. Morissette's anguished, sometimes screechy voice is the sound of postadolescent independence. She's in the driver's seat now.

--By Christopher John Farley