“Volcano girls, we really can’t be beat/ Warm us up and watch us blow.” – Veruca Salt
“Readers are often poorly served when an author writes as an act of catharsis,” wrote Jon Krakauer in Into Thin Air, his firsthand account of the 1996 Mount Everest climbing disaster. This quote kept popping into my head as I slogged through Andrea Warner’s We Oughta Know: How Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah Ruled the ‘90s and Changed Music. Comparing a mountaineering disaster to the sexist music industry of the 1990s might seem a stretch, but this book could not get out of its own way.
Equal parts memoir, discography, and therapy journal, We Oughta Know is the “act of catharsis” hinted at above. Andrea Warner wants to do right by Céline Dion, Shania Twain, Alanis Morissette, and Sarah McLachlan who were the face of a Canadian music movement that conquered the world. This is a timely revision of the original 2015 release; Warner acknowledges that the work of these artists was a part of “the fight to move beyond a moment.” I also want to affirm her sentiment that this new edition comes at a time when “there’s more cultural interest in accountability and how these women 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 us to know how badly she feels about disrespecting Twain and Dion at their ‘90s peak in her writing and why Warner wants to make up for it now with a retrospective on both artists. Accordingly, “Morissette and McLachlan were real artists and my feminist heroes, while Dion was a saccharine bloodsucker of vapid wonder and Twain was a tits-and-ass country crossover who personified the Madonna/ whore complex.”
We Oughta Know is a messy read, and I kept asking myself if that was the point. Andrea Warner candidly acknowledges her confused teenage years and how she thought she knew what was right, the musicians to adore, and whom to hate. But why transfer that bewilderment to this book? “There’s passion in Dion’s songs. But it’s a sexless passion, like a Ken doll’s beige genital wasteland,” writes Warner. But in the next paragraph, the author changes her mind, begging the reader to accept that “it’s impossible to deny how much Dion means to her fans, even now, decades into her career. She affords the listener permission to pull down the walls and let something enter in a safe, risk-free way.” What? Is the author trying to gaslight us?
My high school years, 1993-97, also overlapped with the author’s, but our positionalities differ vastly. I am hardly Andrea Warner’s target audience as a hetero male, but there were moments when reading this book when I felt what she was saying. 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“. Talk about being turned on without knowing what that really means. Warner’s depiction of McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You” as “a funeral staple” is apt; it was played at the funeral of a friend who died by suicide, and I still associate the song with sadness even now, 23 years later.
The highlight of We Oughta Know is really about acknowledging how much Alanis Morissette changed music. Warner does this by bringing in her memories and drawing from interviews with Shirley Manson and other women who acknowledge their debt. This material reminds me just how important Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill was when it came out in 1995:
“It wasn’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. It was the sound of both total abandon and calculated emotional manipulation, another seeming contrast that is really an obvious and commonplace duality.”
Punctuated by these moments of brilliant writing, my interest in We Oughta Know was often lost just as quickly. 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 certainly convinced me how poorly these four women were treated by the music industry and journalists, particularly Rolling Stone. Still, I don’t see the point now of these revisionist album reviews.
Andrea Warner writes that she recognized how 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 center We Oughta Know on the experiences of four white women, including Shania Twain, who falsely claimed indigeneity at one time? Why not make the book’s last quarter, arguably the most salient, the focus?
If We Oughta Know was written in response to the very real ways that patriarchy and misogynoir silenced Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and other marginalized artists, then why do we need another white woman telling us the stories that she thinks need to be told and the musicians who must represent that time? That is the mindfuck.