Oh what a difference

a smile makes. I bought Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill" album when it came out, and I don't regret the purchase. The album is full of interesting musical and lyrical ideas. I hadn't known that she was a fan of Cole Porter, but her cameo in "De-Lovely" made that plain, and then it all made sense. Her lyrics (especially "Ironic") are very Porter-esque.

As much as I have admired Alanis for her lyrical and musical ability, I never really thought she had a great voice, or that she was very attractive. Her appearance in "De-lovely" put the former perception to rest; her appearance in the "Everything" video puts the latter to rest as well. At almost exactly 35 seconds into the video, after her hair is cut, and she is just beginning the second line of the chorus ("You see every part"), her face bursts into this radiant smile. The first time I saw it I was literally stunned. I mean stunned. I couldn't believe it. I have never seen a woman go from "who cares" to "Oh my GOD!" so quickly. I was filled with the emotional equivalent of "I want to the be the cause of that smile"

The whole video is just of her walking down a 2 lane road in the middle of what looks like a desert. People come in and out of the scene, but the camera stays out in front of her as she walks. Later in the video, the sky darkens and she's walking through a thunderstorm. Shortly thereafter, the light returns the sky. But through it all, she never stops walking. Her pace and forward movement are a constant throughout the video.

One gets the sense that the road is her life, and through it all (good times and bad), she kept walking. One has only to listen to "Jagged Little Pill" to know that Alanis has had her bitter moments. That album is filled with one bitterly disappointed and angry story after another (albeit told in a lyrically clever fashion).

On the surface, the song is about unconditional love (the unconditional love that her significant other shows for her). Unconditional love is not an idea I subscribe to, but I also don't usually enjoy a song on a purely surface level either. What I like about the song is the sense of profound enjoyment she takes in being fully understood an appreciated. ("And you've never met anyone, as everything as I am sometimes") That's a sentiment that I can personally get behind in a big way. It's very rare that I feel like someone really "gets" me. So this element really appeals to me. It's enhanced even more by the fact that the song itself is an expression of appreciation for her lover!

The constant movement in the video is something I respond to as well. I have an appreciation of images of undiminished progress, or intransigient forward motion. Pearl Jam has a song called Indifference which contains the following lyric: "I will hold the candle / til it burns up my arm / and I'll keep taking punches / til their will grows tired / I will stare the sun down /until my eyes go blind / and I won't change direction / and I won't change my mind." Mudvayne (the heaviest metal band I've ever loved) has an album cover that features a young boy standing in the midst of a violent tornado. The back cover features the same boy in exactly the same pose standing in bright sunlight. The storm has come and gone, but the boy is still there exactly as he was: constant, unaffected, undamaged. The band King's X has an album with an inner cover that features a vast desert expanse. The foreground focuses on the cobbled clay of a dried riverbed. In the midst of all this inhospitable emptiness, a single brilliantly colored dandelion is growing between the cobbles. Once again, the theme is the same: life succeding in the face of all obstacles.

The tone of "Everything" is generally very upbeat. Even though the song refers to some dark places, it refers to them in the sense of them being in the past and being over with. When Alanis does some vocal soloing at 3:00, it's a sound of unhurried and relaxed triumph. The victory isn't just about having found someone to appreciate her, it's also about achieving the self-confidence and maturity to be able to appreciate and enjoy that, and to trust in it without suspicion or self-doubt. It's very difficult for me to relate the Alanis of "Everything" to the Alanis of "Jagged Little Pill." My congratulations to her for having reached a place where she could write a song such as "Everything."

There's one other thing that this video has highlighted for me. My drastic emotional shock at seing her face transform from ho-hum to radiantly beautiful at 0:35 has got me thinking about my own capacity for smiling. Smiling has always come rather difficult for me; not because I'm not happy; it's just that, as Ice Scribe put it, a frown is my screensaver. It sounds strange to say that I'm going to practice smiling, but that's exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to try to make it feel more natural, and automatize it as a normal part of my self-expression. I figure my outside needs to match my inside and all that. Besides, maybe some smart, geeky, Objectivist woman will have a reaction to my smile similar to that I had to Alanis'.

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