Alanis Morissette applauds “ironic” criticism 30 years later: “I’m obsessed with linguistics… I don’t care about it either”
Alanis Morissette isn’t particularly concerned that many people have a problem with the lyrics of her 1995 hit “Ironic,” which depict several scenarios — none of which are pure examples of irony.
On the Dec. 21 episode of MGM’s “Words + Music,” she said of the criticism, “I don’t care.”
“People were really triggered by malapropism, or whatever the word was,” she explained of the slight uproar of the ’90s. “I’m a linguist. I’m obsessed with linguistics. I also like making up words, and I don’t care.”
“Where I go when people are triggered by something is I quickly go to what’s at the epicenter of it all – what is this, why is everyone really angry?” Morissette continued. “Why is everyone laughing? And I think we’re afraid of looking stupid. So I think because who’s a linguist and then misuses a word, you know, ‘What kind of person does that?’ that’s where I’m going.
“But I wasn’t precious about it,” she added. “And I think a lot of lyrics across the planet, many, many artists, most of us are not extremely precious about it. So I’m 90% the grammar police, which is the real irony. And then 10%, I don’t care. So I think the 10% won on this song.”
Morissette also noted that she didn’t actually expect to release the song.
“When Glen [Ballard] and I wrote ‘Ironic,’ that was the first of the songs written for the whole album,” she said. “And I wasn’t writing in a wildly autobiographical way yet, more of a narrative kind of thing, getting to know Glen. And at one point I didn’t want the song to be on the album, because I thought it was sort of, for lack of a better term, our warm-up, you know. But I love the song.
At the time of its release, many people pointed out that the true definition of irony – when something is said or done that is the opposite of what is expected – does not completely apply to most examples in the song.
