There’s a lot to discuss within the realm of teenage girls right now, at least in the greater popular music genre.
On March 25, an opinion column was published on Jezebel titled Jagged Little Pill Is Actually Very Bad??? and it quickly gained viral attention.
The author of the piece, Tracy Clark-Flory, a senior staff writer for the website, described how important Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill was to her 12-year-old self. Reflecting on it as an adult, Clark-Flory is less than impressed with the musicality of the album that sold more than 33 million copies worldwide. It feels like she is trying to apologize for the music that she used to like. Writers, musicians and Twitter users alike took to the internet to defend Morissette’s album, stating that it’s more than just music.
What matters about Jagged Little Pill is that the album gave Morissette and her fans an outlet to be emotional and youthful. After all, Morissette wrote the album shortly after graduating from high school. While the Jezebel columnist may be disappointed with how the album holds up musically to her 2019 tastes, she doesn’t take time to think about how the album shaped her teenage years.
Aren’t we all a product of the content we consumed when we were teens? And who better to understand teenage girls than Billie Eilish? Born in December 2001, the singer is just 17 years old and already topping charts for her music videos and songs. Her first full-length record, titled WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?, was released on March 29. Tickets to her upcoming headlining tour sold out within minutes, months before her album was released.
Eilish’s music videos and public image are that of a spooky, almost-demonic teen girl, complete with images of the singer levitating, crying thick black tears and not having visible eyeballs. But her album opens with a 14-second track titled !!!!!!! that features a spoken conversation between Eilish and her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell. Listeners hear the two laughing and the line “I have taken out my Invisalign, and this is the album.” Between her possessed music video character and her goofy recording studio persona, Eilish demonstrates her versatility.
It’s almost as though she’s demanding to be taken seriously by adopting a dark, morbid personality when on camera. Should she have to? What if Eilish just wanted to be her outgoing teenage self, without stepping into a persona for the public? I don’t know her personally, so I’m really just left to assume that she’s a combination of all of her personality traits. And no one should be able to tell her which version of herself to be.
All of this alludes to a larger problem—society’s tendency to discredit teenage girls for their feelings and accomplishments. Like most other people, teen girls are passionate about music and movies and celebrities, and their interests should be taken just as seriously as those of someone else. Teenage girls often feel a sort of shame that comes along with liking something (makeup, boy bands, reality TV) that’s not seen as important to the greater public, and while navigating their teen years and the complexities of growing up, the last thing these fans need is a constant array of comments that their interests are “shallow” or “silly.”
While the two albums, Jagged Little Pill and WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?, may not sound alike, they capture some of the same feelings from the artists. And they communicate a full range of emotions from a young, female songwriter. Morissette’s and Eilish’s fans can be anyone—people of any age and any gender—and their opinions matter.
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