I remember the year this came out, and I was sitting in a hotel bar at a sales convention. We started talking about Alanis Morissette, and the salesman I was talking to started ranting about how she was a nasty, angry woman who hated men. “That’s not true,” I said, and started naming all the other songs on the album — you know, besides That One. But no, all he could talk about was “You Oughta Know.”
It wasn’t until I was older and wiser that I realized her biggest hit was about men’s primal fear of getting called out by the women they’d fucked over, and there was simply no reasoning with them. They were like cavemen who saw fire: “Danger! DANGER!”
Anyway, this is one of her nicer songs:
I love her too. What a great selection.
On the other hand, what do women think about a man who can’t stop ranting about what an evil bitch their ex was?
In my experience it isn’t ‘gee, that woman must have been terrible’, it’s pretty much the mirror image of how that guy took ‘You oughta know’.
Sales types, feh! For 14 years, I conducted classes to train them in using computers to understand customer buying habits and how they could position themselves to meet their quotas. I was very successful because i quickly dropped the idea of providing notes, and eventually just handed out pictures with highlighted arrows, showing screen prompts.
I explained to my co-teachers (other computer sensai) that the sales types were from a pre-literate culture. It wasn’t just that they were the kids who sat in the back of class, never taking notes. They were the descendants of mammoth hunters who drew pictures of hunt on the cave wall, swapping stories of the Great Hunt. It was an oral culture — there was no written language. We drew pictures, on the white board, of the salesmen chasing mammoths, carry cases of our product, chasing the mammoths. True story.