Singer Alanis Morissette was the first pop artist to tap into, articulate, and successfully commercialize the anger of young white women. It had taken surprisingly long for pop music to find its spokeswoman: Thirty years after Bob Dylan snarled out "Positively Fourth Street," nearly twenty years after punk's standard bearer Sid Vicious murdered his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, rage in mainstream music was still just for guys. The breakthrough came in the final decade of the twentieth century when Morissette—who transformed herself from a Canadian Debbie Gibson to an angst-ridden Everywoman—generated the top-selling album by a female solo artist ever. And she did it through sheer ordinariness.

Morissette was born in Ottawa, Canada, on 1 June 1974, 12 minutes after her twin brother, Wade. Her father was French-Canadian, her mother a Hungarian refugee. From an early age, Alanis wanted to perform in front of people, and...