This accurately and uncontroversially describes almost all of the song’s situations. A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what was or might be expected an outcome cruelly, humorously, or strangely at odds with assumptions or expectations. From “irony” in the Oxford English Dictionary:ģ. Life has a funny, funny way of helping you outįirst, let’s get this out of the way: calling Alanis Morissette’s lyrics unironic is wrong. Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knifeĪ little too ironic…and, yeah, I really do think… He waited his whole damn life to take that flightĪ no-smoking sign on your cigarette break He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye It’s the good advice that you just didn’t take
ALANIS MORISSETTE IRONIC LYRICS FREE
It’s a free ride when you’ve already paid It’s a death row pardon two minutes too late Feel free to read through them once more, and hum along. So today I am going to recuperate “Ironic” from the hands of the misunderstanding scholastics and defend the song as truly, madly, deeply ironic.īefore getting into the meaning of irony and how it applies to “Ironic,” I’m going to post the song’s lyrics in full.
Many of them also felt disillusioned by this attack on a popular cultural touchstone, but still more disturbing is the fact that many of them now have warped ideas of what “ironic” actually means. (I once had a panic attack when a German university professor (!!) asked our poetics class to pick out the “real” poems from a list of impostors.) I take some solace, though, in the fact that I was not alone I have spoken to both colleagues and students who underwent the same sort of gradgrindian torment. I acknowledge that such tasks are particularly odious for me, since I have an incredibly difficult time identifying anything as “truly” anything, once I stop to think about it. Needless to say, this experience was a little traumatizing. This process consisted of the reading going through the song, line by line, tasked with identifying which lines, if any were “truly” ironic. To test our understanding of this concept, my teacher gleefully gave the class copies of the lyrics to Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic,” which was not particularly new but still well known and beloved by us all. I can’t remember what exactly her definition of the term was, but I’m pretty sure that it was close to how I would define sarcasm: the act of someone meaning the opposite of what they say.
When I was in 8th grade, or maybe 9th, my English teacher was dedicated to teaching the class a list of “literary devices.” One of these devices was irony. I’m here today to talk about Alanis Morissette. READ MORE: The best bands and artists from CanadaĪlanis was set to embark on a global tour to celebrate 25 years of her Jagged Little Pill album, but dates were forced to postpone due to the coronavirus pandemic.This piece originally appeared on The American Reader. And I came to realise later that perhaps I should have been." "But people wound up really liking the melody, and I wasn’t that precious about it. That was one of the first songs we wrote, almost like a demo to get our whistles wet.
“And I remember a lot of people going, ‘Please please, please.’ So I said, OK. Talking about how she felt about track itself, she revealed: "I didn’t even want it on the record. “I can embrace, ‘I’m stupid,’ I can embrace that I’m really brilliant.