Pseudo-making it

Pseudo-making it

It is not a must that one breaks up to enjoy a good break-up song.

Back in 1995, I did not know the anger and pain of a break-up. During a past life, my abstinence extended to the radio as well so I was not hit by the emotional tidal wave of Alanis Morissette and You Oughta Know until after September of 1997. But from what I know, the song became a phenomenal international hit and an anthem to disgruntled ex-lovers across the globe. I, for one, began to wait for the day when I could tell someone who broke my heart, "When I scratch my nails down someone else's back I hope you feel it."

Can you feel it?

In June 2008, we got a new kind of break-up song from Ms. Morissette: Not As We.

(My hope was to embed the video to this song, but I was able to do that. It's beautiful and truly worth viewing. Follow this link.)

Unlike You Oughta Know, there is no anger radiating from this broken relationship; however, like You Oughta Know, the emotions come from pain. After the anger, still in the daze of pain and confusion--asking ourselves, "What happened?"-- we all must start over again. Alanis expresses all these feelings so beautifully through this song. It's from her Flavors of Entanglement album from 2008. It did not take two years after the song's release for me to discover it; I bought the album in June 2008 when it came out. Not As We was instantly one of my favourite tracks of the album. However, until last night, I'd never seen the video.

For various reasons, I've been in an Alanis mood lately. I ventured over to youtube last night when the internet decided to stop crawling at a snail's pace, and I did a search for Alanis's 1995 performance of All I Really Want on MTV's 120 Minutes (I just like her crazy facial expressions and the way her hands remain eerily stiff during that particular performance). Somehow that search also led me to the Not As We video. I was moved by the beauty of both the song and the video and felt that it must be shared.

It's no longer 1997; therefore, I'm a little bit older (and according to one recent acquaintance, the aging process is a bit accelerated for me: especially around the eyes). I cannot make the same claims of inexperience I could in 1995... Thank goodness!