Alanis Morissette Updates ‘Ironic’ For 2015; Admits She May Have Messed Up On The Meaning Of Irony

Alanis Morissette’s track ‘Ironic’ is legendary in the much-celebrated genre of White Chicks Having Intense Feels In The ’90s. It ensured Jagged Little Pill would go down as one of the classic alt-rock albums of the decade. It firmly cemented the words “it’s like raaaaaIAIN” in the pleasure centre of everyone’s brain at the expense of all other lyrics. It’s very good and you should take a second out of your day to re-live it right now, guilt-free.

Just do it. I won’t tell anyone. You go ahead and be you.

But in the past 20 years since the song’s release, ‘Ironic’ has faced much criticism for its understanding of the concept of irony. With lyrics like “it’s a death row pardon two minutes too late” and “it’s like rain on your wedding day”, many have suggested the song is more about unfortunate things than actual irony. It’s made the song an easy target for a number of comedians and a few years ago, College Humour amended it accordingly with a spoof called ‘Actually Ironic’.

This has led to some pretty nerdy arguments about the term, its application, and its multiple definitions. (You’ve been warned). The way most people use the word is through its principal definition: “the expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect” and on this count, the song fails. But, as situational irony, the song absolutely succeeds. Each lyric really does describe “a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often wryly amusing as a result”.

Pointing all this out in an emphatic piece for Salon, Michael Reid Roberts argued this was all very deliberate. “The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that in writing this Alanis has a much deeper, more radical, and philosophical concept of irony,” he wrote. “It seems to me that Ms Morissette is remarkably well-versed in the theories of irony from Erasmus to Paul de Man; if she hasn’t read their works herself, then she has certainly internalised much of the theory of irony not only as a trope but as a question of philosophy.”

Now, celebrating the song’s 20th anniversary, she’s performed an updated version of the song on The Late Late Show with James Corden. She made new novelty lyrics that reference Tinder, Twitter and Snapchat, and then perfectly made light of the whole thing:

“It’s like Amazon, but your package never came.

And who would have thought, it figures.

It’s like Netflix, but you own DVDs 

It’s a free ride, but your Uber’s down the street 

It’s singing ‘Ironic’, but there are no ironies

And who would have thought, it figures.”

Maybe she never really cared that much about the literary devices of 15th Century Dutch theologians or Belgian theorists.

In support of that — the idea she doesn’t take the meaning of her music too seriously — here she is last week performing the same song with Jimmy Fallon and Meghan Trainor while clucking and inexplicably dressed like giant chickens:

Never change, Alanis. Never change.