Modern Rock No. 1s: Alanis Morissette and "You Oughta Know"

Alanis Morissette shakes up the post-grunge wave of alternative rock with "You Oughta Know," a song that changed the landscape of popular music and gave women a voice in a male-dominated era

Matt Madurski

Jun 29, 2025

Alanis Morissette - “You Oughta Know”

Weeks atop the Billboard Modern Rock chart: 5 weeks (July 22 to August 19, 1995)

Previous Modern Rock #1 hit: U2 and “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”

Billboard Hot 100 chart toppers during this time:

TLC - “Waterfalls” (7/8/95 to 8/19/95, 7 total weeks)

Back when I talked about Tori Amos and her Modern Rock #1 hit “God,” I touched briefly on the concept of male teenagers and their detachment from strong female artists during the early ‘90s. Maybe this was just a phenomenon in my life, being a student at an all-male college-prep high school in Pennsylvania, but I can tell you for certain that image was everything. If you even remotely found yourself liking something that may have stripped away the tiny seeds of masculinity you were nurturing during those years, what little social cred you had at the time was gone.

I had very little social cred as an awkward, slightly overweight, conventionally unattractive male. I had friends, of course, and managed to navigate high school comfortably in the middle of the pack (not popular by any stretch, but hardly a punching bag for bullies, either), but most of my public likes and dislikes at the time were heavily influenced by what others around me liked. I was a conformist; no way I could pull off goth or jock or even grunge.

Along with all of that, mainstream female artists at the time were, by and large, love-song singers. Take a look at any of the Billboard Hot 100 hits from the ladies in this era: all treacly sweet love songs about love, dreaming about love, etc. If you’re holding on to social credibility for dear life, you steered clear of Mariah Carey and Celine Dion. And, to be honest, those types of songs never were my jam — still aren’t, though when I do like ‘em, I’m not shy about it anymore.

And then, in the summer of ‘95, this hot young brunette with flowing long hair and eyes that could stare into your soul came out of nowhere, sounding just like all the alternative bands of the moment, and singing about how jaded she is that her man left her for some girl — and she asked, brazenly, if this new girl would give him theater blowjobs in the same way that she did. Say what now?!

If your socks weren’t blown completely off the first time you heard Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know,” then you missed out, because she rode this new level of female empowerment and freedom all the way to #1 on the Modern Rock Charts for five weeks.

At the time I’m writing this, we’ve just passed the 30th anniversary of the release of Jagged Little Pill, an album that basically defined alternative rock in the mid ‘90s and was a juggernaut unlike anything we’ve seen before or since. “You Oughta Know” was the first single off that album and it didn’t take long for it to shoot all the way up the charts, on the strength of both Morrissette’s tremendous vocals and the musical stylings of Dave Navarro and Flea, who played guitar and bass, respectively, on this track.

I’ll be discussing two other hits from this album in relatively short order, but I’m going to use this space to get some of the big formalities out of the way: Jagged Little Pill won five Grammy awards in 1996, including Album of the Year, Best Rock Album, Best Female Rock Vocal Performance and Best Rock Song for “You Oughta Know,” and Best Long Form Music Video. At the time, Morrissette was the youngest artist in history to bring home an Album of the Year Grammy. And as far as sales go, Jagged Little Pill sold an inexplicable 33 million copies worldwide, which depending on your estimate of choice puts it in the top 10-20 albums of all time in terms of worldwide sales.

You don’t need me to explain the incredible success of Jagged Little Pill, but I can tell you that, at the time, no one saw this coming, and it exploded like an atomic bomb in record stores and on the radio. In hindsight, Morissette managed to come out at just the right time with just the right style, and it connected across genres in a way no other alternative album could.

“You Oughta Know” was a perfect first single for the album; I’d argue that, if she’d started with “Ironic” or “You Learn,” the album might not have reached the same stratospheric heights that it did. I could be way off here, but remember we’re still riding the post-grunge wave launched by the grunge tsunami of 1991-1993, so anything and everything that sounded tangentially like Nirvana or Pearl Jam or Soundgarden was getting pushed to radio quickly.

That first single straddled the line perfectly between alternative/grunge angst and hard rock, and it added the extra spice of a female lead singer with impressive range and a voice that can balance between the sweetness of pop and the crunchy gravely drone of alternative. So, of course, the song instantly made waves on the alternative scene. What surprised everyone at the time — myself included — was the song’s crossover success, because, I’m telling you, this is very much the opposite of what Mariah Carey was singing about:

An older version of me, is she perverted like me?
Would she go down on you in a theatre?
Does she speak eloquently? And would she have your baby?
I'm sure she'd make a really excellent mother

This song is a big, fat, in-your-face “FUCK YOU” to whoever wronged her, raw and direct and unlike anything you’ve heard on pop radio to that time. I’m sure there are some encyclopedic brains out there who can point to comparable pop break-up songs that have some bite, but I’m telling you that none of them used the word “fuck” with such power and perfection as Morissette does in this track. The “fuck” seems to go on for, like, 10 seconds — radio edits of the word seemed interminable (I added the letter “u” about a dozen or more times in the pull quote below for added effect):

Did you forget about me Mr. Duplicity?
I hate to bug you in the middle of dinner
It was a slap in the face how quickly I was replaced
And are you thinkin’ of me when you fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck her?

You’re hearing it in your head right now, aren’t you?

As a teenage guy at the time, a few things stood out to me. First, holy shit, I need to get my act together and be reasonable and honest when and if I ever have to end a relationship, because no one wants to be on the losing end of that level of hate-filled burn.

(I didn’t heed my own advice; I’ll admit, I was a petulant and immature jerk with a couple of breakups, but with 20-30 years of hindsight, I feel really bad about it and can appreciate why Morissette was so mad!)

My second thought, again as a teenage guy, is that this girl is perfect in every way. Few songs and artists stirred the hormonal pot inside 16-year-old Matt as much as Alanis Morissette’s sexy, passionate, burn-this-guy-to-the-ground anthem did. I can say for sure that there was more than one time where I thought to myself, “If she ever met me, I would treat her way different than that jerk.” I can’t be the only guy who felt that way, but I was absolutely in love with her. That she was able to do this within a genre of music I was actively exploring and loving proved to be a gateway for me into female-led alternative rock and punk, and that combination continues to be an important component of my everyday music consumption.

The music industry had the same gateway moment, and once Morissette opened the door, the floodgates opened with another post-post-grunge tidal wave of female-led artists showing off their rock chops. Bands like No Doubt, Dance Hall Crashers, Save Ferris, and Hole, among others, started to emerge (or explode further into the mainstream). Solo female artists and female-led pop acts also had a solid run into the late ‘90s into the 2000s, including folks like Natalie Merchant (see below), Sarah McLachlan, Paula Cole, Donna Lewis, The Cardigans, Sixpence None The Richer, and so on.

There were artists who started to create the bridge to this moment, and I’ve covered several over the past couple of years in this space, but Alanis Morissette made it real, quickly shifting the musical zeitgeist toward a new style of alternative rock that also had mainstream appeal. And once that bridge was completed, everyone wanted to get their hands on Jagged Little Pill. Radio producers were frothing at the mouth to push more singles from the album into regular rotation, and indeed, six more singles would find their way onto both alternative and pop radio. Two of them will find their way into this space soon.

“You Oughta Know” is more than just a song. It’s a moment in time, a BC/AD moment in ‘90s alternative rock where everything that came before it would be remembered as the lead-up to this explosive change in the way we listened to alternative rock, and everything that came after for the rest of the decade would be judged against it.

I love this song, and I love that Alanis Morissette pushed open the door for female-led artists to attain the mainstream success they’d long deserved. I love that “You Oughta Know” made female-led rock something that everyone could consume and enjoy, and in my personal social microcosm at the time, it expanded the reach of what I could explore and enjoy musically without feeling like I had to hide it. And it made teenage Matt fall in love with a musician for the first time. I mean, seriously, what teenage guy wouldn’t be smitten…

It’ll be interesting to follow Alanis Morissette’s journey through this chronological review of Modern Rock Tracks chart hits, because she’ll absolutely burn bright over the next year or two, but like most artists who landed with an explosive burst on the music scene, the carryover into the end of the ‘90s and the 2000s will not be reflected as strongly. We’ll be covering the next big single in very, very short order, at which point we can discuss the counter-cultural backlash against her more pop-sounding singles, as well as how many different things one can accomplish with only a single hand available — the other being in a pocket, of course.

But “You Oughta Know” is an all-time banger, one of the best ever made and a stone-cold classic.

Rating: 10/10

Chart Check

Other notable MRT chart songs from this time period

Highway robbery in this week’s Chart Check, as Weezer is criminally underrated with their all-time classic single “Say It Ain’t So.” Also this week, we have the first appearance of Foo Fighters, Tripping Daisy, Hum, and Natalie Merchant as a solo artist. We say goodbye to The Ramones, continue the good vibes from the Batman Forever soundtrack, deal with marching ants and Taco Bell-eating beavers, and make a case for Hootie & The Blowfish being pretty terrific.

“This Is A Call” by Foo Fighters (#2):

Future Modern Rock Tracks #1 artist Foo Fighters emerge onto the scene for the very first time with “This Is A Call,” the first single off the band’s self-titled debut album. Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl emerged from the shadows of his former band to take the lead on this new project, and it would prove to be a fruitful endeavor. We’ll see this band in the top spot at least a dozen times over the coming months and years, but it begins here with a solid track.

“I Got A Girl” by Tripping Daisy (#6):

Then you have bands like Tripping Daisy, who dabbled in neo-psychedelic alternative rock in the early to mid ‘90s and hit paydirt with “I Got A Girl,” which peaked at #6 behind Alanis Morissette. This one is a radio staple to this day and has a nice mix of warbly verses and a hard-rock jam for a refrain. The band would score one more alternative top 40 hit with “Piranha,” but never made the charts again. The band’s final album release was in 2000.

“Say It Ain’t So” by Weezer (#7):

Future Modern Rock Tracks #1 artist Weezer (but not for any of the songs that you’re thinking) is robbed blind by alternative rock radio and airplay chart compilers when “Say It Ain’t So” peaks at #7 on the MRT chart behind “You Oughta Know.” I can’t argue that it’s a better track than Alanis’s effort, but my God man, how is this song not at least #2? Lots of selfish bias here, but this song is my all-time favorite from Weezer, arguably the best single off the already amazing “blue album,” and probably in the pantheon of greatest songs of the 1990s. But sure, #7. Whatever, Billboard. Say it ain’t so. Harumph.

“Stars” by Hum (#11):

Hum is another band that rode the post-grunge wave into some short-lived chart success. “Stars,” the band’s lone charting single, managed a respectable #11 peak behind “You Oughta Know.” Hum’s initial run began in the early ‘90s, but ended before the turn of the millennium. The band did reunite in 2015 and produced an album in 2020, and is still listed as active as of the writing of this article. “Stars” is a solid track and a good representative of the deluge of post-grunge alternative hits during this era.

“Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver” by Primus (#12):

I need to see this band live someday. Primus hits the alternative charts for the last time in the ‘90s with “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver,” a song ostensibly about a woman and her pet rodent who loves Taco Bell, which peaked at #12 on the Modern Rock charts. Contrary to popular belief at the time, the song is in no way inspired by Winona Ryder or Wynonna Judd; it appears to just be all about a rodent.

“Carnival” by Natalie Merchant (#12):

Natalie Merchant, lead singer of former Modern Rock Tracks #1 artist 10,000 Maniacs, launched her solo career with “Carnival,” a track that peaked at #12 on the MRT charts and #10 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album Tigerlily went 5x platinum in the U.S. and would spawn additional singles, marking the highwater mark in Merchant’s solo career from a chart and sales perspective. This song was among the singles I discovered in the wake of Morissette’s emergence, and still remains a favorite to this day.

“Ants Marching” by Dave Matthews Band (#18):

The second of 13 top-20 alternative track for Dave Matthews Band, “Ants Marching” was the second radio single off their Under The Table And Dreaming album, and quickly became one of the songs of the summer of 1995 for me. The song peaked at #18 on the Modern Rock chart and #21 on the mainstream Radio Airplay chart, as the song was not released as a commercial single and was therefore ineligible to chart on the flagship Billboard Hot 100. This song brings back good memories and is still an all-time classic.

“Only Wanna Be With You” by Hootie & The Blowfish (#22):

Mark Blankenship

from

The Lost Songs Project

recently wrote about Hootie & The Blowfish in the context of their single “Old Man and Me,” and it got me thinking about the weird backlash toward the band in the mid ‘90s. I loved Hootie, as did so many folks I knew, but for as much love as the band got, I also remember a really strong anti-Hootie movement from people. I postulated it was because they were the “anti-post-grunge” wave of musicians who made a more pop-friendly version of the post-grunge sound, which made them targets for “alternative purists” who felt the music was “selling out” or some such malarkey. Folks tend to level the same backlash toward bands like Creed or Nickelback, but pound for pound, if it’s a good song, who cares how “authentic” it is? So it goes with “Only Wanna Be With You,” the band’s highest charting alternative hit, which peaked at #22 on the MRT chart. I love this song, I love this album, and you should, too — especially if the Dolphins are still making you cry.

“I Don’t Want To Grow Up” by The Ramones (#30):

Punk rock godfathers The Ramones hit the alternative charts for the last time with “I Don’t Want To Grow Up,” a song that’s … fine. It’s not my favorite from the band but, as I get older, I can appreciate the sentiment more and more. The track peaked at #30 behind Alanis Morissette. Joey Ramone would die six years later from lymphoma in 2001; Johnny Ramone died three years later from prostate cancer. The band’s legacy and influence far outweighs any commercial success reflected on the Billboard charts, but it’s still cool to call out the hits when they appear.

“Kiss From A Rose” by Seal (#35):

U2’s #1 hit “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” was the first performance to shine through as part of the Batman Forever soundtrack, but Seal’s song shined even brighter — at least from a pop perspective. When I write next week’s Chart Chat, I’ll highlight “Kiss From A Rose” as the Hot 100 #1 hit, but the song also made a modest impact on the alternative charts as well, peaking at #35 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. This song may well have been THE song of the summer of 1995, as it was everywhere on radio, television, MTV, commercials, etc. It’s still a banger.