Tegan Quinn, of Tegan and Sara, says, “From the mind of one of our country’s finest writers, We Oughta Know is a history lesson in how misogyny marked the stratospheric careers of Canada’s four biggest female music superstars. A fascinating, fun, and infuriating read.”

Andrea Warner lives in Vancouver, BC, on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Her books include The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing, Rise Up and Sing! Power, Protest, and Activism in Music, and Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography.

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Your book We Oughta Know came out to great acclaim a decade ago. Why was it important to you to revisit the material?

So much has happened in the lives of Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah in the last ten years, and during that time there’s also been a significant shift in the culture’s relationship to these artists and to many famous women who were subjected to hostile, misogynistic, sexist treatment by the media and the public. There are so many great documentaries and podcasts and memoirs attempting to correct the narrative, challenge bias and, where necessary, our own complicity, and write a new, more complete account — this time with context! — of the pop culture that’s made us. I kind of think of We Oughta Know as a living text because Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah continue to be public figures in the world and in our culture, and I (hopefully) will continue to deepen my thinking and grow and change, too.

It’s such a fun, nostalgic read, diving deep not only into the careers and cultural impact of these four vital artists, but also analyzing album tracks and reflecting on how their music has impacted you. What was the best part about writing the book?

I love the luxury of spending so much time with a record and losing myself in the music. I try to be soft and open and free in that immersion — even if I’ve heard the album 1,000 times — and just let myself hear it and feel it and write from that reactive place. Then I will go back over it later and add in additional layers of thoughts, feelings, and reactions after I’ve let it sit inside me, or after I’ve lived inside it. My second favourite part of writing this expanded edition of the book was to just spend time in the worlds of Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah and revel, a little bit, in how much more celebrated they are now than when We Oughta Know first came out. I love it for them and I love it for us!

One of the themes you address is how these four artists were underestimated (each in their own way) by the male-dominated music industry. But you also explore how Céline Dion and Shania Twain in particular were denigrated and thought of as less than the other two artists. Why was it important for you to reckon personally with your own relationship to Céline and Shania in particular?

Once I realized just how much internalized misogyny and sexism I had, I was so mad. I was even angrier when I had to face up to how it had infected my brain and personality because the patriarchy is a toxic foundation for humanity. Like, it’s not actually good for anybody, even as it privileges white, cisgender, heterosexual males. But one of the things that made me feel sick to my stomach was realizing that a lot of the things I was raging about as a teen against Céline and Shania were part of the patriarchal playbook of controlling, demeaning, and devaluing women. I was participating in gendered nonsense, slut-shaming, and gatekeeping. I felt like I’d been propping up the old boys’ club and it was so gross and completely antithetical to who I wanted to be.

So, I wanted to confront that, and I wanted to address my complicity, but I also wanted to revisit the music because I realized that part of what I’d also done in “hating” them as a teen was that I’d denied myself a really good time! I thought I was too cool back then, but in reality, I spent years denying myself some stuff that was super fun. As a person who loves pleasure, I’m very happy to be participating in this great unlearning. My gatekeeper feminism was the patriarchy in disguise and intersectional feminism is the right path for me.

In another generation—say, in twenty-five years—how do you think the legacy of these four artists will have changed, if at all?

Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah are living icons so I absolutely hope and believe we’re in for the long haul with all of them. I also think each are feeling themselves in ways they never have before and they’re getting their flowers while they’re alive — which is rare — and they’re also refusing to just fade into legacy fame. Each of them is active and in the culture and participating in the world in so many different ways, so 25 years from now, I think their legacies will be richer, deeper, and more nuanced than they are even now in this moment.

It might not be a fair question, but imagine you’re on a desert island and can only listen to three songs from the four artists in total for all eternity, what three songs would you choose?

Hahahahaha this is worse than asking me to choose who to Fuck Marry Kill!

But okay, I think I have to take Alanis’s “You Oughta Know” because it’ll give me something to sing at the top of my lungs when I really need to work through my feelings about being stuck on a desert island. There’s so much humour, contempt, and rage in that song and matching her strangled cries will be a total catharsis for a spectrum of feelings.

Shania’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” is pure fun and camaraderie and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that tiny call to action at the beginning, “Let’s go, girls!”

And I adore Céline’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” It’s good to have an epic, thunderous, gothic ballad in the mix, plus it’s seven minutes long in its fullest version so it’s almost like having two songs in one. My apologies to Sarah, I hate leaving her out, but I understand the assignment. I’ll just have to sing her songs to myself as part of my desert island disco.
 
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INTRODUCTION

One of my favourite pieces of musical trivia is this: in Canada, up until 2015 at least, Céline Dion was bigger than the Beatles. So were Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, and Sarah McLachlan. In fact, according to the 2010 Nielsen SoundScan, of the ten best-selling artists in Canada, only five were Canadian and all five were women. Céline Dion was first, then Morissette and Twain, with McLachlan in sixth. Diana Krall was tenth. The Beatles made an underwhelming appearance at number seven.

This chart still reflects a couple of major truths: there were only five Canadians on the list of best-selling artists in Canada. The top four — Dion, Morissette, Twain, and McLachlan — all burst into prominence during a five-year window from 1993 to 1997. Suddenly an impressive statistic becomes a holy shit one. How did these four wildly different artists have such a chokehold on the charts and the culture that they not only changed the gender dynamics of the music industry but also changed music itself?

Yes, of course, the ’90s were a different time. Much to the chagrin of audio purists, people began to embrace CDs over vinyl records and cassette tapes. It was a glorious transition for the ashen-eared non-audiophiles, even while purists resisted, eventually resurrecting vinyl and cassettes. The decade was the final heyday of physical record sales before the bottom fell out in the aughts with file sharing and streaming. But even considering the music industry’s drastic changes, would the average person ever have guessed that four women — Canadian women — were among the best-selling artists in Canada? For example, when critics talked about famous, mainstream Canadian musicians and acts in 2010, masculine acts like Nickelback, Drake, and Michael Bublé typically got priority. Almost fifteen years later, it’s now the Weeknd, Justin Bieber, and, well, Drake is still holding on. It’s a fascinating, exciting, inspiring thing to think that amidst all the bullshit sexism — in the music industry and in the world — these women defied the odds, their critics, and the general consensus that rock ’n’ roll is a man’s space to succeed. Consider that as recently as 2023, Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner went on the record with the New York Times and declared that his new book, The Masters, did not include any women or Black artists because they “didn’t articulate” at the “intellectual level” of their white male peers.

So. Many. Questions. About Wenner’s racist, sexist nonsense, and also about how, in the face of prevailing, gate-keeping attitudes like his, Dion, Twain, Morissette, and McLachlan became the big four in Canadian music? What’s the Venn diagram shared by a grande dame of ballads, a country-pop queen, a hissing alt-rock viper, and an angelic folkie? Is Canada a secret feminist wonderland or a hothouse of terrible taste where emotions are easily, voluntarily manipulated? What was it about 1993 to 1997, my prime teenage years (fourteen to eighteen years old), that made it possible for this particular confluence of events? I hated Dion and Twain when I was a teenager. The cheesy sincerity, skimpy outfits, and simpering “love is everything” mantras were an affront to the sarcastic, smarty, arty persona I was trying to cultivate. How the hell did I get to the point where I wanted to write a book that included them and their perky, earnest superstardom? I was team Morissette and McLachlan forever; how did I get so soft? How did we get here?

Excerpted in part from We Oughta Know: How Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah Ruled the ’90s and Changed Music by Andrea Warner. Copyright © by Andrea Warner, 2024. Published by ECW Press Ltd. www.ecwpress.com