The prevailing notion is that the Alanis Morissette's song “Ironic” is not ironic at all, but instead simply full of bummers, is a pedantic and sad case of unimaginative people wielding sexist bias to dismiss Alanis as dumb. Alanis has admitted that the lyrics to “Ironic” prove she didn’t properly grasp the meaning of the word. We’re not here to rehash verdicts already rendered. She f**ked it up and said so. We’re here to examine the implications of that f**kup, to explain why it was usefully so very on the nose for the '90s and to argue that the song is redeemable while the critique of it is not.
