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Author here to remind us what we oughta know

Personal book examines when Canadian women ruled the music charts in the 1990s
oughta
Andrea Warner's book, We Oughta Know, is part music criticism, part cultural analysis and part candid, witty and wrenching feminist coming-of-age memoir.

Of the 10 best-selling artists in Canada, only five are Canadian, and all five are women.

For Vancouver-based music journalist Andrea Warner, it was a revelation, coupled with the fact that the top four female artists — Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain and Sarah McLachlan — came to prominence during a five-year window from 1993 to 1997. In fact, according to the Nielsen SoundScan list, they’ve sold more records in Canada than U2 or the Beatles. Diana Krall ranks 10th.   

“Suddenly an impressive statistic becomes a ‘holy s***’ one,” writes Warner in the introduction of her forthcoming book, We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the ’90s and Changed Canadian Music.

“They all became super powerful when I was a teen and it resonated with me that I was, unknowingly, witness to this time of this huge movement in Canada that was unprecedented and hasn’t come again,” Warner told the Courier over coffee last Friday.

With the title a riff on of one of Morissette’s biggest hits, Warner, an associate producer for CBC Music, 2013 Polaris Prize Jury member and freelance writer, has penned a provocative book that’s part music criticism, part cultural analysis and part candid, witty and wrenching feminist coming-of-age memoir.

As a teenager growing up on Fraser Street in Vancouver’s Sunset neighbourhood, Warner loved Morissette and McLachlan and abhorred Dion and Twain. But opinions formed in adolescence often deserve a second look, so Warner spent countless hours listening to songs, some of which she’d previously loathed, examining what had been written about the four artists and reconsidering her “a**hole thoughts” in the writing of her first book.

In the essay “Making Peace with Celine Dion: Mockery, Manipulation, and Matters of the Heart,” peace isn’t reached easily.

“There’s a passion in Dion’s songs, but it’s a sexless passion, like a Ken doll’s beige genital wasteland,” Warner writes.

She discredits the notion that Dion and Twain would have been nothing without the music industry men who became their husbands.

“It’s sexist and demeaning, but it’s also an affront to intelligence, much the same as people still believing that the Earth is flat or that Stephen Harper is a decent guy or that there’s no such thing as evolution,” Warner penned.

If you’ve ever blasted Morissette for her questionable understanding of irony in her hit song “Ironic,” Warner might persuade you to reassess your ire.

“I’m a stickler for definitions, too, but the number of people who jumped down Morissette’s throat for ‘Ironic’ far outweighed the number of people who actually care about linguistics,” Warner notes in her essay about 1995 and Morissette’s album Jagged Little Pill.

Warner muses about her own slut shaming of Twain, Dion’s glorification of “forever love,” and the anguish that overwhelmed her when she pressed play on McLachlan’s 1996 album Rarities, B-Sides and Other Stuff in the writing of this book. “In fact this is where I started crying in public in a coffee shop and hid behind a curtain of my hair so my friend working beside me wouldn’t notice,” Warner writes.

She didn’t allow the flow of tears to hold back her writing, so the essay “The Myth and Magic of Sarah McLachlan” includes an epically poignant reflection on the loss of a parent, coping and grief.

We Oughta Know includes an appendix of Canadian acts in the ’90s (solo women musicians and women-fronted bands) and name checks Tegan and Sara, Grimes, the Pack A.D. and Tanya Tagaq.

“How far we haven’t come is a bit surprising, and yet we have come very far,” Warner said.

She maintains popular culture warrants attention because chart toppers trickle down to independent acts who create music in reaction and response.

“Their influence is really everywhere and even if you don’t like them, what they did is bring attention to Canada and Canada’s music machine,” Warner said. “They don’t even get that credit, which his crazy to me. If four dudes had done that, they’d be on our f***ing dollar bills — if we had dollar bills.”

Kathryn Calder and Louise Burns Music will play Warner’s book launch April 25 at The Lido, 518 East Broadway, from 6 to 8 p.m.

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