Alanis Morissette vs. Fiona Apple
Battle of the Wailing Whiners

Let's look back -- waaaay back -- all the way to the summer of 1994. Bill Clinton was President of the United States. Friends was one of the top sitcoms on TV. Harrison Ford was starring in one of the season's top box-office draws. Truly, it was a very different world. It was into this very different world that Alanis Morissette made her début with the very angry grrrl stylings of Jagged Little Pill.

The closely guarded secret about this purported début, we all know now, is that it wasn't; when her thick, wavy brown hair was blow-dried and teased into a chunky helmet (1992), she was known simply as "Alanis" and anointed Canada's Most Promising Female Vocalist at the Juno Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys™) on the strength of "Too Hot," a wuss-metal single that owed more to Heart than it did to Hole. We are all supposed to pretend that leg of her career never existed, though; her management team must have long since bought up every copy of her real first album, Alanis, smashed them into powder with sledgehammers and, just to be absolutely sure, put the dust into a rocket and shot it into space, because it doesn't even show up on searches of the biggest online retailers.

Anyway, everyone was very impressed by the prodigious bitterness of the first single, "You Oughta Know," particularly since she was only nineteen years old and, one would think, had scarcely been burned enough by life and love and heroin to muster rage on a par with Courtney Love's (whose second Hole album was released around the same time). Who was the cad so dashing and sexy that he'd screw over a grrrl with a rage like Alanis's, people wondered?

Then they found out it was Dave Coulier, from Full House. And people stopped wondering how he'd screwed Alanis over and resumed wondering, "Isn't that guy gay?" By the time Maverick, her label, released "Ironic" -- which famously demonstrated that the songwriting wunderkind had been so busy as a child star building her career that she'd never had a tutor explain to her the meaning of such a common literary term -- and the Alanis backlash began in earnest. Alanis virtually went into hiding for several years, during which time there emerged a pretender to the throne of Angriest Grrrl with Most Pre-Raphaelite Hair: a little phenom known as Fiona Apple.

On her first album, Tidal, Fiona took a slightly different approach in cementing her image as an artist. Instead of kicking off with the loudest, angriest, most grunge-soaked single on the album (it was, by now, 1996, after all), Fiona pushed a couple of more langorous tracks -- "Shadowboxer" and "Criminal." If Alanis was crystal meth (or, as she was downgraded after CoulierGate, a No-Doz and Jolt speedball), Fiona was opium. Whereas Alanis was all lean, hard muscle and big, healthy Canadian teeth, Fiona was a tubercular waif, lolling around the "Criminal" video in her underpants looking like it was an effort to hold her head up.

So, okay, fine, they didn't have much in common then, other than the hair and the fact that they were both white women. But by the time each woman's second album came out, it became clear that they had become the same person. For one thing, there was the album art -- each featured the artist's big old grin (accompanied, in Fiona's case, by the rest of her face). For another, each had crawled closer to the centre of the artistic spectrum; Alanis had mellowed a whole hell of a lot, and Fiona had dialed up the grit (viz "Fast as You Can"). Both had contributed songs to the soundtracks of middling chick flicks (Alanis to City of Angels, Fiona to Pleasantville). Both even decided to take some high-profile career missteps: Alanis starred as God in the critically reviled Dogma, and Fiona tearfully stomped offstage in the middle of a concert, to the delight of entertainment journalists everywhere.

Who, then, should reign supreme -- and alone -- as the foremost Wailing Whiner? Tough call, right?

Advantage: Please. Who would you rather be linked with -- Paul Thomas Anderson or Uncle Joey? Fiona Apple wins this one in a walk.