Take 5 with pop culture author and educator Megan Volpert

What exactly is art who defines it who makes it and where in Atlanta do poets thespians and artists congregate and create We ll use this space to catch up with a limited for a scant selected you may know others we hope you ll be pleased to make their acquaintance Megan Volpet Photo by David Clifton Strawn When I was years old I experienced my first musical renaissance Back then you didn t go to Apple or Amazon to buy music you d head to the mall to Camelot Music to browse flip through the album covers check out the cool guy or girl behind the counter listen to their playlist of the latest releases and maybe buy I was at Camelot when I first heard the strains of an unforgettable synthesizer solo with a reggae beat then drums so timeless that LL Cool J sampled it in Doing It Well over a decade later Then a contralto repeating My Jamaican Guy and by her third iteration I was obsessed Grace Jones and her album Living My Life became art to my ears consciousness and a defining moment in my youth By the time I left for college I had Grace Jones albums cassettes a life-size poster and my favorite button of all time that I had to rescue from my college boyfriend s cigar treasure box after it had gone missing but that s a different Take Grace Jones was the soundtrack of my youth my inner bad girl and bold spirit But it took another pivotal moment to drive home her significance in my life One day I was walking the Beltline and remembered Prince s Piano and a Microphone tour was playing at the Fox that night I exposed a ticket placed it in the shopping cart and then took it out because I was trying to save money By the time I finished my walk after ruminating over it I had changed my mind and returned to my shopping cart and the ticket was gone But I cheered up and declared I d excursion to see him perform on his next tour Well the greater part Atlantans already know the deeply regrettable mistake I made on that day April because exactly one week later Prince had died unexpectedly And I learned a different coming-of-age lesson so to speak don t leave anything you ll regret later in your shopping cart My point is that music serves as a great equalizer it becomes the soundtrack of our youth a record of our emotions a pivotal life lesson or as in the affair of Megan Volpert markers in our coming-of-age DNA In her new book Why Alanis Morissette Matters University of Texas Press Volpert examines the artistic journey of Alanis Morissette and discusses how her album Jagged Little Pill influenced her at the age of Volpert highlights the themes and insights determined in Morissette s creative life emphasizing that years later she continues to offer valuable lessons and ideas that can resonate with teenagers in Volpert is an interdisciplinary thinker writer mentor and healer teaching at Kennesaw State and Reinhardt Universities She also does intuitive tarot and scent work primarily at Seed to Star in Decatur and Stillwell s Emporium in Stone Mountain Volpert a -year Decatur resident when not enjoying the quiet of her home hangs out around the two rock shops where she works enjoying the communities built there and using the services of the other healers that share those spaces Check out Volpert discussing her Morissette renaissance below Tell us about your book Why Alanis Morisette Matters its origin and your research What did you discover surprising about her or yourself in the process When I was a teenager the radio was where I revealed my poets I ve constantly been interested in writing about music from a literary and philosophical perspective As time goes by I ve ended up writing a lot of music books about Tom Petty Bruce Springsteen Warhol s influence on The Velvet Underground and reviewed very plenty of music books for PopMatters A while back I reviewed Tanya Pearson s debut book about Marianne Faithfull and really enjoyed it as well as the Music Matters series from University of Texas Press of which it was a part So Tanya gave me a good shove and I sent them a short list of musicians I thought might be a good fit for the mission of the press as well as my own fandom mostly women in rock Alanis was top of my list and after I sent them two sample chapters it was a done deal I m a voracious researcher so I just collected everything and then unhinged my jaw But seriously there are hardly any books on Alanis so the main work was reading every interview and a bunch of reviews I read everything she s ever published anywhere and I also made a playlist of literally every version of every song she has and listened to that on loop for about a year and a half The preponderance surprising discovery was one I hit upon almost instantly she and I are both Highly Sensitive People The first chapter of the book focuses on this About fifteen percent of individuals of any species are highly sensitive You can start thinking about whether you might be by taking this little quiz I took the quiz I m not quite highly sensitive but not far from it and it sent me down an compelling aside about the connection between HSPs vs empaths So how did Morissette s Jagged Little Pill album influence you was there a specific song on that album that connected you to her The book s epigraph is a quotation from Right Through You and the first single that charted from the album in summer of was You Oughta Know but as the book moves track by track through the entire album I end up making a larger situation that the heart of Jagged Little Pill is You Learn Each song on JLP continues to resonate with me at different moments throughout my life in fresh solutions as I get older Lately I find myself having a real soft spot for Not the Clinician A main point of the book though is that the beauty and power of her voice doesn t stop at JLP Whatever it is you love about that album has grown deep roots and fresh leaves that we can trace across all her subsequent work both musically and in other projects like her podcast advice column charitable causes forewords for books and so on In the book you referenced Morissette s lyrics Oh hello Mr Man You didn t think I d come back You didn t think I d show up with my army And this ammunition on my back from Right Through You and how they d been at the top of your epigraph list since you were in high school Can you share its significance for you When I was fifteen I clung to it as a simple revenge fantasy In my twenties my appetite for vengeance got supplanted by something closer to Taylor Swift s notion of Karma In my thirties when I had amassed an army of several thousand students who had passed through my classroom I began to see these lines for their patience and organic sense of society building Now in my forties having pretty much gone full punk monk it reminds me that everything comes back moves in waves finds its cycles There are constantly moments when it is useful to speak truth to power and in this way looks a lot like to me The significance of the epigraph is that it offers a little prayer that my book may be part of our ammunition part of the legacy of strategies Alanis gave us to keep Mr Man from getting us down You compared Morrissette to Antigone if you had to compare yourself to someone in Greek mythology who would it be and why I m partial to Medusa Also Cassandra And Nyx Or any of the women who run in packs the Amazons the Sirens the Fates the Furies and so on Why They re all punk feminists They re all witches But generally I feel more called to Eastern mythologies In Indian texts I m investing time studying all the forms of Kali and in Chinese texts I admire Feng Po Po who is the goddess of the wind All of these women have a strong sense of justice By the way I took a different online quiz to see who I might be in Greek Mythology and it was Perseus I m not sure I agree but apologies to Medusa Having declared that you were a tenth-grade English facilitator for a multitude of years If I remember it was an angst-filled time for me How does that translate in the st century When you reflect on your -year-old self-discovery of Morissette what makes her music relevant to teens now That s an easy one Alanis was first Ask Olivia Rodrigo if her musicianship would be achievable without the influence of Alanis Ask Billie Eilish what her albums would sound like if she d never heard Alanis Ask Lana Del Rey who paved her way Ask Taylor Swift Ask P nk Go back to the source kids Here s a quote from English professor Sara Marcus that I use in the book to think about the transmutation of feminist ideology through generations of music Specific women are never going to access Bikini Kill but they re aware of Hole Particular women aren t aware of Hole but they re listening to Alanis Morissette Now we re at a third-generation degraded copy and at the same time there s an embrace of anger and obscenity that does something for people Even the Spice Girls are like a fourth-generation degraded copy from Riot Grrrl Check out Volpert s playlist which includes a Stevie Nicks song that is pertinent because her next soiree just a short walk from Alanis she says is co-editing White Winged Doves A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology with our own Collin Kelley the executive editor of Rough Draft Atlanta It will be published by Madville Publshing in spring Connect with Volpert on Instagram meganvolpert She will also be in conversation with Alix Olson on Friday April at p m at The Book Bird in Avondale You can register for this free event here The post Take with pop way of life author and educator Megan Volpert appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta