"Bitch" — Meredith Brooks
The 1997 single that dared radio to say its title, and radio mostly did. Meredith Brooks' one big hit sat at number two on the Hot 100 for four weeks, earned two Grammy nominations, and spent the year being compared to Alanis Morissette.
Meredith Brooks was on her second act when it hit. Born in Corvallis, Oregon in 1958, she had played in the all-female Eugene band Sapphire in 1976 and in The Graces with Charlotte Caffey in 1987, and released a 1986 solo debut that found an audience mostly in Mexico. She wrote "Bitch" with Shelly Peiken, who has said it grew out of her frustration at a stalling career; Brooks described it as a celebration of "Everywoman's multiple psyches" and an attempt to take the sting out of the word. Geza X produced it.
Capitol Records was nervous. The label hesitated to lead her album Blurring the Edges with a single whose title couldn't be printed everywhere and considered censoring it; Brooks and Peiken talked them into servicing radio with the lyric intact. Released March 25, 1997, it debuted at number 57 on the Hot 100 on April 26, climbed for months, and peaked at number two for four weeks beginning the week of July 12, 1997, staying on the chart for 35 weeks. It reached number two in Australia and Canada and six in the UK, went gold in the US and platinum in Britain and Australia, and carried the album to number 22 in America and number five in the UK.
The Alanis comparison followed it everywhere: AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Brooks an "Alanis clone," and Billboard, Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times all noted the resemblance. The song still earned nominations for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance and Best Rock Song at the 1998 Grammys. Its lowest moment came opening for the Rolling Stones in Argentina on March 29, 1998, when the crowd booed and threw bottles, batteries and coins until she left the stage, a reaction she called misogynistic mob behavior.
Brooks released Deconstruction in 1999 and Bad Bad One in 2002 and produced Jennifer Love Hewitt's BareNaked the same year, but "Bitch" remained the calling card: VH1 ranked it 79th among the 100 greatest songs of the '90s, Britney Spears recited it as spoken word in her Piece of Me residency in 2016, and Avril Lavigne named it in 2022 as the song she wished she had written.
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