I think she pulled it from her ass just like all her songs.
Bottom line is, someone could record themselves taking a dump after eating 100 burritos the day before and put it out on a cd and I would rather listen to that then her.
Ah, yes. It's the old "ironic" argument.
Well, at least one of the lines in the song actually does contain irony:
"And as the plane crashed down, he thought, 'Well, isn't this nice.'"
That would be ironic. Well, done, Alanis; yer batting .002.
Those who want to protect the word "irony" from misuse would be well advised to look up its definitions, which go beyond belying the meaning of a word. There's dramatic irony, of which the plane crash verse is an example: a character in a narrative makes a statement, which is belied by knowledge available only to the audience. (Either that, or we can decide that he's aware that the plane is crashing, making his statement directly ironic.)
So Tanz is right after all. And frankly, I think that Alanis started saying the song was meta-ironic only after a thousand second-rate newspaper columnists hauled out their dictionaries and said there was no irony at all, thus making idiots of themselves by idiotically criticizing an idiotic song.
And that, by the way, is also ironic, in a sense.
[y'all need to be voting on the Ironic/Irony poll going on in the Non-Hip forum, cuz it looks like I got some supporters now (and I'm trailing 12-6 at last count)]