Here'a clue for the clueless generation: If you're going to worship someone, you ought to know what she looks like. Outside the Mercury Cafe Brewhouse, in Denver, where Alanis Morissette is playing a club gig, a desperate young man approaches the singer in the hopes of buying an extra ticket, unaware that he's talking to the headliner. It's a few hours before show time, and already a crowd of ticketless fans — a mix of intense young women, bookish lads and preppy couples — has gathered to try to buy scalped tickets to this sold-out show.

Just because fans of Morissette connect with her heartfelt, earnest songs — in fact, they seem on the verge of anointing her rock's Generation X-rated diva — doesn't mean they could pick their heroine out of a police lineup. They're not to blame: The hit clip for that ultimate bad-breakup anthem, "You Oughta Know," is so atmospherically photographed as to make its star a barely recognizable MTV icon. Similarly, the photo of Morissette on the cover of her smash album, Jagged Little Pill, has a hazy, elusive quality.

"I've been told a few times now that I don't look like my songs," Morissette says. "People expect me to have purple hair and a pierced nose and boobs. Then they meet me, and I'm just...me." In this instance, "me" is a petite but curvaceous young woman who wears little makeup. "I hate to let anyone down, but I'm not the cleavage sort of aesthetic babe. I've been down that road before, and that's not what I'm about."

Exactly what Morissette is about has become a subject of passionate debate on the Internet and everywhere else music fans meet since "You Oughta Know" started its long reign atop the modern-rock radio charts. She has been called everything from brilliant to naive, with stops at most points in between. Perhaps naysayers are pissed that the public has chosen to make Morissette a star instead of the critically lauded Liz Phair. In any case, the masses have spoken with their wallets. Want to know how hot Morissette is? The other day she got a gushing love letter from the other queen of 1995's pop culture prom, Alicia Silverstone.

On Jagged Little Pill's "Right Through You," Morissette sings about a time that sounds like the present: "Now that I'm Miss Thing/Now that I'm a zillionaire." Although actually written when she was broke and sleeping on friends' couches in Los Angeles, the lines appear to have came true.

"I guess in a way, I am Miss Thing right now," Morissette says, shaking her head. "I laugh now when I sing the song onstage because the whole thing's so ironic. When I wrote those words, I was the furthest thing in the world from it." Not that she's complaining. Unlike some of her contemporaries, Morissette says she's excited by her success: "I asked for this."

Partly because Morissette collaborated on Jagged Little Pill with Glen Ballard — a successful songwriter and pop producer known for his work with Wilson Phillips, among others — her critics suggest she's simply a contrived creation of the studio. But for the crowd in Denver, there's no question that Morissette is for real. From the moment she kicks into "All I Really Want" with furious harmonica-blowing accompaniment, it's obvious that a healthy percentage of this packed audience has not only taken these songs to heart, it knows them all by heart — and this for an album that at the time of the Denver show had been released only five weeks. Morissette's uncensored documentation of her psychosexual former-Catholic-girl torments has become resonant fodder for the rest of the entire listening world. As she sings on "Forgiven": "I sang hallelujah in the choir/I confessed my darkest deeds to an envious man/My brothers, they never went blind for what they did/But I may as well have/In the name of the Father, the skeptic and the Son/I had one more stupid question."

"The reaction of the audience has been so amazing and open," says Morissette. "It's comforting and bittersweet to know that I'm not the only one who's gone through these things. At the same time it's a little disturbing that apparently there's a lot of people out there having gone through such painful things. The reaction has been pretty intense." Sometimes the reaction is so intense, it shocks even Morissette. "There was a mosh pit in Minneapolis when we played there. Is it me, or is this music not about mosh-pitting?"

Still, singing with conviction and whipping her long mane of hair around the stage, Morissette brings the Denver crowd to a frenzy. Some may find her powerful voice — which at times recalls Sinead O'Connor's and Kate Bush's — overly mannered, but she really is one of rock's most gifted vocalists. Like the Counting Crows' Adam Duritz and the Cranberries' Dolores O'Riordan, she's a brave lead singer willing to go to an emotional level just millimeters below over the top.