“I don’t like being approached by people who look at me too intensely, who needed something from me that I didn’t have. I don’t represent anything.” — Liz Phair

It’s her birthday.

Talking about her is difficult because to so many – including myself – she does represent something. She didn’t set out to change the world, she was so shy and working in such isolation, but change it she did. She is beyond her own art, even though my initial response was about her art. In retrospect, it’s obvious what happened and why. But in the moment, it was beyond analysis. At least for me. I wasn’t a writer then. I was an audience. Her audience. She was a singer-songwriter. Maybe you’d have to be Gen X to really get it. I don’t mean this is an exclusionary way. I think of people who were actually teenagers when East of Eden came out. What that must have been like. I wasn’t there. But I love hearing about it. I try to imagine myself into it. The first time I saw East of Eden, I felt like I was in 1953. I was 13 years old, but it was as though the movie came out yesterday. I think of David Lynch’s comment on Elvis, something like “He wasn’t there and then suddenly he was there.” Liz Phair’s “arrival” was like that. The second she arrived – with a double album, no less – and no touring history, no bar band phase, nothing – it was like you couldn’t imagine how you had lived without her. Who WAS this woman, growling and murmuring in a flat-affect monotone about her life, her men – with such specificity you feel like you were IN those rooms, meeting those people? (The thing is: I WAS in those rooms, and not with those same people, but really they WERE the same people. It was the VIBE. The early-90s vibe.) Who WAS she?

Liz Phair emerged at a time when the traditional music industry had exploded. All bets were off. New voices emerged, blazing not just out of the Pacific Northwest, but everywhere. There was always an indie scene, a punk scene, an underground scene, but in the early-mid 90s indie went mainstream. It was amazing to experience it, we didn’t know how good we had it. People like PJ Harvey and Ani DiFranco were very big in my crowd, but then this new crowd burst on the scene and blazed out into stadium tours in a matter of months and it had to have been very surreal. Liz Phair is a Midwesterner but she was also a Chicagoan. So there’s a difference there in context, a subtlety.

Exile in Guyville seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.

The album – a track by track “retort” to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street) – sounded like it was recorded in her basement apartment at 3 a.m. And indeed much of it was. So authentic it was almost frightening. The album still freaks me out – and I’ve been listening to it constantly ever since it was first released. The album is never far from me. I could not fucking BELIEVE it when I first listened to it, front to back. Song after song after song … I had never before had the experience of hearing my own life, exactly what I was going through at that very moment – and in Chicago, no less! – reflected in a contemporary musician. That first listen was almost embarrassing. She was saying shit I was going through, but afraid to say in such a blunt way. It’s an album where the track listing is woven into my consciousness. Back when albums were listened to in their entirety. Back when track listing had meaning, when an album told a story. So I listen to “Help Me Mary” and I know what comes next.

More after the jump.

The music is under-produced. The lyrics blaze out from a void, as does her growly-confident voice. Some of the songs seem like they’re even too low for her voice. And she wrote the songs! Making pretty sounds was so not the point that it called into question all other music. She was my peer. I was living in Chicago when Exile in Guyville came out. She was a smarter bitchier sexier version of all the female singers clogging the airwaves now. Her frankness is what sticks out. She was (is) a little bit scary, she sees everything, she perceives everything. She doesn’t just tell on other people. She tells on herself. She is vulnerable, but not soft. Listen to the lyrics of “Stratford on Guy”:

I was flying into Chicago at night
Watching the lake turn the sky into blue-green smoke
The sun was setting to the left of the plane
And the cabin was filled with an unearthly glow

In 27-D, I was behind the wing
Watching landscape roll out like credits on a screen
The earth looked like it was lit from within
Like a poorly assembled electrical ball

As we moved out of the farmlands into the grid
The plan of a city was all that you saw
And all of these people sitting totally still
As the ground raced beneath them, thirty-thousand feet down

It took an hour, maybe a day
But once I really listened the noise just fell away

And I was pretending that I was in a Galaxie 500 video
The stewardess came back and checked on my drink
In the last strings of sunlight, a Brigitte Bardot

As I had on my headphones
Along with those eyes that you get
When your circumstance is movie-size

It took an hour, maybe a day
But once I really listened the noise just fell away

It’s so SPECIFIC. And yet … I have experienced this. I know this, somehow. She was local and specific and that’s the only way to become truly universal. (I am stealing Henri Cartier Bresson’s observations about Marilyn Monroe: she was undeniably 100% American, she could never have been from anywhere else, and because of this she appealed to everyone. The idea of erasing differences being the only way to appeal to everyone is just … stupid and ahistorical.)

Songs like “Fuck and Run”, “6’1”, “Johnny Sunshine” … these songs described my life at that time. It was almost embarrassing, my own journal entries suddenly showing up on an album.

Like “Mesmerizing”, one of my favorite tracks:

You said things I wouldn’t say
Straight to my face, boy
You tossed the egg up
And I found my hands in place, boy
After backing up as far as you could get
Don’t you know nobody parts two rivers met?
Don’t you know I’m very happy?
You know me well
I’m even happier
I like it
I like it

With all of the time in the world to spend it
Wild and unwise, I wanna be mesmerizing too
Mesmerizing too
Mesmerizing to you

This is so damn honest. I want to thank her for being honest, because it opened the door to seeing what I was doing as well, and being honest about it. I, too, am wild and unwise. Do I mesmerize you? Yes? Good!

Within a couple of months of the album release she was on the cover of Rolling Stone. There were other “girl rockers” happening then – very important too – Bikini Kill, L7, Courtney Love, Sleater-Kinney, Tracy Bonham, Babes in Toyland, Bjork … For a brief period of time, female anger was on the Top 40! 20 years later, the so-called “Girly-Sound Tapes” were released, rough drafts and riffs and experiments Phair did as she was making Exile in Guyville: the songs that eventually were hammered into shape for the album. Again, it sounds like she’s alone in a room at 2 in the morning, which, she was at times. I was fascinated to hear the extra verse of “Fuck and Run”, where the GUY speaks about his desire for a girlfriend, he’s getting sick of all this hooking up business. The eventual song is only from the girl’s point of view but I love that the other version exists. Nobody was getting used during hookups, but both parties could walk away feeling unsatisfied, empty, walk of shame, etc.

I really love this article in Esquire by Tyler Coates about Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville and the Girly-Sound Tapes.

Phair’s follow-up albums – Whip-Smart (1994) and Whitechocolatespaceegg (1998) are also filled with gems. Imagine your first album being Exile in Guyville. Imagine the pressure. She also had no idea Exile in Guyville would be what it would be. There was no PR push behind her, or an industry behind her … She has said that when she was writing those “Exile” songs, she was totally in her subconscious/unconscious. She had no sense of what anyone else was doing, and how she might fit in. She was not trying to fit in. She wasn’t trying out these songs on live audiences. She was in her own unconscious space of creation and expression. Because of that, these songs feel very private. When you are private, you don’t censor yourself. I mean, “Fuck and Run”. She has said her whole career is about trying to get back to that time when her Unconscious was in the driver’s seat.

I love Phair’s comment in the an old interview in Elle (I had the URL but it’s a 404 now. We are losing so much, culturally, in this digital world):

So I came to Oberlin having a Lady Di haircut, wearing acid-wash jeans with flowers on them—like, “€œHi! I’m Liz! And I wear really strong blue eyeliner!” And I got my ass kicked by all these New Yorkers. The zeitgeist on that campus changed my perspective completely on gender and bravery.

Certain fans of Liz Phair cried “sell out” with what happened next, her self-titled album (I love that it was her FOURTH album that was self-titled, not her first, second, or third), and the album after that, Somebody’s Miracle. Both had bigger and more “produced” sounds, plus they were made up of catchy pop songs, a far cry from “Johnny Sunshine” or “Chopsticks”. Pop songs! The horror!! She also got trashed for her sexy pose on the album cover. Misogyny is alive and well. I guess critics somehow thought her “I want to be your blowjob queen” on Exile was “ironic”, instead of an honest comment. She was trashed for “trying to be sexy” and “aping a teenager” by men and women critics alike, including Meghan O’Rourke in the New York Times. Women are the most brutal to other women, particularly when it comes to sexuality. (I’ve said it before: when I was carousing around as a wild floozy in Chicago – at the time Exile came out – I was often slut-shamed, but never by men. Other women were the ones who tried to cut me down. One called me a “slut” to my face.) The entire “discourse” around the self-titled album was disgusting, and basically proved Liz Phair’s original points in Exile in Guyville: the culture has a PROBLEM with sexual women (particularly if they’re mothers, which by that point she was), AND they have a problem with women ENJOYING sex with men. The self-titled album has “HWC” on it, which puts the sexually explicit lyrics of today to shame. Could Liz Phair actually MEAN this? A woman ENJOYING sex like this? The boys-club of music critics were put off by all of this. Robert Christgau, thankfully, called them all out on it, and dug into what she was doing with that album in a deep way, something sorely lacking in the rest of the commentary. I also love “Extraordinary” off that album, “Rock Me”, and “Bionic Eyes” (I quoted “Bionic Eyes” in my column at Film Comment about Ripley and Hicks in Aliens.

Phair took big risks with those two albums, and they were conscious risks. Like I said, the risks she took with Exile were mostly unconscious. She was making music only for herself. She hadn’t even played live before. Wild. “Somebody’s Miracle” didn’t get good reviews either, but I love some of those tracks: “Stars and Planets”, and “Giving It All to You”.

Then followed some bumps in the road. She broke ties with her management and the record company, none of whom understood what she was doing. It was probably the best thing for her. Funstyle is a crazy record. It’s the soundtrack to a Bollywood version of Liz Phair’s fights with her record company. lol One doesn’t blame a record company for not getting what she’s doing – “where’s the hit single?” – but it’s frustrating, because this was the woman who changed everything with her first album. Maybe … trust her? Or at least just let her do her thing? FunStyle was 2010. Then came a long period of no albums, although she was very busy doing scoring for television – so interesting – as well as the highly-publicized 15th anniversary of Exile in Guyville, with re-releases, re-masters, a tour, etc. The release of the Girly-Sound Tapes was also huge. Listening to that lonely angry funny sexy girl, she has no idea what’s about to happen. She’s just getting stuff out of her head and into the room.

and oh my God imagine my surprise when I first listened to the Girly-Sound Tapes, I learned she wrote a song about Elvis!!

Only found on the Girly-Sound Tapes sessions!

My brother wrote a wonderful piece about Exile in Guyville, as well as seeing Liz Phair live. He had this beautiful and funny interaction with her.

Recently, she came out with a memoir, Horror Stories (there will be a second volume coming soon). I devoured Horror Stories, thrilled by the humor and stark honesty (the opening chapter is about coming across a passed-out drunk girl in a bathroom and not doing anything to help. She still feels ashamed about this.) She’s also funny and observant.

And then in 2021, light from the caves – a new album, Soberish. So exciting! The lyrics of “Soberish” cut through the bullshit, my bullshit, resurrecting similar experiences I’ve had, meeting up with old flames in hotels, and being in a weird space of Now-Then, and the gap between the two, the connection bridging the gap. But you’re older now. Your younger self haunts you.

I already told you, it was love at first sight
And that’s a frightening notion
I’ll hold the light and you can read me what we owe

Like everyone, I am drawn to my own generation, particularly as I get older. How are we all doing? How are you coping? Where are you at with life changes? How do you deal with your own past? What’s happening with all of us? In Soberish, there’s nostalgia, but it’s so bittersweet it’s not pure. We’re Gen X. We aren’t golden-glow rose-glasses Boomers. It’s sweet to re-visit an old time, but it’s sad too: it won’t come again. Liz Phair is still truthful, yet in a different register. We change as we gain more miles. So checking in with Liz Phair is like checking in with myself.

Liz Phair. A poet of my generation. A Gen-X avatar.

“People hang their hopes on you fitting into their CD collection in way that they have made a space for, but I’m playing a longer game than that.”
— Liz Phair

 
 
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