{"id":168021,"date":"2026-04-17T09:00:47","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T13:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=168021"},"modified":"2026-04-16T12:04:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T16:04:19","slug":"liz-phair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=168021","title":{"rendered":"“I don’t represent anything.” — Liz Phair"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

\nIt’s her birthday. <\/p>\n

I don’t mean to go on and on in a generational way because of course we are not a monolith (after all, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar are Gen X. Ew.) … but “I don’t represent anything” – said by Liz Phair – who truly does represent something to MANY – is one of the most Gen-X comments said by a Gen X icon ever. <\/p>\n

This is why talking about her is difficult. 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<\/i> 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><\/a>, 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? <\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

Liz Phair emerged at a time when the traditional music industry had exploded (it would soon implode again). New voices emerged, blazing not just out of the Pacific Northwest, but everywhere. And it wasn’t just “grunge”. Rap and hip hop in the mid-90s? Forget about it. Everything was changing. There was always an indie scene, a punk scene, an underground scene, but in the early-mid 90s the indie went mainstream. The experience<\/i> of it was amazing, and we didn’t know how good we had it. People like PJ Harvey and Ani DiFranco were very big in my crowd, but then a new crowd burst on the scene and blazed out into stadium tours in a matter of months – Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, The Breeders – and it didn’t feel surreal, but in retrospect it was. Liz Phair is a Midwesterner but she was also a Chicagoan. She did not hail from New York or LA. She was midwest and also urban, a subtlety of her outsider context. <\/p>\n

Exile in Guyville<\/i> seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. <\/p>\n

\n\"Liz-Phair-Exile-In-Guyville-608x608\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nThe album – a track by track “retort” to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street<\/i> – sounded like it was recorded in a basement apartment at 3 a.m. And indeed much of it was. So authentic the sound is – still – almost frightening. The album still has the ability to freak 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. <\/p>\n

More after the jump.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\n 
\n <\/p>\n

The music is under-<\/i>produced. The lyrics creepy-whisper 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<\/i> 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”:<\/p>\n

I was flying into Chicago at night
\nWatching the lake turn the sky into blue-green smoke
\nThe sun was setting to the left of the plane
\nAnd the cabin was filled with an unearthly glow<\/p>\n

In 27-D, I was behind the wing
\nWatching landscape roll out like credits on a screen
\nThe earth looked like it was lit from within
\nLike a poorly assembled electrical ball<\/p>\n

As we moved out of the farmlands into the grid
\nThe plan of a city was all that you saw
\nAnd all of these people sitting totally still
\nAs the ground raced beneath them, thirty-thousand feet down<\/p>\n

It took an hour, maybe a day
\nBut once I really listened the noise just fell away<\/p>\n

And I was pretending that I was in a Galaxie 500 video
\nThe stewardess came back and checked on my drink
\nIn the last strings of sunlight, a Brigitte Bardot<\/p>\n

As I had on my headphones
\nAlong with those eyes that you get
\nWhen your circumstance is movie-size<\/p>\n

It took an hour, maybe a day
\nBut once I really listened the noise just fell away<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n