Tag Archives: Liz Phair

Is Liz Phair mad or brilliant?

I’ll admit, I have no idea what to think of this. Did anybody even know Liz Phair had a new album coming out? This is quite a departure in the sounds we’ve come to expect from Ms. Phair and I can’t decide whether it’s mad or brilliant (or brilliantly mad).

My 9-year-old just heard me listening to this and asked, “Who is this? Do you know her? I don’t like it” and then proceeded to surf to YouTube and pull up some dancey pop-rock song.

If this song floats your boat, you can buy the entire digital CD for $5.99 on Liz’s site by clicking “Get it Now”.

A Transmission About Liz Phair from the Actual Guyville

Much print has been spilled in the most recent flurry of Liz Phair news, and a lot of it just clearly misses the fucking point.

As an artistic piece I still think Exile In Guyville is an amazing piece of emotional honesty. I could care less what motivated Liz Phair to write the songs, and from what I can tell she was an artist first and foremost, but she wanted validation from Nash Kato and that crew, so I think that supplied the drive to actually get her stuff released. I think the “potty mouth / slutty blowjob queen / Exile On Mainstreet / priveleged rich kid going bohemian” thing is an angle that lazy journalists employed then, and still employ. One watch of the Guyville Redux DVD that comes with the reissue is paints a much better representation of the indie scene at the time — Chicago in particular — and the way she actually fit into things at the time.

But I think she was/is an artist with a limited well from which to draw. There’s a reason the good songs on later discs were mostly reworkings of stuff from the Girlysound tapes. I think she hit upon a bright burst of inspiration at a certain point in her life and after that was gone she didn’t have anything else unique to say.

Another journalist and I were having an argument recently over whether or not Guyville is even a feminist work. I argued it wasn’t philosophically, but understood that since it empowered so many women some folks just lump it in as a “feminist work.” And I think that’s the most important thing, and one that gets severely overlooked since almost everyone that’s ever written about the album is male, and they totally fucking miss this point just about every single time, but when that disc came out there were a LOT of girls that were suddenly like, OH my GOD, I think those same things too. And it’s O.K. I’m not alone!”

Who cares if Phair never writes another decent song, or that her career nowadays is one naked grab for attention after another? That’s her business, and I don’t hold it against her one whit, and I think it’s idiotic for people to hate on her for trying to make a career within today’s totally fucked up music industry. What matters is that, once upon a time, she created a piece of art that gave a lot of people courage by shouting universal truths previously held behind closed doors. For that Liz Phair will always have my respect.

Guyville, No Longer With Wild Thing?

Liz PhairI’m reviewing Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville reissue for another publication and got the digital version of the album a week or two ago so I could hear the bonus tracks. I just got the physical version in the mail today since I needed that to review the DVD that’s included. (Which, just from this brief bit, already looks pretty awesome.) However I noticed that the CD no longer includes the bonus track “Wild Thing,” a playful rework of The Troggs tune.

I wonder what happened?