Today's column is a Liz Phair column. This is kind of a difficult thing. See, Liz had one great album, 1993's Exile in Guyville. It was her first album and it was great, I mean seriously, it was really, really great. So, the basic point of this column is how great that first album was.
There's a complication though: as of today, Liz Phair sucks. Her second and third albums bombed. See, after her first album, Liz got married, had a kid and had a nice, happy little home life going, so her music lost its poignant character and turned into lovey, gee-golly-isn't-life-dandy-let's-sing-about-it pop mediocrity. As a result, I was pretty psyched after she went through a painful divorce a couple years ago. I figured, score, Liz is miserable, now she'll finally start making good music again. All the greats are better when they're miserable. Roman Polanski was going to let Chinatown have a happy ending before the Manson family killed his wife; Nirvana would have been an ugly mess of Dave Grohl and sloppy chords if Kurt Cobain hadn't hated himself so much; and William Wallace didn't really get down to slaughtering Brits until after the English executed Muron. So, now that she was unhappy again, Phair's self-titled fourth album was going to be awesome, right?
Wrong. No, Liz had something else in mind. She hired The Matrix (the same producers who mix Avril Lavigne) to write her music and (keep in mind she's a 35-year-old mom) took off a lot of her clothes for photo shoots and wrote bouncy lyrics about balling younger guys. One of her lyrics was, no joke: "I'm starting to think young guys rule." Yep. Today, Liz is basically Britney Spears, if Britney had stretch marks and nobody listened to her music.
Yet, like I said, there was a time when Liz was awesome. Exile in Guyville, wasn't just one of the best albums of the '90s; it was an indie rock feminist manifesto. Phair structured as a loose response to The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street. This could have been a disaster - she was a 25-year-old solo artist inviting people to compare her debut album to one of the greatest rock records of all time - but Phair pulled it off. Guyville seized the pent up emotion and vulnerability that typified Main Street, and funneled it into a bleak look at sex in the '90s.
Usually music sex is a lot different from real sex, because music sex is about selling records and creating an image. If all you knew about sex came from music, you'd probably think that it was always A) deep and meaningful or B) fun and harmless. With Guyville, Phair invented a C) oppressive, animalistic or selfish, dangerous or exploitive.
Her lyrics married vulgarity and honesty. Metaphor is everywhere: "You put in my hands a loaded gun - And then told me not to fire it." As for the promise of salvation through marriage, she's pessimistic: "the license said you had to stick around until I was dead - But if you're tired of looking at my face, I guess I already am."
Musically, Phair was no virtuoso. Her guitar playing defined rudimentary, her voice was limited and she often missed notes. But that just added to the aura. People don't listen to Highway 61 to hear Dylan croon either.
So forget all the trash she's made since - this album's a stunner, and nothing like it's been made since. Buy Guyville. And Liz, if you're reading this, get your act together and maybe I'll stop making fun of you.
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