"Liz Phair" vs. Exile in Guyville etc.

But I don't think it's fair to compare her one masterpiece with this album. You're hurt -- as many are -- that she's not the indie goddess Liz Phair anymore. But could we really expect her to be?

I'll quote myself: "She never made another album this good again, and her songwriting becomes more comfortable with each album after this one, but that's understandable. If she had continued to be as confused and transitional as she is on Exile on Guyville, it wouldn't have felt real."

Guyville is the work of a young woman in emotional limbo. She found something finally, and I'll agree that it's rather bland, but it's no use complaining that she's not the girl she used to be.

It's like seeing Orson Welles do a Paul Masson ad.

Ah! the French.

I don't give a shit about vision betraying, and I thought Liz Phair + the Matrix would be dandy. But Avril Lavigne + the Matrix is way more memorable. Douglas sums it up damn well when he notes the suppresive quality of it all. Sheryl Crow's "Soak Up The Sun" was better than this, and I HATED that.

::ephemerally breaking my hiatus, not that anyone gives a damn::

i loved exile when it came out and i liked the second one too. never heard the third one. see, i always felt like she got a raw deal in print even when everybody loved her. i'd never seen such projection before. people, years ago, ran with that whole blow-job queen tag cuz it didn't seem as if they knew how to write about her or her music. i thought it stunk and that she deserved better. i don't know what she's up to now, and all the interviews make her sound/seem kinda sad. as in unhappy. and they still don't know how to write about her. it's weird. she always seemed so normal. maybe that's what gave/gives people a problem.

-- scott seward (skotro...), June 23rd, 2003.
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I agree with Scott. I liked Guyville because Liz sounded so damn unimpressed with everything. And I don't give a salty one about indie cred or indie purists.

-- Jeanne Fury (jeannefur...), June 23rd, 2003.

Liz Phair Goes Pop, Setting Off Debate
The Associated Press
Jun 23 2003 6:13PM
NEW YORK (AP) - The first time Liz Phair pooled her allowance money to buy a record, years before she became an indie rock queen, she bought ``Saturday Night'' by the bubblegum band Bay City Rollers.

That's worth remembering now that the 36-year-old singer has set off an extraordinary debate in the rock world simply by making a disc designed to be enjoyed by as many people as possible.

Some fans feel betrayed, others intrigued. All can judge for themselves when the disc, her first in five years, is released Tuesday.

Titled ``Liz Phair,'' the cover features the star with teased blonde hair and a semi-dressed pose covered up by a strategically placed guitar. Among the 14 glossy pop-rock songs are four co-written with the Matrix, the hitmaking songwriting team behind Avril Lavigne's smash, ``Complicated.''

Her debut a decade ago, on the other hand, was decidedly lo-fi. Complete with frank sexual talk, ``Exile in Guyville'' was a brash, feminine response to a classic Rolling Stones album. Critics and hipsters loved it, saying it captured the mood of many women in their 20s.

Will the real Liz Phair please stand up?

``I'm the same person I always was,'' Phair told The Associated Press in a recent interview. ``I just lost the whole `cool school' thing.''

By courting pop success, some critics have essentially called her a sellout. In a lengthy essay in The New York Times on Sunday, writer Meghan O'Rourke said Phair ``has committed an embarrassing form of career suicide.''

``Ms. Phair often sounds desperate or clueless,'' O'Rourke wrote. ``The album has some of the same weird self-oblivion of a middle-aged man in a mid-life crisis and a new Corvette.''

Others differ. Jim Farber in the New York Daily News said the disc's slickness covers up Phair's weaknesses as a singer and player. ``The added elements have made her songs catchier and her vocals more compelling,'' he wrote.

Phair recorded and shelved three different albums in the past five years, as she got divorced and moved with her 6-year-old son from her native Chicago area to Los Angeles, the cradle of stardom.

The last try was a somewhat depressing disc produced by Michael Penn, husband of mopey songwriter Aimee Mann. Phair took it to the president of Capitol Records, Andy Slater, who said it was a good album critics would like.

Phair knew a lukewarm record company usually dooms an album to failure. ``I really wanted you to be a little more excited than, `It'll be fine,''' she told Slater.

As a single mom living in an expensive new area, Phair was eager to take a big swing at success and agreed to work with the Matrix. ``Exile in Guyville'' and its 1994 followup, ``Whip Smart,'' both sold just under 400,000 copies, and 1998's ``whitechocolatespaceegg'' sold 266,000 copies - respectable if you're a struggling artist-type, but not on the level of a major star.

Phair believes working with others has amplified, not concealed, her personality. She said she's not turning her back on the woman who wrote ``Exile in Guyville.''

``What did you do in your 20s?'' she said. ``Oh, I wrote one of the most influential albums of the '90s. It's awesome. But it shouldn't stop you'' from trying different things, she said.

Worrying about critics can be as much of a trap as overthinking the pop marketplace. Phair said she occasionally felt paralyzed as a writer in the mid-1990s worrying whether her songs were hip enough.

Still, she doesn't dismiss fans who don't like what she's doing.

``Of course, I care,'' she said. ``I like them and I'd like them to like me. If they don't, that's fine. I don't like every record. I hope they don't reject me as a lifelong artist. I think that's a little bit spastic.''

Phair talked just hours before attending a concert by Radiohead, the ultimate critic's band. But she's still in touch with the little girl who sang along to ``Saturday Night.''

``I would never want to give up my `indie-ness,''' she said. ``I just don't understand why you have to be one or the other. I like highbrow and lowbrow.''

Phair is less eager to talk about the provocative photos being used to sell her disc, saying they weren't her idea. She's never been shy about using her sexuality; on `Exile,' she doctored her vocals to sound as girlish as possible when talking dirty.

The new album has one song explicit enough to make Mick Jagger blush. She also sings about picking up a guy nine years younger for sex and about the allure of infidelity.

Yet a song with nothing to do about sex packs the biggest emotional wallop. ``Little Digger'' describes the wrenching confusion of a young boy seeing his divorced mom with another man for the first time.

``My goal, if I have one as an artist, has always been to expand the acceptable rules for women and girls,'' Phair said.

``One of the things that was hard for me growing up was older women who did not talk about things that they felt outside of an accepted way of talking,'' she said. ``I think it's important to allow yourself to say things that are not OK.''

06/23/03 18:09 EDT

::reinstating my hiatus, not that anyone gives a damn::

Liz - "Sorry I'm not INDIE enough for you!"

http://www.giganticmag.com/reviews/000109.php

You can all throw tomatoes at me now.

But we sure didn't pillory R.E.M. like this when they discovered the joys of Marshall stacks to mainstreamline the unique edges.

PS re: Entertainment Weekly cover art, she posed freakin' topless on the cover of "Guyville."

I'm not sure if I miss that croak in Liz's voice or not, though. & I don't doubt that I'd enjoy the "critic's darling" record Capitol dismissed more than this Matrixed model (which, by the way, I like just fine, my fondless for Girlysounds et al notwithstanding).

Actually the description of the track about banging a younger guy made me think of "Young Offender" by the Pet Shop Boys - surely worth .1 of a point at least!!

From http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Club/2471/00000014.html

And if all that doesn't toy with enough perceptions of the rock myth, take a peek at the packaging (or is that unpackaging?) of Liz Phair. Exile in Guyville's blurry cover photograph features a snarling Phair -- flashing. The inside reveals what would be much more compromising Polaroids of Phair if, in fact, the model in question wasn't actually a woman named Kristi Stevens.

"My sexuality was going to be packaged for me, so I did it myself," says Phair. "People kept saying, 'How could she exploit herself?' And I did. On the cover, there's the tiniest bit of nipple showing. Yet I didn't, because the inside photo isn't me. What is that saying about images?"

Oh boy. You must have a time with Timbaland.

If a novelist were to write a cult classic, a couple of less well received follow-ups, and then an attempted blockbuster, and if they were to package the blockbuster as a blockbuster with an embossed cover and all that, and if they were to say "Look, the people who liked my first novel won't enjoy this, it's not for them, I'm just making some money and I'm still capable of delivering the other kind of book" - would their readers assume that the novelist had completely lost it/sold out, or would they just ignore the blockbuster and think 'maybe next time, then'.

A bit of both, obviously, but I think the idea of bills-paying releases, career sidesteps, etc. is much more acceptable in other media. There's something about rock fans and critics which seems hooked on the idea of a rock career as being this organic linear thing - growth, development, decline, sell-out; it all has to tell some kind of story. Is it because the individual 'parts' of this story - albums - are quite short and insubstantial things, so the fan needs some kind of macro-concept of artisty to pay loyalty to?

(Lots of bands do make side-steps of course but into the side-project or 'experimental album' territory, which seem more acceptable.)

In that case ignore what I was saying!

(I'm scared to download any of the other tracks now in case they're awful.)

better watch your mouth, boy, 'fore you start castin' aspersions 'round like that.

Try "Red Light Fever," "Why Can't I" (is that the new single? it should be), "Rock Me" (for perhaps the silliest chorus in the histroy of choruses), and "It's Sweet." All of side one (if there were such a thing) is really good.

But every time an actual indie band does something like that people complain. ;-) Or at least most people here were extremely annoyed with the Dandy Warhols attempt at same, Kate and Arthur being the exceptions I think.

Like who? Examples, please. David Eggers? William Gibson? Nick Hornby? Neil Stephenson? Anne Rice? Ken Follett? Oh, god, please, don't say David Sedaris...

Tico, I think you're right about stories but here's the correction: people don't approach musicians like writers, they approach them like lovers. And your lover is not allowed to start acting completely different and dating someone else, especially not the kind of person you've always had a grudge against anyway. (This is where Sterling's whole idea of the "sell-out" as being a betrayal of assumed community comes in; I mean, maybe Liz-as-lover always had this in her -- I think she did -- but the us-against-them predilections that indie nurtures obviously make it hard on traitors. "I thought we hated guys like that," say the old Liz-phans, to which she needs to say clearly: "No, you hated guys like that," etc. etc. and why do I feel like Nick Hornby should be making this metaphor?)

(I have never heard old Liz Phair apart from a couple of tracks from her last album I think.)

Stream-able here.

By the way, in terms of idiosyncrasy-->pop I feel like there's some missing Phair vs. Cat Power idea to be explored, especially since those Girlysound tapes often sound quite a bit like the earliest Cat Power stuff.

For one thing, I think the genre shift has led to some overestimation of the changes -- even ignoring Whitechocolatespacegg as the bridge, I'm not sure there's such a radical disjunction in the songwriting. Nevertheless, a lot of the quirks that originally made her endearing have certainly been paved over -- chief among them the flow and the pacing of her thoughts. They're very rigid now, very precise; in her earliest work she was constantly wandering around herself to accommodate words, phrases, melodies, wheras now there's a carefully numbered streetplan overlaying everything. The tunes and the thoughts don't seem so different to me, but they're boxed up now; it's like reading a press release instead of a letter. If I'd never heard her before -- which the fans she's courting here probably haven't -- this wouldn't bug me in the slightest. But I'd agree with Douglas that it's a loss.

What's gained is sort of a side-issue: I'm not sure any critics or rockers are ever going to admit what an amazing thing this sort of Matrix-style rock production is. It sounds and feels more like rock than pop productions have in a long time, but it manages to shoehorn in there every advantage of high-tech detail -- all those swooshes and glosses and tweaks riding in all over the place, from the scratches leading into the verses of "Complicated" to the tweaky shifting of "Rock Me." (This approach, interestingly, isn't so far off from what Brad Wood and Casey Rice were doing -- in the indie context -- with some of the songs on Guyville.)

There's a better metaphor for the change, actually, and a very Chicago one; Phair is the fascinating city friend who's moved out to the suburbs and now does more outlet shopping than partying. Of this model there are two types: one type makes unapologetic noises about growing up and changing, whereas the other claims not to have changed at all, only changed situations. Phair's the latter, which is why she's singing "White Hot Cum" -- I'm sure she's well aware that this second type tend to look like they're just guilty and overcompensating, and it's sort of touching that she doesn't care. And the completing twist, of course, is that she's very literally from the Chicago suburbs in the first place.

She sounds good; I like this; she sounds like Avril's mother or something. But I completely understand where Douglas is coming from: this isn't as special a thing and arguably not as good a thing as the old Phair. It's not just that she went pop -- it's that going pop meant filtering out a few of the things that were most interesting and valuable about her songwriting. She managed to keep a lot of interesting and valuable things in there, I think -- a lot of those songwriting idiosyncrasies I was talking about earlier seem to still be in there, and I doubt she'd be able to stop writing songs that sound like Liz Phair songs even if she tried a million times harder -- but there are still a few tricks missing. And as for the genre switch, I'll admit it: most of why I liked listening to indie back in the Phair era was precisely because it embraced a bunch of basically pop/rock songwriters who just happened to have odd, slanted visions of how pop/rock should turn out. It's easy to miss that.

Still, so far I like this okay; I'm starting to think Matrix-rock is a pretty cool thing, and I like the twist that Phair's retained idiosyncrasies put on it.

(Here's another one: despite my saying you can think of Guyvile as "not indie," it does include the line "I was pretending that I was in a Galaxie 500 video.")

I wish she'd recorded an entire album with Material Issue...their Banana Splits cover was as "big" and "slick" and "rawk" as all getout, but still felt charming rather than processed with a belt sander.

How this manages to be a compliment is perplexing and yet oddly satisfying in a way.

(Sorry to lurk around this thread but I'm over here having a head-exploding Guyville and new-one experience. I'd forgotten some of the highlights of Guyville: that half-sad "I guess I already am" on "Divorce Song" just kills me.)

I hope everyone is stealing this record from duh in-ter-net and not buying it so it doesn't encourage her further. But then I suppose she'll turn around an sue you all.

While I still think the new album has a depressing amount of generic "mere professionalism" on it (way more than the White Stripes, Chuck), especially in the modest soft-verse/loud-chrous session dood shuffles, there ARE definite hooks on most of the songs, and a few have great lyrics. Her change still feels like a CONCESSION to some degree, but she hasn't lost the ability to create withering portraits of romantic interaction (she also hasn't lost the ability to write meandering filler either). The song about her son's truck is really touching and there's a few others I dug strongly too. I don't see this as being better than White Chocolate Space Egg or Exile (which are frankly much less generic musically), but it's nowhere as WORSE as I thought.

I feel like among many who gave Phair tons of credit for being a really talented artist circa Girlysound and Guyville, what's being played out now is this scrambling to create two boxes small enough and sexist enough to contain two Liz Phairs, Her Earlier Vision and Its Betrayal. We love her b/c she was so quirky and uncomfortable, and now there's this refined slick order that's taken over. Often, rather than trying to account for a career-length process of growth and change, the nicest thing that can be said once the categories of analysis have been created is to give Phair credit for having a vision of Liz Phair v2.0 (a fixed image of herself as pop star) and declaring that she's not achieving it.

Either that or you decide the record execs signed up Liz Phair v1.0 and decided they'd cash in by pulling her strings.

Perhaps Liz Phair decided to risk alienating a particular indie-elitist moralizing cross-section of her original fans because THEY SUCK.

And James, I've heard only a few of the singles and they didn't sound much slicker than whitechocolatespaceegg, and that record seemed to only get deeper and more interesting with each listen.

Actually, it's because they don't suck quite hard enough, especially when compared to white-hot Xbox-wielding studpups.

But hey, forsaking elitist art for the demands of the dumberer worked wonders for, oh, Genesis, Yes, the Tubes, REM, etc. Here's hoping she doesn't have to come crawling back to the cult with a remastered "Girlysound."

Daria, as for the two-categories thing, I'm not sure it's worth pretending that's some sort of critic's construction: Phair herself has pretty much explicitly said she was deliberately doing something different.

NB: the voice really is the biggest thing missing here. I honestly wouldn't even recognize this as her. I honestly wouldn't recognize this as anybody; a lot of the vocals seem like they were groomed to be as indistinct as possible for each specific track.

The song makes me laugh exactly because of the casual obnoxiousness + arrogance of tossing off these insults at the guy & also her potential audience the way she does. "You said things I wouldn't say.. straight to my face," you know, that sort of behaviour, except now she's saying them. I get a kick out of it, what can I say.

Honestly? Really? Now come on. It may sound watered down, but it still doesn't sound like anybody else.

Hmm.. Nabisco, thinking about what you said, I am not doing a good job at putting into words what I think is going on re: critical responses to the album & Phair's career in general. I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do so right now.. it's as if I'm seeing this huge clash going on, and it's got something to do with her motivations and image and there's a huge gender issue that's part of it too. One person hears boring lyrics, I hear extremely funny ones; another person thinks she's made a horrible mistake; I'm really fascinated by what she's decided to do, that it involves a total unapologetic acknowledgement that making music is a job and you have to make business decisions about it too.

The original question's reference to Welles doing a Paul Masson ad just struck me.. I wonder when in his career he did that? Is it particularly tough to see an artist you admire making a blatant business decision? If he'd done it earlier, would he have had enough $$ and thus enough leverage to keep the studio from mucking up The Lady from Shanghai?

Here's another question: If one could say that she wanted to make a big radio-friendly rock record and used the Matrix to help w/this, well, what terms do you use to measure the success of such an enterprise? Number of records sold? The singles getting radio/MTV airplay? Maybe just by virtue of having made the record, regardless of its popularity?

Hmm.. I was reading this piece by Franklin Soults that I agree with more than any other (aside from the point re: Madonna and sex talk as testing the limits of pop).

Oh la la, thanks for the info Kenan, that's awful then. I don't think an incapacitated formerly great artist who's exploited like that has much to do w/what I'm talking about here.

hahaha! I was SO waiting for yet another "feminism is in danger" reference, now that Ally McBeal's off the air. There's also this bitchin' quote in which a modern-rock radio guy suggests that women over 25 will relate to the "soccer-mom lifestyle" in her new songs.

Daria G's take on all this truly rocks various casbahs.

perhaps this is why the video (which i saw on 'subterranean' last night, so much for trying to alienate that demographic(??)) is styled as such (liz & band are in various album covers that are flipped through on a jukebox) so that every frame says LIZ PHAIR on it somewhere -- 'don't forget her name, don't forget her name, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WE SPENT SO MUCH MONEY ON THIS DON'T FORGET HER NAME' being the not-so-underlying message.

but watching the video made me wonder just how serious the push to the trl crowd is, because it's not visually compelling at all -- it feels like one of those 'wait-who-was-that-again?' videos that i see on vh1 classic from time to time.

i don't know, listening to the album has been more than a chore for me because liz's vocals sound like they're being presented to us through about eight pneumatic tubes

I don't know what thread to revive but I chose this one because I've been listening to her lots & these are the two excellent albums.

I can't stop listening to "Red Light Fever". I would love to hear a Paramore cover, because this song would fit perfectly on the self-titled Paramore album. It's just short of a country song. I've been trying to read about it, but google reveals that most of the writing about the album was boring, focusing on the "controversial" rejection of her previous ethos. But I found one interview with Gary Clark, with whom she co-wrote "Red Light Fever", and he says "She made a whole album with Michael Penn, on which there were lot of my songs – like, eight songs or something – and I have never heard it to this day." I want to hear this album too!

I can see how "Little Digger" would have been overlooked: think about the pop audience that's going to respond to a song about a mother relating to her young son's relating to her new partners. But it's an intense performance, recognizing how her decisions and her desires impact her son, with her quavering on "my mother is mine" reflecting how she understands her son's protectiveness of her, herself at the middle of three men's understandings of her, trying to perform those understandings through her own voice.

"Friend of Mine" is another one that I can't find much about. Is that her guitar solo? Who did the string arrangement? It's a huge song, unlike anything else on this album.

I'm almost 30 years late to this album. It's not as if I wasn't tuned in in 1993 - I was the target age - but I was just listening to other things.

I like '6'1''; I like "Fuck and Run." "Stratford-on-Guy" is LOVELY.

I notice the Rolling Stones motifs. I even wonder if she used the same alternate tuning as Keith Richards, bc a lot of her chords sound Stonesy.

She sings in a limited range, almost conversationally, but it works.

I'm a new Liz Phair fan, decades too late.

Talking about Exile in Guyville of course

hi!

Hi! Have you expounded on this album somewhere, because again, I'm sorry if I've missed the whole discussion