Liz Phair
Have you heard... Liz Phair?
Everyone likes Liz Phair, especially intelligent blokes (you see throngs of them at Natasha Khan's live gigs videoing her thoughtfully). Taking influence from 70's film soundtracks, weather phenomena, childhood Halloween parties and a David Lynchian vision of suburbia, Liz Phair will take you on a very strange journey indeed...
Musical style: Confrontational, emotionally-charged feminist pop-rock
Okay, the thing about Liz Phair is that when she first started out in 1993 she was far more subversive than she is now, wrapping beautiful, growling pop tunes around bleak and uncompromising lyrics. We want to pretend the last 10 or so years never happened, and skip right back to 1993...
Her debut album 'Exile in Guysville' was a bit of genius, getting her critical acclaim and no money. The sad truth is that she followed this up with a succession of increasingly diluted and commercial albums (once you self-title an album, as she did with her fourth album 'Liz Phair', you know you're in trouble, soul-wise) and earned considerable moolah through hosting her songs on adverts and such, but at the cost of general respect.
We're going to pretend that Liz Phair never transformed into a shiny-slick product on the lines of self-styled 'pop-punk princess' Avril Lavigne. We're going to pretend she never teamed up to make the evil self-titled fourth album with The Matrix (the hit-making team responsible for Lavigne, unsurprisingly enough). We're also going to pretend she didn't do a cover shoot for a recent birthday under the tagline "Hot M.I.L.F." in Rolling Stone Magazine.
Instead, we'll focus on her early work, from the days when she sang to exorcise the darkness from her soul, not to generate cash.
Liz Phair was a firebrand from Chicago with an authentic and creative voice who tried to push the boundaries of lyrical expression (translation: her lyrics were sexual, bruised and cynical). Her approach to singing/songwriting was appropriated by contemporaries like Alanis Morissette who went on to sell millions of albums while Phair remained obscure.
In her early twenties, Phair released her debut album, Exile in Guysville (a reference to the malecentric Chicago music scene). Recorded in a garage before the days when lo-fi was fashionable, Guysville was a sprawling, ambitious epic. Its tracks were a riposte to the Rolling Stone's Exile On Main Street, with each track on her work being a flipside to what its mirrored song by the Rolling Stones represented. An innovative and grand approach ('hey, I'm in my twenties, I'm going to take on the Stones...'). More importantly, the songs were gutsy and well-formed, funny, sad, they had a downbeat passion, and they were sexually frank in a way that wasn't de rigeur at the time.
The following lyrics may give a clue to how Liz Phair's career has progressed over the years:
Fuck and Run Lyrics - Exile in Guysville
I woke up alarmed
I didn't know where I was at first
Just that I woke up in your arms
And almost immediately I felt sorry
'Cause I didn't think this would happen again
No matter what I could do or say
Just that I didn't think this would happen again
With or without my best intentions, and
What ever happened to a boyfriend
The kind of guy who tries to win you over, and
What ever happened to a boyfriend
The kind of guy who makes love cause he's in it, and
I want a boyfriend
I want a boyfriend
I want all that stupid old shit
Like letters and sodas
'Can't get out of what I'm into' - ('Girlysound Demos')
But I can't get out of what I'm into
'Cause it's a steady job
And it's the only thing that makes me money
And it gives me something to laugh about
'Cause my real life ain't fucking funny
We can only assume that the stuff that Liz Phair has done more recently (which, to be fair, still shows touches of the old Liz Phair in its subject matter if not in its excess polish and 'sexygirl' album covers) is a 'steady job' and 'the only thing that makes... money'. And let's hope the extra cash has given her 'something to laugh about'.
And before we get too damning, let's remember that Liz Phair is commercially successful from having built on feminist music roots, and she's a forty year old mother who's clearly enjoying herself as she continues to make music - and these are mooky approaches to life that should not be denied.
If you want to check out Liz Phair, start with Exile in Guysville and move straight onto the Girlysound Demos, which were released in 2006 but contain material recorded in 1991 which is, on the whole, seriously worth listening to.
Liz Phair used to be a genius. Let's not forget it.
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