Gina Arnold on Liz Phair

True, Liz Phair's first single, "Why Can't I," is as unstoppably catchy as, yes, one of Avril Lavigne's horrid offerings, but wouldn't you rather hear someone with authentic musical context and actual songwriting talent sing a song like that, rather than an eighteen-year-old phony punk rocker?

also,

If Liz Phair can still shock and appall people, in what way is she selling out?

who the fuck is still shocked & appalled by Liz Phair? and how does this concept prohibit her selling out?

"oooh! my parents are scared of her filthy language and base pandering to my 16 year old sexual desires! she MUST still have cred!"

where's Gina Arnold finding these new issues of Forced Exposure?

a critic criticizing other critics for being critical of a critical darling. it's a beautiful thing.

Liz Phair has presented the world with a conundrum: a commercial record by an edgy artist. As such, it has created the greatest example of raging idiocy in rock criticism since the mainstream press decried Elvis Presley for wiggling his hips. Perhaps this was inevitable since, like Presley before her, Phair is a breaker of gender stereotypes -- from the outset she has written great, true songs about what assholes guys are, and how it feels to be female.

is so monumentally stupid, puffed up, and full of uh gross exxxagerations (what my mom would call "fibs") that i don't even know where to begin.

Similarly, maybe, an abandonment of the sonic *signifiers* of indie while still not producing "bad" songs challenges the indie ethos to the core, promises the overturn of Albini and The Velvets and Theee Pixees by THEEE MATRYX.

1) The world in small or large terms was NOT panting with anticipation for a new Liz Phair album, from what it seems.

2) The announcement of a new album that was more overtly pop-friendly caused a slew of biases to (re)emerge that had nothing to do with the album -- to force a comparison, it was a case where a specific event resulted in axes being reground as much as they were on the social and political front after 9/11.

Add to that the fact that Arnold is now a Hilburn for the alt set and frankly who gives a flying one.

Wow! Okay, on second thought, I DON'T agree with it anymore. (In fact, Gina Arnold proclaiming "we won" after 1991, the year Nirvana got famous, was pretty ragingly idiotic in its own rock-crit right.)

>>Which published criticisms in particular struck you that way, chuck?"

Start with the New York Times one, then work your way down. (Never read the Pitchfork one - they gave it, like, a 0.0, right? Idiots.)

*well OK Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

"Why Can't I" is a good song anyway, but not as good as "Complicated" or "Sk8er Boi" or "I'm With You".

All the rest of the "indie" comments seemed to be sour grapes from Liz and people who liked the album, accusing its detractors of clinging to "indie" when they weren't at all.

but this:

Perhaps this was inevitable since, like Presley before her, Phair is a breaker of gender stereotypes -- from the outset she has written great, true songs about what assholes guys are, and how it feels to be female.

my mom has spent a lot of time telling me what assholes guys are, too, lately, on the eve of her pending divorce. but, um, doesn't that just sound like the nbc must-see-TV line-up to anyone else?

I'm surprised you found the NY Times article to be "ageist"; I remember it being thoughtful, and very specifically about one person's relationship to specific aspects of Liz Phair's music.

From the Onion AV Club's review (which I remembered mentioning this same song, and specifically discussing others): It's hard to sound condescending singing to a child, but Phair pulls it off with "Little Digger." The lover-as-underwear metaphor of "Favorite" wouldn't work even with a better tune, and the semen-as-skin-conditioner ode "H.W.C." seems thrown in out of some vestigial desire to shock.

Is the Onion saying any of what Arnold says "the critics" are saying? Is it saying that "the life experiences of women in their thirties (and forties and fifties and so on) have no place in pop music"? Or is it just saying that the songs don't work? Which is what I remember most of the negative reviews saying.

The ageist stuff was, for instance, when the writer was comparing Liz to a mid-life-crisising guy buying a sports car (or something like that -- don't have the review in front of me) as if it's only okay (or daring, or whatever) for REALLY YOUNG women singers to have sex lives, or sing about them. The rest of the article struck me as even-more-deluded-than-usual seventh-grade* whining-about-selling-out-and-about-how-much-more-innovative-indie-rock-is-than-pop-music cliche's. One of the dumbest pieces of music criticism I've read this year if not ever (though the Northern State thing in Pitchfork comes close).

* -- nothing against seventh graders; when seventh graders make these kinds of comments, it might actually BE interestesting or daring. I'm assuming, maybe wrongly, that the writer was NOT a seventh grader.

http://www.theonionavclub.com/review.php?review_id=6598

And the sports car thing... I dunno, I'd still need to see actual passages of reviews that criticized the idea of older women having a sex life. I don't know if it was knocking the idea of older women having sexuality/being sexy/presenting their sexuality how they want to, or if it was expressing embarrassment over the way Liz was doing it.

the thing that i was most surprised about in the times article was that the editor would think that "what indie rock means to me" was worth devoting column-space to, given their basic readership.

Keller is not Raines redux. But he, too, will need to be cognizant of the 18-to-34 demographic that advertisers love so dearly. Just listen to what Raines said on The Charlie Rose Show about his talks with publisher Pinch Sulzberger. Does anyone really think they hadn’t discussed those NYT statistics showing that 80 million people in this country have “the intellectual appetite for a paper like The New York Times,” yet it only has a circulation of 1.2 million daily? That the two hadn’t believed in the need to “change the paper, not in its standards, not in its principles, but in the breadth of its intellectual interests and in its vitality in graphics, in the way it’s written, in the way stories are selected so that you get the other 78 million.”

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/36/deadline-finke.php

Then why doesn't everyone listen to a GOOD one? Like Kristen Hersh's Grotto or the spectacular Throwing Muses reunion (that's gotten far less press than Phair's album - undeservedly), or Kay Hanley, or Tanya Donelly?

Noted, but again, I really do lurv them Faint and them Rapture, and they're just as entrapped in the context. So I'm hardly damning across the board. I will say that being able to see the Chameleons live three times in a week last October reminded me once again how readily they hit a peak for me that Interpol couldn't begin to climb at present -- and Mark Burgess is just as apt at sometimes bemusing and sometimes clunky metaphors about love and connection as Interpol, if we have to play the lyrical game. So why do the Chameleons, with lyrics from when THEY were the same age as Interpol, capture in my mind a sense of encompassing, enveloping warmth which Interpol lacks? I don't think it has anything do with sincerity or its perceived application, but I sure do think it has a lot to do with how they can fire on all fours in the ways others here have been crediting for Interpol -- but in a band like the Chameleons is where I hear it, not in Our Apple-Cheeked NYC Quartet.

Maybe 'cause they're the sort of guys who'd hang out to talk Merovingian conspiracy theories after a show (true story, I couldn't make it and my 'buff' brother went instead. He had a great time!)--whatever else you'd say about Interpol, I don't see 'em doing that ...

Liz Phair sold more right out the gate than Interpol has, so ya know. And it may well sell more. Just today I heard that Lilix song about how it's about life and it's about the Matrix and I thought it was Liz Phair until about the chorus (the LP song is way better, don't get me wrong. I just think her sonic similarity with everyone else on the radio will boost sales a bit, especially since she has better lyrics).

I see the Liz Phair album possibly taking the same "slow burn" path that, for instance, Norah Jones did. And what the figgity fuck do Interpol & Liz Phair have to do with each other in 2003? At all? Huh? Wha? (Matador affiliation don't mean sheeeeeeeeeeit in answering this inquiry, BTW.)

as some (not to reopen a can of worms but) maybe felt about Guyville, making subsequent bites harder to swallow ...

(in my neighborhood at least. Liz Phair should be playing farmer's markets)

* the source of my bitterness to be sure

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Girly Sound is (so far) Liz Clark Phair. She lives in a suburb of Chicago in her parents' house. She's done with college, done with the notion that she may have been the one whose life could have started with a silver step (it didn't). For now she's staying home and scrounging for some evidence of her existence. In between her life she's put out a tape of some of the most moving music made in a bedroom. The tape contains 12 songs with a homemade cover, and is mesmerizing. The arrangement throughout never varies: only her voice (double tracked) and a lone electric guitar playing made up chords, simple elements endlessly repeated until they become a sensual drawl slipping you into her short life. This is her first batch of songs and her self-consciousness shows. Being at her parents' house she can't possibly weigh her words with a passion that might complement her music but the result is an unbearable nervous calm that's unsettling and beautiful.

Her singing style is a drawl, as if she's talking into her own head about every friend, fuck or house she's known. The evidence comes effortlessly because she's been walking for miles now. She fills her songs with the mundane details that turn into jewels inside her hesitant mouth, a shy voice singing, "you've gotta have FEAR in your heart..." over and over. The mixed up guitar chords are barely enough to catch a thought or a phrase before it's tossed away.

It's meaningless to offer up Jandek or Daniel Johnston as comparison here despite the obvious qualifications. Girly Sound is My Bloody Valentine, is (My) Sonic Youth, it's every immensely popular "cool" band we've ever spent the night listening to, digging it like a sucker. I know in some ways Liz Phair, like a lot of people would settle for popularity and recognition, a little conversation, no problem. We wouldn't settle for anything less (meanwhile working at temp jobs, if working at all). We get high and INTO it and RELATE to our "secret personal friendships" with Pussy Galore, Galaxie 500 (i.e. our favorite whoevers), we want to appear in Sassy because we want to swoon and be swooned on. And that is the stupid heart of Girly Sound, staying up all night with a dumb dream of success.

The subtle kiss that will emerge once you get past the boo-hoo sentimental meaningfulisms is that this music is really joyful and funny. It's not a sarcastic in-joke but it's in the concept, get it?

She's singing with closed eyes, "...you've got a lot of nerve coming here after all the times that you tried to pull the wool over my eyes and ears and nose and mouth and don't be so in love with yourself cause I'm not... and he said you've got a lot of nerve painting me like I'm the villain what about all those words like 'he's just a friend' what a load of bullshit..." Out of stagnant fouroclockinthechicagofuckenmornings she's dashing out the dots of her aimless Liz Phair story, and I am AAAAAAHHH. Send her some cash for a tape, she'll probably be up to tape #11 by the time you read this. (Liz Phair, [address withheld], Winnetka, IL 60093)

- Tae Won Yu
Chemical Imbalance Magazine, 1991

Jandek + The Matrix = ????

Just preferably not California ones that old men drive cars through.

She sang with him the last time I saw him play! That's the cool way to tour with a kid. The not cool way was when my wife took me to see Shawn Colvin, and Colvin's two-year-old daughter came out between songs and everyone in the audience went, "Awwwwwwwww." Like, look kid, if you can't sing or dance, stay out of the limelight. Of course, she was only two.

Please tell me her daughter was wearing a bullet-proof vest.

in what way?

"For some reason, my opinions are read as threatening--and I don't know if that's because they are uttered by a girl, or because they actually ARE threatening (although if it's the latter, people sure are easily cowed)."

I want to say something here, but perhaps Gina does a better job herself. Boy am I scared.

her 33 1/3 book is out today. haven't read the times review

the opening few posts of this thread are like the worst

disagree. "Writing proper pop songs" is most definitely a criticism. The best part about phair's early stuff was the kind-of-off structure and melody (cf. "Stratford-on-Guy"). There's nothing half as interesting-sounding as that song on "Liz Phair" (or "Whitechocolatespaceegg" for that matter). But hey, who am I, anyway? I don't like Avril at all (the big choruses drive me nuts)!

― J (Jay),

There's so much of early ILM saying everything contemporary is utter shit yet everyone likes now

Hm. Missed that Jay post the first time. At least he was defending the appeal of "intuitive" composition. I thought it was nice at the time but that was before the Internet and it seems too personal and sensitive for me now. I can't even bear to peek at the book.