The Independence of Liz Phair

(Which reminds me of when I showed my resume to my mom, after interning at Minty Fresh in college, and she looked askance at the description "record label" and suggested that employers might not know what a "label" was. Huh? She wanted me to change it to "company," and I'm like, "Mom, it's not a 'record company,' it's not like Sony. People know what labels are!")

I suspect the Songs In the Key of Life response is just another line.

For the record, I think Whipsmart has been the only misstep (a retread of Guyville) in a career fueled by upsetting expectations.

This is a good point, now that I think about it.

my wife plays the s/t record in her car, along with Enrique Iglesias, Elvis Presley, the Dixie Chicks, Otis Redding, Dead Milkmen, the Shangri-Las, Simon & Garfunkel, and Couch Flambeau.

Yeah, I thought she was an "indie queen," not the "crown princess." Jeez.

I've tried but I just ended up fetal in the dirt singing lines about icarus.

Let me introduce you to some of my friends.

Not at all. Exact opposites, no?

Ah, they're the ones then.

I have a friend who actually discovered Liz via that last album, and loves it the best even after going back and buying all the others.

Become born-again formalists, my children. Eschew backstory; it rots your teeth.

So not true. A lot of my friends did feel betrayed by Whitechocolatespacegg and Liz Phair.

Feeling betrayed by any artist's decision = assuming one controls the artist. Not the healthiest of approaches.

This is because every interview is about this topic.

She pointed out that the record did pretty well, not huge, but enough to keep her and hers - she has an 8-year-old-son - in food and shelter.

This sentence makes my brain hurt.

"Used to love her, but I had to kill her. Her oh-so-naked grab for $$ and sales is appalling, and disgusting, and pathetic. I have N-O no respect for her anymore (and her songs, by and large, suck these days - I mean, the singer of "Fuck and Run" could kick the living shit out of the singer of "Why Can't I?")."

So...

She wasn't entirely naked. There was some kind of scarf thingie draped across her lap.

The most relevant fact about Liz and commercialism is that although there isn't a strict decline in record sales (the last one did better - albeit only slightly - than the third one, for instance), there IS an astonishing relationship between her sales and what her records cost to make and promote. If "Exile" was a 1 to 1 relationship, than "Whipsmart" was about 1 to 15, "Whitechocolate" about 1 to 30 and "Liz Phair" about 1 to 100. In other words, the more dollars they throw at her, the less the proportionate return. The last record barely broke even. You could expect that to some extent, as "Exile" was so cheap, but the enormity of the discrepancy is what's really interesting.

Liz was never particularly into "indie" rock or even music in general and always held Madonna (not Kim Gordon or whoever) up as her musical and career role model. I don't find Liz's "direction" to be very good or even remotely interesting, but I can see why the indie cred argument bugs her; it never was her scene. On the other hand, she firmly believes that a Madonna-style "Material Girl" candidness about her own ambition will work for her ultimately, in the sort of postmodern way it did for Madonna - despite the fact that she's just really not in the same league as Madonna in just about any sense. And of course, it's been done to death.

It seems like she's gained new fans to make up for those crying betrayal. It will hurt though when she realizes that these new fans are just as fickle as the indie fans.

Don't ask me to rationally defend this distinction, because I can't, but there it is.

those are great song titles.

haha oh boy

1) I conceded the what-those-songs-were-about a good while ago re Phair
2) the discussion moved toward Prince
3) I disagreed with some of the interpretive stuff in re: Prince based on things I've spent years thinking about, most of which is understandable enough but I've always heard them in different ways
4) this has jackshit to do with the Phair songs from earlier, whose content I conceded I probably misheard/remembered

there. is that basic enough for you?

And collaboratating with Dianne Warren and Desmond Child to craft singles wouldn't be closer to an artist's original intent?

Well, since Phair's songwriting shares exactly no aesthetic qualitites with Warren's (Desmond Child) - thematically, melodically, what have you - it's curious enough to warrant a "what's this about, then?" Like, if David Hockney suddenly announced a collaboration with Mark Kostabi (not that Phair's a Hockey nor Warren a Kostabi). There isn't much in Phair's catalogue that suggests an aesthetic kinship with Dianne Warren, so questioning whether the collaboration intends to explore some artistic connections or simply to "reach more listeners" (i.e. "make her songwriting more palatable to the broader audience that Warren has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to reach") seems fair.

Of course, the "debate" on "rockism" (which in its current incarnation is neither a debate, nor about rockism; it's public preening about social positioning) might argue that to decry artistic collaborations that are specifically about cold, hard cash is "naive," etc. But just because it's perfectly fine for art to be about commerce (it is!) doesn't mean that success is good simply by virtue of being profitable. Capitalism's all right (maybe), in other words; Wal-Mart's still a shitty store, and Phair/Warren's a dumb idea by any measure other than "hey, fuck, we could really sell some records if we got Dianne Warren on board!"

omg please have her release that!

http://www.patfullerton.com/superman/pix/phantomzone/generalzod.jpg

Liz & friends give oral history of Exile in Guyville
http://www.spin.com/articles/liz-phair-exile-in-guyville-oral-history-best-1993/

Phair: I can remember listening to [Guyville] in my apartment and thinking it sounded amazing. I was so proud and felt a rush of power because I had done something I knew was good. Listening back at my parents' house, privately, feeling terrified that my two worlds would collide and it was not going to be pretty. I had kept them separate. It would blow my cover.

Even more novel and exciting was the fact that Guyville was, in both form and concept, a rookie's rogue retort to classic rock: Phair conceived it as a track-by-track response to one of the pinnacles of swaggering musical masculinity, the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main St

I think I posted this on another thread, but a few days before it was released, she was interviewed on WXRT in Chicago. The interviewer asked if this was a response to the Stones record. Phair said she hadn't heard Main St. until after recording Guyville, and only knew it by name. The interviewer pointed out that Guyville had the same number of tracks as Main St.. Phair: "Really?! That's so weird. What a random coincidence."

= she was trolling xrt?

She seemed genuinely surprised. This was before there was much, or any, hype around her and the record.

Maybe she is a good actress? I dunno. I certainly don't think she's lying about it now.

Yeah, after she started talking about it being an intentional response I thought, huh, that's weird, she said she hadn't heard it. So yeah, either she was trolling xrt, or if she wasn't, she spent a lot of time coming up with a convincing backstory.

It was the way she described the way she went about the response that seemed really natural and logical to me, esp since she was a novice songwriter who had spent a lot of time listening to music.
trying to figure out patterns and reproduce them is what i'm doing right now, so that part really resonated with me. i have my own bizarro notation system and have adopted my own spirit animal record to experiment with. i hear where she's coming from and it doesn't seem to me to be an elaborate backstory. also she was at the age then that she totally would have trolled xrt!

i dunno, i thought it was interesting to read her in her own words with the benefit of hindsight.

Who among us wouldn't troll xrt if given then chance?

But it's definitely interesting reading about her/the record's development. Didn't know the drums were added last! Always thought the drumming on "Never Said" was pretty special.

The panning background vocals in the second verse (or bridge, I guess, since the melody is different) of "Never Said" are one of my favorite things in any 90s record.

I thought that bit about the drums was interesting too! i also like how they get the exile stuff out of the way and then get to nitty gritty -- focusing on the concept really gives the actual album short shrift. her notation system worked! how gratifying is that.

God, 6'1" is so great, as a song, as an album opener, as a statement of purpose, everything. That long, LONG first line, in which the entire verse is a single, coherent sentence, grows in awesomeness when I read her say: Like you are talking about tripping home from being at someone's house sleeping with them and you run into your other girlfriend while you're doing your walk of shame — which is what I thought about "Rocks Off." So I wrote a song like I was the girl he ran into, which was "6'1"."

this is (supposedly) the first article ever written about liz phair and she claims the 'exile' parallel was deliberate -- maybe she was going back and forth on whether or not it was a good idea to encourage the association.

http://www.hitsville.net/2013/06/24/exile-in-guyville-at-20-the-first-liz-phair-interview/

Her guitar tunings – her guitar playing, period – are mad underrated. I can listen to "Explain It To Me" ad infinitum.

maybe she was going back and forth on whether or not it was a good idea to encourage the association.

Yeah, maybe it wasn't clear exactly how the association would be received. I don't doubt now that she conceived of it as a response to the Stones, but I'm not really clear on how "Canary" relates to Angela Davis.

the amount of shit that liz phair has put up with (and probably dished out to herself to some extent) since Guyville came out is staggering

there are so many liz phair threads i wasn't sure which one to bump but i chose this one
debating whether or not i would completely lose it if i saw her play at the empty bottle at the close of her anniversary tour. also, $35. still think it would be super fun if i can manage to not freak out!

https://www.avclub.com/liz-phair-announces-massive-exile-in-guyville-reissue-1823801606

that sounds awesome. she was really great when I say her in '98, you should go!

I saw her at the last go-round of Guyville anniversary show at the Vic, and I thought she was great, LL. She has a really has such an interesting live guitar style/phrasing.

something about seeing her at the EB seems really appropriate

To dip back into the above convo from four years ago -- when you compare the two "Exile" albums song-by-song, it seems pretty clear that hers was indeed conceived at l ask loosely as a response to the Stones LP (musically, maybe even more than lyrically)... it's very impressive. She was probably indeed just trolling when she brushed it off in that first radio interview; or (more likely) didn't want to invite her album being saddled with the association at that early stage, and later was okay embracing it when it was clear that it wouldn't be portrayed as a negative?

("at I ask" = "at least". Autocorrect is killing me lately.)

Then again, a lot of those songs are on the Girlysound tapes (not tracking the Stones album), so I dunno. Maybe it was half serendipity, the way the parallels fell into place.

That SPIN article was really interesting & revealing; really cool to hear about how that album was constructed

Also

Her guitar tunings – her guitar playing, period – are mad underrated. I can listen to "Explain It To Me" ad infinitum.

― A deeper shade of lol (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, June 27, 2013 3:12 PM (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is super otm (& not solely bcz "Explain" is my OPO from the album)

Been playing her first three albums a lot since her show on Friday. This track is still a favorite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHqOJwgbpxo

FWIW, I also saw Richard Linklater's Before trilogy yesterday - I was surprised how disappointing the third film seemed when viewed immediately after the first two. It still had a good deal of promising ideas, but they give way to a pair of climactic scenes that feel much too prosaic and much too narrow - packed with dramatic fireworks but with nothing new to say. Liz's song suggests a whole lot more in its two minutes and 53 seconds.

^I revisited Whitechocolatespaceegg last week, and too was struck by how good & precisely worded that song is.