I am pretty sure one of the reasons I like Courtney Barnett so much is due to my Liz Phair fandom when I was a 20-something.
Back then, I gave anything and everything on the Matador label a fair shake. So much of it was so good — Phair, Yo La Tengo, Teenage Fanclub, Pavement, Guided By Voices, Guitar Wolf, Chavez, Boards Of Canada, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Cat Power, Neko Case and Spoon.
Matador signed Phair based on a home demo cassette. They hadn’t met her and hadn’t seen her perform. We’re going to examine the result of that signing — Phair’s debut, Exile In Guyville. I was in deep with her first three albums. But if I’m honest, I haven’t heard anything from her four albums after Whitechocolatespaceegg. That’s weird, right?
What got me right away with Phair was the “single” from Exile In Guyville, Fuck And Run. Not only does it have the F-bomb, but it’s a catchy and cool song of female empowerment. I have never been comfortable with macho, masculine sexualised songs by men. I find it cringey and uncomfortable. It’s why I struggle with hair metal. The only way I can enjoy it is if it is ironic, satirical, tongue-in-cheek or ridiculous. For example, I love Slip It In by Black Flag but not Slide It In by Whitesnake. But I also like KISS — except only in makeup. Not a fan of Mötley Crüe, but I love Van Halen.
Anyway, all this to say that sexually suggestive, empowerment or statement songs by women are usually very appealing to me:
“I can feel it in my bones
I’m gonna spend another year alone
It’s fuck and run, fuck and run
Even when I was 17
Fuck and run, fuck and run
Even when I was 12.”
It’s warts-and-all stuff. Maybe not relatable, but relatable to lots of people I cared about. It’s also insightful, or felt insightful. It felt right and smart to be one of the people who really liked this song. Phair’s songs were clever and smart, which mattered to me. I know I was a little pretentious about that, ironically. I still am.
Phair claims her debut is a concept album — a song-for-song skewering of Exile On Main Street by The Rolling Stones. Both albums have 18 songs. Phair’s album sets out to rewrite each Stones track as a reply from the female point of view. This is a bit weird for me because, somehow, I didn’t know this about the album until recently. I owned Guyville decades before I owned a copy of Main Street. I loved Guyville as a collection of songs, not a concept. Besides, the concept seems obvious anyway — strong songs about how shitty, maddening and toxic it is can be as a woman in the music industry.
Lots of people caught on to what Phair was doing on Exile In Guyville. Her followup Whip-Smart was a major success — released just over a year later. Whitechocolatespaceegg is good, but not great — and then it all goes to hell in a handbasket. Two duds in a row which I never bought and only heard bits of. Phair went into doing TV themes and disappeared from my world for a whole decade before showing up with a new album in the middle of a global pandemic. I haven’t listened to it, but apparently it’s good.
So, let’s go through that debut already. It’s been awhile since I spun this record, and — how do I say this? It’s not as good as I remember. It’s also a double album. It opens with the catchy 6’1″, which has all the Phair-acteristics on display: Guitar/bass/drums, no solos, loads of sung-spoken lyrics, hooks over melodies, not everything rhymes, flat vocals and hard-earned lesson words:
“I bet you fall in bed too easily
With the beautiful girls who are shyly brave
And you sell yourself as a man to save
But all the money in the world is not enough.”
What I really like about this track is it sounds live off the floor. She basically made the record with the producer and engineer as musicians. It sounds like a band. It demands your attention. If you’re listening, it’s great. If you’ve got it on but are doing something else, it’s probably annoying.
Help Me Mary is a little groovier, catchier and sweeter — in tone, but not necessarily in its message. I used to listen to this when I was in college and there were people at my apartment who I didn’t invite. This and Some Of Them Are Old by Eno.
Glory is the first one to be slightly different — acoustic and intimate. More softly sung than the previous two, with a slightly more artistic chorus. It’s got a bit of a Breeders feel. One of their darker tunes.
Dance Of The Seven Veils is another lessons-learned song, and maybe a rarity in that the chorus has the word cunt in it, and Phair’s not even British. It’s a very simple arrangement and creatively sung.
Never Said follows this, and is probably the most commercial song on the record. It’s somehow both very ’90s and not terribly dated at the same time. It has all the ringers — a great pair of melodies, solid performances with effective overdubs and backing vocals. It’s an indie hit, a cool-kid classic with loads of appeal. Except, perhaps, to the grammar police who would scold her for the double-negative.
Side 2 starts with a song which I always thought had a Syd Barrett-like riff and Billy Bragg arrangement. It has cool drum accents rather than a beat throughout. The lyrics of Soap Star Joe are great and the bridge is, well, whip-smart. A feeding frenzy on the aging male actor with delusions of grandeur.
Explain It To Me is next. With its relentless Mo Tucker drumbeat, it’s a bit of a death march for my tastes. People like it, though — they even put it in the movie Thirteen.
Phair switches from guitar to piano for Canary, with its exquisite and delicate intro. But once the vocals come in it gets pretty monotonous and repetitious, redeemed twice by the chorus.
Mesmerizing concludes the second side. Somehow this feels like a Stones song to me. Maybe because it has bluesy lead guitar in it, and shaker. In fact, there’s no drums — just stomps and handclaps and shakers.
Side 3 starts with her best song, or at least the best one on this album — Fuck And Run. This is an all-time great for narrative lyrics. Phair paints a sympathetic picture of a young woman unable to find love and instead complicating her feelings and prolonging her loneliness by a series of one-night stands and unfulfilling sex dating back to her pre-teens. The F-bomb represents this. It’s not called Love And Run.
Girls! Girls! Girls! is next — another doozie, except of the stripped-down variety. Just guitar and vocal. It’s wry, clever and cool. She follows this with another more commercial number — Divorce Song. Maybe commercial isn’t the right word, maybe accessible is more accurate. It’s got a nicely stressed F-bomb and a brilliant line about marriage:
“The licence said you had to stick around until I was dead
But if you’re tired of looking at my face, then I guess I already am.”
There’s also a rock-out ending with a harmonica solo. A real gooder.
Shatter is a bit like poetry on top of some very raw and pure strummed electric guitar. Makes it quite cinematic — and also makes it the longest song on the album because the lyrics don’t start until 2:30. This is quite a song. Very intimate and raw. The ambient feedback and background noise adds a perfect amount of tension to a song seemingly about someone — just maybe — being surprised by their own genuine feelings.
Side 3 ends with the creative and devastating Flower. It’s sung in a round, with explicit lyrics. Like — whoa — explicit.
“I want to fuck you like a dog
I’ll take you home and make you like it
Everything you ever wanted
Everything you ever thought of
Is everything I’ll do to you
I’ll fuck you till your dick is blue.”
Hello. Except, I think the idea here is to use infantilizing, predatory, objectifying language about men the way it is often used about women. Flip it. Like when She And Him did Baby It’s Cold Outside with the roles reversed.
On to the last side — Johnny Sunshine isn’t as pleasant as it sounds. It’s a thumpin’ garage-rock number, really, with a sweetly-sung chorus-becomes-the-outro. Cool structure. Excellent song.
Gunshy is next. Not my favourite. It’s half-baked and outsider-artsy. It does, however, remind me of No Sky by Guided By Voices.
This is nicely followed by a top-notch Phair song, Stratford-On-Guy. Perhaps my second-favourite on the record. When she nails the narrative thing, she really nails it. I also am a sucker for her slacker-sweet delivery.
It all ends with Strange Loop, and its guitar and bass parts which sometimes seem like they’re from two different songs. This one is a bit uninspiring, really. But that might just be because the album is so damn long by this point.
I know it’s an old and revisionist shit-take thing to do, but — *whispers* — this would have been an incredible single album. I’d love to see an artist do that just once with a remaster, re-release — shorten it. Gawd knows I could shorten any one of my own albums. With pleasure. Yours AND mine.
3/5
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Area Resident is an Ottawa-based journalist, recording artist, music collector and re-seller. Hear (and buy) his music on Bandcamp, email him HERE, follow him on Instagram and check him out on Discogs.
