Tonight’s selections from Liz Phair’s 1993 debut, Exile in Guyville. Rework of a diary published in March 2021. UPDATE: Republishing to An Ear for Music (Thanks for adding me!) as a test and because I feel this is an Important album that deserves more attention.
Before I ever heard Liz Phair, I heard about Liz Phair. The Midwestern indie-rock gossip train had made the trip from Chicago, her hometown, to the Minneapolis record store where I worked in high school weeks before an advance copy of her 1993 debut, Exile in Guyville, did. Listening to the men I worked alongside pick apart this woman none of them knew – whom they called an amateur and a slut because she’d written a song called “Fuck and Run” and reportedly appeared topless on her album cover – taught me a crucial early lesson: The boys who run this scene will hate your ambition either way, so you might as well just do whatever you want.
It’s hard to overstate what Guyville meant at the time. Today, echoes of its direct, finessed feminist interiority can be heard in similar work by young artists like Mitski, Soccer Mommy, St. Vincent, Snail Mail and others. In 1993, she was at the vanguard. A double album debut was audacious; her clear-eyed and candid presentation of sexuality and gendered experience of the music scene even more so. Musically, its versatility showed Phair as an auteur with the vision and chops to back up her ambitions. The album was finessed and dynamic from start to finish, from the single “Never Said,” a wry anti-kiss-‘n’-tell anthem with a soaring, multi-tracked harmonic “I,” to the more subtle but no less complex “Stratford-on-Guy,” where Phair sings about flying over Chicago, imagining a cinematic upgrade of her life – pretending she’s in a Galaxie 500 video. The subject matter was certainly striking, but the bigger deal was a double album of flawless songcraft. — Jessica Hopper
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Never Said
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Men and women have written paeons to Phair since Guyville was released, putting her swagger, strength, and mundanity in whatever context meant the most to them. But let's start with "female rocker." Guyville still runs up your spine on track one with its full-on opener, "6'1'", which is the best song she's ever recorded: tough but exposed, with cute feints in the lyrics, a wicked riff, and the door slamming open on her sassy tomboy vocals. — Pitchfork
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6’1”
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Phair was pissed off, stoned, obsessive-compulsive, crushing on an unattainable rocker, and underemployed: a perfectly warped creative storm. "I had tons of dream time," she says, and began an intense relationship with Exile on Main Street. "I would really pretend that all the answers to all my questions were in Mick's lyrics and this record, and I would dream I was having this conversation." In 1993, her own 18-song disc Exile in Guyville arrived, touted as a "track-by-track response" to the Stones' double LP. — Rolling Stone
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Mesmerizing
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This was [the counterpart to] the Rolling Stones’ “All Down the Line” in my saga. They’ve just been in their disagreement moment and now the guy is checking out and hitting the road. He’s going back out on tour. I liken “Johnny Sunshine” to investing all this stuff in this relationship and then you’re just taking off. It’s that feeling of abandonment that you feel when you’re like, “Fine! Go! I don’t care.” Then, of course, you break into the truth of it, which is that she’s devastated. — Liz Phair
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Johnny Sunshine
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Not a day goes by that someone doesn't tell me that they booked 27D on their airplane seat specifically to have that experience [laughs]. It's amazing. [...]
They felt like they were the arbiters of cool and "Stratford-on-Guy" is me waking up as I travel out of there and just getting out of that neighborhood and it all falls off of you. It all just falls away. There is this sense that you're literally at 30,000 feet above the scene that you are so involved in and this relationship you're so involved in and it's just a literal perspective shift above it. A lot of the bullshit just falls away. — Liz Phair
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Stratford-On-Guy
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Twenty [now thirty] years after its release, two things are apparent about Liz Phair’s debut album, “Exile in Guyville.” The first is that the record is still worth listening to. If you haven’t heard it recently, “Guyville” is many things. It’s an eighteen-song record of what used to be called indie rock, arguably the quintessential example of the form. It was conceived and written by Phair when she was a twenty-five-year-old Oberlin graduate, and then reconceived as an impressionistic, atmospheric song cycle in a Chicago recording studio by a young producer named Brad Wood.
“Exile” is part coming-of-age story and part systematic inquiry into the fractured psyche of American nineties womanhood. At the time, it was a landmark of foul-mouthed, compromised intimacy, a tortured confessional, a workout in female braggadocio, and a wellspring of penetrating self-analysis and audacity. Phair was as lyrical as Joni Mitchell but played as tough as Chrissie Hynde; she was as smart as Courtney Love and as comfortable toying with sexual imagery as Madonna. — The New Yorker
The three songs that kick off side 3 of Exile are a great example of “a landmark of foul-mouthed, compromised intimacy, a tortured confessional, a workout in female braggadocio, and a wellspring of penetrating self-analysis and audacity” as quoted above.
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Fuck and Run
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Girls! Girls! Girls!
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Divorce Song
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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Jake Gyllenhaal, Whitney Cummings, boygenius
Jimmy Fallon: Ray Romano, Zoe Lister-Jones, Flo
Stephen Colbert: Rachel Weisz
Seth Meyers: Jason Bateman, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Brann Dailor (R 4/4/23)
James Corden: Billy Porter, Lisa Kudrow
Daily Show: Guest host Jordan Klepper
SPOILER WARNING
A late night gathering for non serious palaver that does not speak of that night’s show. Posting a spoiler will get you brollywhacked. You don’t want that to happen to you. It's a fate worse than a fate worse than death.
LAST WEEK'S POLL: SONGWRITING PAIR
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Pie 10%