Liz Phair's strange new album

Sure do. Still do. You're the one who called them a "niche group."

When your fans are a "niche group," you're probably sleeping on their couches because you can't afford the Day's Inn.

 

That's silly. She had a "niche group" of fans, but it was a very, very sizable niche. I had all of her albums in the '90s, and I was certainly no badass underground music club goer. "Never Said" was a big radio hit. So was "Whip Smart." So was "Supernova."

I don't think the problem is so much that she tried to gain wider mainstream success. No one, for example, begrudges a band like Green Day for that. Or, hell, the Rolling Stones or Beatles.

The problem is that she wasn't very good at it, and she should have realized that in the midst of selling her soul to a bunch of producers who were leading her off a cliff trying to turn her into Ke$sha.

 

Agree 100 percent, DW.

And for those of you who own it, go ahead and play "Exile in Guyville." Liz Phair isn't the greatest singer or guitar player, but she was (is?) a hell of a songwriter.

 

"The Divorce Song" is one of my favorite songs of the decade. Just raw.

 

Yeah, she could have made it very big doing something pretty similar to what she really did best. Instead, she let producers turn her into Velveeta.

 

Velveeta is a very adept metaphor, because what she became was so inauthentic. When you hire The Matrix to write songs for you because you're impressed they were able to see Avril Levine as a pop-punk princess, you're not just sacrificing your credibility, you're lighting the damn thing on fire.

The A.V. Club said a lot of this in their most recent installment of Alternative Nation, but it perfectly summed up my feelings about what happened to Phair so I'm mostly going to paraphrase it here. Exile In Guyville is a genius album because of its raw honesty. Phair felt like women in her world weren't being taken seriously as artists or intellectuals, and that rock and roll just blindly celebrated the idea of the boozed up, coked up rock star fucking his way from bed to bed to cure a little bit of loneliness. And that's what makes "Fuck and Run" such a good song, because it flips it and makes you see the situation from the woman's perspective. It's not an angry song, it's just a weary lament of someone who let herself be fooled again into thinking some guy thought she was special. It's an incredible portrait of loneliness. I think "Divorce Song" is one of the best break-ups songs ever, because it truly nails a relationship coming apart over petty stupid shit.

I still think these are some of the best lines written about a bad relationship. I love how it picks up in mid-story, like you just walked in on two people having a fight.


And when I asked, for a separate room;
It was late at night. And we'd be driving since noon.
And if I'd known, how that would sound to you,
I would have stayed in my bed, for the rest of my life just to prove I was right
That it's harder to be friends that lovers; and you shouldn't try to mix the two.
Because if you do it and you're still unhappy; then you know that the problem is you.

The problem with what Phair became is that she abandoned the main quality that made her interesting, that made her stand out (because let's be honest, vocally and musically, she's nothing special). She was honest about her emotions, whether it was writing about her failings, or wanting to fuck someone you know is bad for you.

When she tried to pretend she was the love sick teen crooning "Why can't I sleep whenever I think about you?" or wanting to play X-Box on the floor with some young asshole, she seemed like every dumb, giggling, Miller Lite-drinking, please-pay-attention-to-me! party chick she was saying she wasn't with Guyville. Artists like Ke$ha, Brittney, Avril, Miley -- they needed packaging and gimmick because the were short on talent. Phair is a genuinely talented artist who put on a clown suit and no one bought it. Even she didn't seem to buy it. Her whole act was fake cheese, and it did not keep well.

 

I was about to point out that the essential A.V. Club had done a piece on Phair and the other Chicago bands of '93 that made something of an impact but Double Down beat me to it.

But he didn't post a link so FAIL, so here you go and the Billy Corgan/Smashing Pumpkins stuff is really interesting as well.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/part-4-1993-smashing-pumpkins-liz-phair-and-urge-o,47739/

 

Off the subject a bit, although kinda related, when I saw JF had posted, I had to mention that I finally got around to listening to Farrar's latest album. Jesus, for a guy who made "Trace," one of my deserted island favorites, he has really fallen. Every song sounded the same, and he didn't sound at all interested in what he was saying. He's always had a deatched, aloof quality, but, Jesus, all I kept thinking when I listened to the songs was how much Jeff Tweedy has expanded and experimented since Uncle Tupelo broke up and this guy keeps rehashing the same stuff stylisticly, only worse and worse with each release. I have given up on Jay. His music at this point does absolutely nothing for me. It belongs in elevators.

 

It isn't hard to see why Tweedy, by far the more experimental member of Uncle Tupelo, ditched Jay. You can hear it int he Uncle Tupelo songs he did.

And why Tweedy also ditched the other Jay, RIP. Wilco, for all intents and purposes is a new band each time a new album comes out. And with the exception of Stirratt, Wilco is pretty much a new band.

Early Farrar is essential listening but it sounds just like the songs he did with Uncle Tupleo.

The newer stuff, it isn't even worth a shrug. It makes me sad but I think Farrar is happy being the guy who piles into a minivan after a small club gig to hit the road for another small club gig a couple of hundred miles down the road.

 

I truly hope so, because if not — given the disparate roads he and Tweedy have traveled in the last 20-plus years — he has to be an absolutely miserable human being.

 

None of this, however, alters the fact that "Trace" is pretty much a perfect album, from start to finish.

"Sounds like 1963, but for now/Sounds like heaven."

I could drive coast to coast and listen to that damned song on repeat and be fine with it.

 

If nothing else, that story compelled me to pop on Urge Overkill's Positive Bleeding for the first time in years. Love that song.