whatever Mick was saying, it was a conversation with him
July 16, 2013 2:45 PM   Subscribe

Spin magazine's GIRLY SHOW: The oral history of Liz Phair's 'Exile in Guyville.' It's 20 years old now.
Phair: I remember some guy had come back to my apartment after the bars closed, and we were going to get high or something, and this happened a lot, and I took great pleasure in this. They'd be like, "Blah blah my music, I'm going to do this, blah blah." And then I would be like, "Oh, I'm recording a record too," and they'd be like, "Really?" I'd put it on and they'd be, like, "Oh my god, you really are recording a record." And that was always a proud moment, because I could blow them away because it was a totally good record.
Former Lucky editor Kim France has collected reminiscences about the record on her blog Girls of of a Certain Age: How Exile in Guyville Changed Our Lives.

And Jessica Grose over at Slate's Double X blog takes a (shocker!) contrarian view with her piece Exile in Guyville Is 20. You Should Listen to Liz Phair's Other Albums.

(Previously: A 15th anniversary post for Exile.)
posted by purpleclover (61 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
20???

How old does that make ME?????
posted by janey47 at 2:50 PM on July 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


Everything happened in multiples of 5 years ago.
posted by 2bucksplus at 2:58 PM on July 16, 2013 [3 favorites]


What do you mean I was in high school 20 years ago?!
posted by pxe2000 at 3:00 PM on July 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


I was gonna post this Chicago Tribune article a few weeks ago and then I forgot.
posted by moonmilk at 3:01 PM on July 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


This album is such a damn classic.
posted by entropicamericana at 3:02 PM on July 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


The original cassettes: Girlysound.
posted by timsteil at 3:02 PM on July 16, 2013 [5 favorites]


I really like that Jessica Grose piece. whitechocolatespaceegg was my first Liz Phair album, and it showed up at a seminal point in my life, where I (as a man) was trying to figure out a lot of things about relationships/love/sex, and that album was really helpful in a lot of ways that I think "Exile in Guyville" wouldn't have been.
posted by TypographicalError at 3:05 PM on July 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


This album has held up so well over the years, although there was a long period of time in the late aughts during which I couldn't listen to Fuck and Run because my downstairs neighbor kept BLASTING it at 3 AM and then making me out to be the bad guy when I would go downstairs, knock, and ask her to turn it down. All right, I might have said "Turn it THE FUCK down" after the first few times I had to ask. After months of this, complaints to the landlord, etc., she finally moved out. I had to call the cops on her the night before I heard she was moving. Her boyfriend answered the door and told them she wasn't home and he didn't realize how thin the walls were.

So you can imagine that I had a love/hate relationship with the song for a period of time.
posted by janey47 at 3:11 PM on July 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


20 years old...oh wow, I feel ancient. I bought this while in college, played it so often I still know almost every word, and it's still one of my favorite albums ever.
posted by SisterHavana at 3:13 PM on July 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


A peek inside my head:

"It's so weird that I saw her perform the whole album live last year - weird that she'd do that for the 19th anniversary... oh that was actually five years ago. Fuck me."

fin
posted by MCMikeNamara at 3:14 PM on July 16, 2013 [4 favorites]


Man, there are so, so many good things on that record, but everybody I know who loves it points to a single song or two as the things that they really love. I think that's because it's so intensely personal, and yet in many ways; Phair herself has said somewhere that these weren't songs about her but sonic portraits of other people she was observing around her, people that were very different from her. So it makes sense to me that people kind of find that one song that tugs at them personally; what's surprising is how effectively she does that.

For me, it's "The Divorce Song," which hit me square between the eyes when I was going through my own divorce. It encapsulates all those things that really are important and essential about a major breakup like that from someone you thought you were going to spend your life with. And it may sound weird to say this, but it has a kind of female maturity – like, in this exasperated way, Phair's actually telling the truth, ripping the cover off that facile and petty nonsense that guys so often have the sad privilege of indulging in. One thing I compare it with a lot is another divorce song from Chicago that I enjoyed probably more than I should for a while, Shellac's "Prayer to God," which is so very sweet in its insanely bitter and twisted rage to anyone who's in a particular state but which is ultimately empty and frankly very wrong. Phair is above that stupid shit. "Divorce Song" actually admits to the hate but has the courage to say that "you've never been a waste of my time," which – my god – is a very, very brave thing to say. It's not even just a thing you say, really; it's a mantra you have to internalize, admitting and accepting and embracing that you got good things from this person who also caused you a lot of pain; and then to say it to the ex, it's this act of mercy on her part, offering him an out and also showing him how it's done. And she also (as always) speaks a lot of truth to power there, that tired but wary engaging of the guy she's talking to where she says 'yeah, okay, I've been silly and dumb and petty, but you've been an asshole.' It's a sheer burst of honesty that isn't afraid of love that's ended, and the fact that Liz Phair could write something like that without actually ever having gone through a divorce before herself just blows me away every time I listen to it.

I really love that song. All of the songs are awesome; that's just the one that means most to me personally. What a great record this is.
posted by koeselitz at 3:18 PM on July 16, 2013 [19 favorites]


> I was gonna post this Chicago Tribune article a few weeks ago and then I forgot.

"(Expletive) And Run". Hee.

Nice article, though. Definitely worth reading.
posted by ardgedee at 3:18 PM on July 16, 2013


MCMikeNamara: “A peek inside my head... 'It's so weird that I saw her perform the whole album live last year - weird that she'd do that for the 19th anniversary... oh that was actually five years ago. Fuck me.'”

You may be old, but you're a lucky bastard. I would have really liked to have seen that.
posted by koeselitz at 3:19 PM on July 16, 2013


Excellent album. After hearing the girlysound tapes I've stuck with them for so much longer, but man that album. Not a bad track on it. Not A. One. And such a mix of moderately experimental sounding things like Flower and completely conventional rock songs like 6'1" and Divorce Song. Amazing. One of those something-for-everyone albums, and lots for everyone that can get on board the lots-of-sex-and-maybe-some-relationships train. Thanks, Pitchfork. One of the best things you ever told me about.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:25 PM on July 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


It gets a little dusty in the room whenever I even think about this record, and I can't listen to the next two without getting downright verklempt, so I loved reading all of these very much. (My favorite will always be Whip-Smart, which inexplicably goes unmentioned in the "other albums" Slate link.)
Thanks, too, for the introduction to Girls of a Certain Age; reading each woman's personal experience with and take on Guyville was very powerful. Fantastic stuff all around.

I especially adored this comment from Susan Dominus, staff writer for NYT's sunday magazine:
Maybe one day I’ll look back on my late twenties in New York with fondness, as a time of innocence and romance and sweet cocktails. But mostly I recall those endless, expensive nights out as something of a long protracted battle, requiring great efforts of cheer, and a hard-won endurance that allowed me to reject and be rejected over and over again. Before I went out, whenever I wanted more than anything to stay home, I put on Exile in Guyville. Most of my friends were marrying or on that path, and Liz Phair was the girlfriend who was in it with me, who got the grit of it; for me her songs were necessary anthems. They got me out the door, ready for battle; I felt confident wherever I ended up that night, there was someone out there who would not judge me, who could not just mock but make great music of a woman’s sometimes desperate chase for intimacy. If it was all bitter I couldn’t have taken it time after time; but no musician has ever convinced me more that sex and unsentimental romance were worth the fight.
QFT.
posted by divined by radio at 3:31 PM on July 16, 2013 [9 favorites]


TypographicalError: Me too. Before that she was in my "aware of, not terribly interested in" category.

All: You should listen to her other two albums. It's a real shame she never made anything after Whitechocolatespaceegg. A real shame.
posted by aaronetc at 3:35 PM on July 16, 2013 [3 favorites]


Wow. Twenty years. Such a great album.

But also — all three were 1993: Exile in Guyville, Rid of Me, and Siamese Dream. I think each of these has held up very well.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:54 PM on July 16, 2013 [7 favorites]


5 yrs ago she toured on the 15th anniversary and played the album straight through. She had lost some of the (terror induced) edge of some of her early stage performances, but still, that gal can rock.
My stepdaughter is 20 now and listens to these songs she's grown up with with a mixture of nostalgia and a new gleam of understanding in her eyes that's awesome to behold.
Thanks Liz.
posted by OHenryPacey at 4:02 PM on July 16, 2013


I was dating this guy and I was living in this apartment where I was writing the songs for Guyville. It belonged to some friends who had vacated and they'd left behind these cassette tapes, and one was Exile On Main St. I was listening to it and thinking about how to make a record, and I was fighting with [this guy], and he said, "Well, why don't you do that one? That's a double record" — but he was kind of sarcastic about it and so I was like, "Okay! I will!" I listened to it over and over again and it became like my source of strength — my involvement with Exilewas like an imaginary friend; whatever Mick was saying, it was a conversation with him, or I was arguing with him and it was kind of an amalgam of the men in my life. That was why I called it "Guyville" — friends, romantic interests, these teacher types — telling me what I needed to know, what was cool or what wasn't cool. I developed a very private relationship with this record, listening to it again and again and again.
When she released the album, I made a mix tape alternating tracks from the Rolling Stone record with hers, thinking it would help me better understand how each Stones tune inspired or influenced each Phair tune.

The connections are not obvious. Exile on Main St. is not an album with a unified theme. It has the most "Keith Richards" sound of any Rolling Stones album - which is to say raw, blues infused rock and roll - but the lyrics are all over the place. Guyville has its own unique sound - a wonderful stripped down rock sound. Phair's lyrics are more personal (even though the songs aren't about her, per se) but its challenging to see how either those lyrics or the music was influenced directly by Richards/Jagger. In fact, the more I listened to Guyville, the more baffled I was by the idea that she might have taken any direct inspiration from the Stones' album.

I mean, both records are deservedly considered classics and both have 18 tracks. Obviously, Phair's choice of titles is making a pointed comment about how female rockers were accepted in the wider "boys club" rock community in 1993 by parodying (?) the Stones' title. However, Phair's album stands completely on its own and you don't need to have any familiarity with the Rolling Stones at all to appreciate its brilliance. Indeed, Guyville is not brilliant in relation to the Stones - Guyville is brilliant entirely in its own right.

That said, for your enjoyment, here are some of the most interesting juxtapositions of Phair and Stones based on the running order of each album (with the understanding that, assuming Phair really was responding song to song, she may not have placed her tracks in the same order):

Rocks Off / 6'1"

Happy / Fuck and Run

Let It Loose / Flower

Tumbling Dice / Never Said Nothing

I'm in the minority of people who also likes much of Phair's later work, but its hard to deny that Guyville is her masterwork. How wonderful, though, that she's able to claim a masterwork - so few musicians can claim more than a couple of great songs here and there.
posted by Joey Michaels at 4:20 PM on July 16, 2013 [7 favorites]


I certainly listened to it a lot at the time. It's been a while; think I'll listen again.
By the way, Pansy Division did a cover version of Flower.
posted by larrybob at 4:21 PM on July 16, 2013


It's a real shame she never made anything after Whitechocolatespaceegg. A real shame.

Bwuh?

I mean, yeah, Liz Phair is this weird thing you can see she listened to some people for advice and they didn't give her good advice. But I liked Somebody's Miracle, and I'm still on the fence on about half of Funstyle.
posted by mephron at 4:31 PM on July 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


20 years? Man. Time flies when you're listening to great music.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:36 PM on July 16, 2013


A friend of mine lived down the street from John Henderson (and Liz, in the early days) in Wicker Park in the early 90s and hung out with them quite a bit. Reading these articles brings back a visceral memory of getting wasted beyond comprehension at the Rainbo, smoking cigarettes, listening to awesome loud music and just generally not giving a fuck about anything other than having a good time. God, that was fun. Thanks for posting this!
posted by hapax_legomenon at 4:47 PM on July 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


If you missed it, Spin did a similar oral history treatment of PJ Harvey's Let It Bleed that is fascinating for similar reasons.

I was all of 12/13 when these albums came out, but both of them dominated the musical landscape of my early teens, though it wasn't until years later in my 20s that I really came to fully appreciate them.
posted by strangecargo at 4:54 PM on July 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


I have this really vivid memory of my mom playing "Fuck and Run" in the car with me when I was 13, and me being so happy that she thought it was okay to play such an explicit song around me and that we were being two people together instead of an authority figure and child. And then I went home and played all of Exile in Guyville for myself, and listened to it throughout high school, and I'm so glad I did. I really think in some sense Exile in Guyville taught me how to be a woman in a way no other album did--that you could be a woman and also be a complicated, sexual, flawed human being. When you're a teenage girl you don't hear that message that much, I think.
posted by precession at 5:06 PM on July 16, 2013 [7 favorites]


Amazing album. I originally rented it (yes, you could rent CDs) because of the supposed link to Exile On Main Street and wasn't terribly impressed at first. But something about it stuck with me, so I wound up buying it. A few years later, when I met the woman I would one day marry, we spent a lot of time playing Scrabble and listening to it...and being able to sing along to it was definitely a feather in my cap.
posted by The Card Cheat at 5:18 PM on July 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


Her saying explicit stuff is far from the best parts of that album. But its the first thing they lead with, everytime.
posted by Ironmouth at 5:59 PM on July 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


You see, I'm not really bothered by the whole anniversary thing, because I didn't really get into this album until the year I lived in Japan, which was...ah...1997...*cough*...um...excuse me...I think I need to lie down for a bit...would you send someone up with a bicarbonate, please...thanks terribly...
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 6:01 PM on July 16, 2013


Winter of '93-'94 - 24 years old. First months in Boston, broke and looking for a job, hanging with my super-cool artsy roommate (still a dear friend) and listening to this cassette over and over in our shitty Allston apartment while I drank beer and watched her paint. This record will always be a part of my DNA.
posted by jalexei at 6:10 PM on July 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


Whiechocolatespaceegg (her best record) turns 20 I'm going to write a dang novel as a metafilter comment. This record, eh, it's great, but that's about it.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:27 PM on July 16, 2013 [3 favorites]


"Shatter" is the one I never tire of hearing. "Divorce Song" is the one that guts me, at this line.
and the license said
you had to stick around
until I was dead
but if you're tired of looking at my face
I guess I already am
posted by nicebookrack at 6:34 PM on July 16, 2013 [6 favorites]


This album absolutely is a classic. I bought it because of a review in Ms. magazine, if you can believe that. And I listened to it so much.

I love Liz Phair, all of her albums have good songs (seriously Got My Own Thing is one of the better clitoris pride songs out there). It's cool to see that other people liked whitechocolatespaceegg, I think that album was incredibly under appreciated. There was this weird backlash against her that I can only understand coming from sexism, because as far as I can tell she is songwriting genius.
posted by medusa at 6:54 PM on July 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


Also I am the oldest person in the world.
posted by medusa at 6:55 PM on July 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


The girl who introduced me to Exile In Guyville was a disaster and the relationship only lasted a month, but I'm still grateful we dated so that she could share it with me. 20 years ago somehow seems less far away relative to that song than to other 20-year-old things. Probably because I never stopped listening to it. Stratford-on-guy is the song I hang my hat on, and Johnny Sunshine as well. I'm a big fan of Whip-Smart as a smart, subversive pop album.

The point being, uh, no point, just a little Liz Phair gushing. If Jack White and Beck and Liz Phair ever toured together, I might explode.
posted by davejay at 6:56 PM on July 16, 2013 [3 favorites]


"Divorce Song" is the one that guts me, at this line.

...Yeah.
posted by entropicamericana at 7:03 PM on July 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


I also love "Divorce Song," and I can't get over the genius juxtaposition of the devastating bit nicebookrack mentioned above ("the license said / you had to stick around / until I was dead / but if you're tired of looking at my face / I guess I already am") with the practical, almost cheerful, dusting-yourself-off of "But you've never been a waste of my time / it's never been a drag."
posted by purpleclover at 7:05 PM on July 16, 2013


Finished high school, '94
Loaded up dad's truck, left farm
He dropped me off at my first apartment in the "big" city
The next day, exploring my new city
Music store, heard 6'1"
asked, bought cd.

Left so much behind that day.

(real actual shivers at the memory, if I boil life down to a dozen days that is probably one of them)
posted by Cosine at 7:20 PM on July 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


Yeah - "Divorce Song" is so dead-on right and full of insights. And I write this having just celebrated my 25th Wedding Anniversary. There are things in that song that helped me get through/around/over the rough times that every relationship goes through. This bit:

"It's harder to be friends then lovers,
And you shouldn't try to mix the two,
Cause if you do it and you're still unhappy,
Then you know that the problem is you."

Yep.
posted by skepticbill at 8:06 PM on July 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


I had Exile in Guyville on cassette (one of the cheap ones from Columbia house, which had a very particular inky smell). I have a vivid, vivid memory of being 14, stuck at the laundromat with my older sister, and the two of us sitting on those hard, slippery plastic chairs reading the lyric sheet together, because it was too sweary to play in a laundromat full of kids. But we each knew the other one was hearing it in her head.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 8:20 PM on July 16, 2013


here was this weird backlash against her that I can only understand coming from sexism, because as far as I can tell she is songwriting genius.

I think some of the backlash is attributable to sexism, but it can also be attributed to her changing her musical style. Exile and the Girlysound tapes were very lo-fi. Her subsequent stuff has all had much higher production values, and the indie-rock press has perceived that as a kind of fulfilling of her own, always held aspirations to go pop combined with declining musical quality and selling out the musical community from whence she came. After all, part of the reason she got slammed for Liz Phair was because she was working with production team The Matrix. (But then again, there's that sexism for you - she rolled into the indie rock community from the outside as well, and got slammed for it at the time.)
posted by Going To Maine at 8:22 PM on July 16, 2013


Such, such, such a great record. An artist can produce some of the most empowering stuff when not trying too hard to send a message of empowerment, but just being honest and sharp and smart and perceptive.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 8:38 PM on July 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


So here is my best story ever:

I was in Washington DC in about 1994, and I wanted to see Liz Phair, frankly because she was so damn hot. So I went to the old 9:30 Club on F Street to see her show, which was shortly after Exile was released. She totally rocked, but I kept looking at the bass player, and I said to my friend, "That's my friend LeRoy from high school. I know it." I had played in school bands with LeRoy for years and competely knew his mannerisms, though I hadn't seen him in about 10 years. Liz was from Chicago and we grew up in northern Illinois, so it wasn't crazy. So while I tried to watch Liz, I was transfixed by the bass player.

Finally, after the show had ended, I went up to one of the roadies and asked, "Was that LeRoy playing bass?" He said yes, and I said, "I'm his best friend from high school and I'd like to say hello." And for some reason (beers), I then showed him my driver's license, as if it said "LeRoy's friend." He said to go on back.

And there he was, my friend LeRoy, a guy I had known since 3rd Grade. He was shocked (didn't know I was in DC). He said, "Did you see Brad?" He meant Brad Wood, who was my other best friend from high school, and the three of us were very close. I said "No, did he come through town recently?" LeRoy said, "No, he was playing drums." And I turned around, and there was my other best friend from high school.

My best night ever.
posted by hawkeye at 9:09 PM on July 16, 2013 [27 favorites]


I can't say that there's anything in "Divorce Song" that speaks to me on a personal level, but nevertheless I think it's one of the songs that I will never, ever tire of. I don't remember why I wound up buying EIG. I was 27 and was still really into Lloyd Cole, REM, Thomas Dolby, and I can't imagine who or how I would have been exposed to Liz Phair in Lancaster PA in 1993, 2 years into my medical residency, but whatever the reason I'm grateful I took a chance and bought the CD. I sometimes compare it to Lou Reed's 'Magic and Loss'. Both are initially a little hard to access musically, but if you like good writing that alone will keep you hooked until the melodies get under your skin.
posted by docpops at 9:15 PM on July 16, 2013


As much as 'Exile' is wonderful and deserves all the credit it gets and I LOVE listening to it loud, I really do think (as others have said) that 'whitechocolatepspaceegg' is totally under-rated.

Some of the songs on that just utterly kill me each time I listen to them.

'Only Son'
'Go On Ahead'

And I love that it ends with 'Girls' Room'. I just read that as Liz saying 'fuck it' and going to hang out with her girlfriends for a while.
posted by maupuia at 11:26 PM on July 16, 2013 [2 favorites]


Oh man...I loved this album the moment I heard it. I have such visceral memories of it, being released my first year of university. So much music from those few years. This and Siamese Dream, Blind Melon, Together Alone by Crowded House, August and Everything After, Automatic for the People, 10000 Maniacs Our Time In Eden, In Utero, Shame About Ray...I could go on.

I was running for my university and I have vivid memories of being home laying on my bed after a morning of training in a happy hazy fog, listening to this record and reading Calvin and Hobbes until I eventually fell asleep. 'Shatter' has echoed around my head for the better part of 20 years. I had such turbulent relationships then - it spoke to me.

I don't know if I could drive a car
Fast enough to get to where you are
Or wild enough not to miss the boat completely
Honey, I'm thinkin' maybe, you know, just maybe
I don't know if I could fly a plane
Well enough to tailspin out your name
Or high enough to lose control completely
Honey, I'm thinkin' maybe, you know just maybe, maybe


Beautiful.
posted by jimmythefish at 12:16 AM on July 17, 2013 [5 favorites]


Paid for a Lillith Fair ticket JUST to see Liz Phair at (what was then called) Starwood Amphitheatre in Nashville. I think it was 1996. She was one of the first acts on, and the seated section was completely empty. I had a ticket for the grassy hill area, and of course there was NO WAY that the security guards would let me up close to the stage. So there I stood, as close as I could get, maybe one of three people actually paying attention. She was still amazing.

I did, however, discover Victoria Williams for the first time later that day. playing to 20-30 people in a tent, using a credit card to play her guitar (the MS had made it impossible to hold a pick by that point). She was amazing, with the brightest, most adorable smile I have ever seen in person.

I left to beat the traffic at some point during the 114th rendition of the chorus to "Thank You" by Natalie Merchant, choosing not to suffer through the other main headliner, Sarah McLachlan.
posted by cilantro at 12:30 AM on July 17, 2013


What a great album. Divorce Song and Fuck and Run are two of the best songs ever recorded.
posted by professor plum with a rope at 12:36 AM on July 17, 2013


Here's an explain it to me thing (sorry. kind of.): why if you mix friendship and being lovers and it doesn't work, you should conclude that the problem is you?

I never got that.
posted by professor plum with a rope at 12:43 AM on July 17, 2013


why if you mix friendship and being lovers and it doesn't work, you should conclude that the problem is you?
Because she warned you, and you went and did it anyway!
After twenty years, I feel I understand this album a lot better. OK, Now I'm ready for the rest of my teen years! Which key do I press to go back to 1993?
posted by current occupation: at 12:53 AM on July 17, 2013 [2 favorites]


Hawkeye, is that Leroy Bach, who also played in Wilco for a few key years in the transition between Being There and the current big lineup?

He's in the documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart as they documented Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I think he'd been playing with them from after Being There, you can see him playing keys in loads of stuff like this...OuttaSight

Back to topic, i still love this album, both how it rocks and how its full of truths.

I never understood the Exile connection, but I think its looser and more imaginative then a straight call and response answer. More like moods, feel, and a liberal interpretation of the vibe of the Main Street songs as a starting point.
posted by C.A.S. at 3:35 AM on July 17, 2013


Hawkeye, is that Leroy Bach, who also played in Wilco for a few key years in the transition between Being There and the current big lineup?

One and the same. I caught up with him again when he came back through DC with Wilco, that time at the new 9:30 Club. Thanks for the link!
posted by hawkeye at 4:37 AM on July 17, 2013


I was 29 and living in Tulsa when the album came out. I happened to catch the premier of the video for Stratford-On-Guy on MTV's 120 Minutes and was totally floored. It's an amazing album, and still one of my favorites 20 years later. I've never really gotten into her later stuff, probably because Exile In Guyville burned so brightly in my mind that everything else just couldn't compare.
posted by ralan at 4:58 AM on July 17, 2013


Cool, hawkeye. There's a load of Wilco with him on board on youtube, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

It feels like a small world, I was in DC long enough to know the old 9:30 club smell like the back of my hand, as well as the new one (in fact I went to gigs in it when it was the church hall).

This thread made me throw on Exile while I went to the gym.
posted by C.A.S. at 7:28 AM on July 17, 2013


Is Leroy as much of a mercenary dick as IATBYH makes him out to be? "I think our friendship [Jay Bennett and myself] has run its course [now that Jay is getting booted out of the band after he hooked me up with this sweet gig]."
posted by entropicamericana at 7:45 AM on July 17, 2013


I like the comments upthread about how even if Exile had no bearing on your life plot-wise per se, if you got into it precociously it felt like Phair was giving you insights into what being a lady is like. Yes. It's ridiculous how obsessed with the album I was at the time given I was like, in 7th grade with an over-the-top sheltered, repressive homelife (barely allowed to go to the mall with girlfriends only, no TV, you will get pregnant if you so much as look at a boy, no clue about sex at all, that sort of thing)--I wrote all the lyrics all over my sneakers and hands and lunchbox and whatever else, just over and over obsessively as if trying to learn their secrets and thus earn Phair's seemingly hard-earned wisdom and wariness and relationship scars, wanted to feel like I had become wiser through pain in a particularly gendered way. I liked what I perceived even back then as a piercing of the balloon of indie rock self-obsessed boy ego, or however those '90s riot grrrl zines would've put it. Partly because while astute it was never purely mean, just honest. Anyway. It always surprises me how many women my age later will confess to the same--that they loved that album, listened to it daily, memorized every line as if it was lived experience when nothing could be farther from the truth (sheltered, not into boys actually, raised religious and thus hypothetically asexual, blah blah blah...one was like "I was just a girl hanging out in a wheelbarrow in Oklahoma who'd never even kissed a boy and wasn't interested in any yet and wouldn't be for years to come, but" yeah). I was so clueless I played "Glory" once during dinner for my parents, for fuck's sake.

For me anyway, I guess part of what drew me to it was that it was one of the first albums where I could sense it was about relationships from a specifically female point of view, and that felt like a club I knew I would have to join at some point and I wanted to be prepared.

As for specific songs, can never pick! I'll get waaaay into 2 at a time, then months or years later it's a different 2 or 3. The same is true for Whip-Smart. And I love that aspect of listening to those albums, how mutable the experience is, where all the intensity of feeling and care shifts depending on where I happen to be in my own personal landscape. The only work I can sort of do that with is the Girlysounds-era stuff, Juvenilia etc. ("Dead Shark" and "Batmobile" and "Easy" are perfect and I listen to them at least every month or so, have been for like over 10 years now).

Funny there was a similar thing on Rid of Me recently, because my experience with each couldn't be more different in execution--I found Rid of Me a good 10 years too late (well, not too, because I adore it now), and my enthusiasm now for it feels like looking back at something in amber, I'm enjoying my fossilized response, that I know how much I felt that way 5, 10 years ago when I didn't have the record...it's hard to explain. But Exile's the other end; I listened to it too early and it was like I was nodding, knowing eventually I would understand and feel those things for myself, like looking out the window seeing a person coming up the pathway, just watching the future come to you, waiting for it.

I got up early just to comment because I love this thread so much, sorry for rambling and any morning incoherence.
posted by ifjuly at 7:56 AM on July 17, 2013 [7 favorites]


But also — all three were 1993: Exile in Guyville, Rid of Me, and Siamese Dream. I think each of these has held up very well.

and Gentlemen as well.
posted by Quonab at 8:07 AM on July 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


The funny thing is all the press is about how this album was written for, and spoke to, the young women of my generation but I'm not the only guy who had this thing on heavy rotation back in the day, and later.

Some of that is sonically, this is music for rock fans. Some of it must have been getting the complimentary view of being young from the other side of the gender divide. Strange Loop is a great expression of that state, lines like

"The fire you like so much in me
Is the mark of someone adamantly free
But you can't stop yourself from wanting worse
'Cause nothing feeds a hunger like a thirst/

I can't be trusted
They're saying I can't be true
But I only wanted more than I knew

Baby, I'm tired of fighting
I always wanted you
I only wanted more than I knew"
posted by C.A.S. at 8:56 AM on July 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


Is Leroy as much of a mercenary dick as IATBYH makes him out to be?

Um, no.
posted by hawkeye at 10:08 AM on July 17, 2013


The funny thing is all the press is about how this album was written for, and spoke to, the young women of my generation but I'm not the only guy who had this thing on heavy rotation back in the day, and later.

Yeah, great music is great music and it doesn't matter on some level who the intended audience was or who made it. That Exile in Guyville was a meaningful and life-changing record for (anecdotally) more women than men is an amazing thing, but it would be a fantastic record no matter who it appealed to. Like I said, great music is great music.
posted by Joey Michaels at 2:50 PM on July 17, 2013


Thanks for the Girlysound link, Timsteil. I just listened to the MP3s from there, and realized how very bad the versions I've been cherishing were.
posted by Catblack at 5:09 PM on July 17, 2013


Thanks for this post. Spent SO much time in college listening to this album. Years later, when I got divorced, "Divorce Song" held a lot of resonance for me.

Whip-Smart and whitechocolatespaceegg are pretty great albums, too. She's done some sporadically interesting stuff since, but I'm sorry that she didn't go the direction of some of the demos she was working on around the time of wcse. I saw her a few times on that tour, and there were some great songs she was working on that never saw the light. Search on Liz Phair 96 demos to have a listen.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:21 AM on July 24, 2013


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