The first time I heard Liz Phair, I was a high school black spiral-bound notebook poet signing into my over-sized button-up shirts while carving Tori Amos lyrics into my arm. Sarah Mclachlan was still a viable alt commodity (read as: Surfacing hadn’t gurgled it’s way into the collective consciousness, like bad flatulence spoiling a fine dinner, yet), and I was in the midst of a torrid mix-tape crush with an Athens girl I’d met on a Tori Amos list-serv. It was the sort of thing that dude from Semisonic wrote about in “Singing in My Sleep”, which was, for radio-pop, actually a pretty fantastic song.
(I acknowledge that I’ve already mentioned waaay more RIAA-sanctioned artists than I should have, but whatever. This is high school we’re talking about. Your grandma hadn’t discovered Napster OR the Squirrel Nut Zippers yet.)
Liz Phair’s “6′1″ was appropriately front-loaded onto a cassette A-side that also included Sarah Mclachlan’s cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” (aka that song about both Jesus and other stuff, too). I think there was a Hounds of Love Bee-side on there somewhere, too, like “Be Kind To My Mistakes” or “Experiment IV” or something. Amidst those 8 or 9 other songs (we’d always use the tape’s B-side to send little letter-missives, or such…dammit, now I miss having pen-pals), “6′1″ was stark, raw, underproduced and harsh to my ears. My first time hearing Liz’s voice reminds me, now, of the first time I heard Bikini Kill-I thought I’d find a cross-bridge to Le Tigre, but fuck no-and, literally, shut down, aurally, for days. I remember thinking that her untrained, straining voice, the muddling way guitar, bass and percussion clacked around the shelf all at the same level-it was an unpolished piece of vein-straining crap, without purpose or point.
I was wrong. Very wrong. It took me about two years of not being able to forget that not-at-all-in-tune, almost more spoken than sung, opening verse of “I bet/you fall in bed too easily” (or, more accurately, “I beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet”) before I finally grabbed a burned copy of Exile In Guyville. It became, like Joni Mitchell’s Blue , an album that I never actually owned but yet carry around constantly, tattooed inside my brain.
With the forthcoming re-issue of Guyville and her return to a minor label, it appears that Liz is stepping away from the MAC counter and the GAP sponsorships that have dogged her in recent years, and caused many a B.A.-holder to rip her poster down off the wall of their first apartment (and take that damn Natalie Merchant one down, too, while they’re at it). Let’s face it-if anyone ever had the mistaken idea that Liz can, well, sing, in the traditional sense, all it takes is hearing her do her Abercrombie & Hit “Why Can’t I” on one of the myriad of catwalks-and-commentary shows she was pulled on for her self-titled sell-out messterpiece to leave one longing for A)autotune B)the return of the old Liz, when it was raw and didn’t matter.
Thankfully, we get B. It only took half a decade and losing status as most oft-fantasized about indie pin-up by both girls and their guy friends, and guys and their girlfriends.
As such (and, holy crap, a decade later), Guyville deserves a little bit of re-discovery. Whatever track you’re listening to on the new Presets album (which is called, like, Dancey Glostick Raveapotamus and the Magickal Beings of FunkVille, or something), pause it. Like the big black man on every old Chicago House anthem, I wanna take you back.
Back. To when indie was a sound. When “indie” was a…spiritual thing. A body thing. A…soul thing.
Ok, maybe not so much the latter three, but when it was less an URBN T-shirt and more of a sound, an experience, a life-changing sort of thing.
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The fitting, opening track to Exile In Guyville, all cocksure swagger backed by ever-present fragility. Listening again to the remaster of this, I can’t believe I’ve never noticed how crystalline those opening guitar licks are. I seriously believe the first verse of this song is one of the most amazing pieces of writing in recent Rock memory.
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“I want a boyfriend”, goes the chorus. And I’m fairly sure that, if you have any sort of history in fringe music whatsoever, you can sing the rest of it: “I want all that stupid old shit/like letters and sodas”. Another fan-fucking-tastic piece of work.
I’m keeping my song commentary brief, because I want this stuff to be rediscovered on its’ terms, the way most of us had to come to this record. There was no blog push, no heavy Real World Lithuania tie-in, no Nike commercial (sorry, Santi). Exile In Guyville was a real deal, a raw deal, and it’s still holding up, artificially strong, painfully shy, to this day.
Welcome back, Liz. And, for the record, I can’t breathe whenever I think about Guyville.
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