Liz Phair

Liz Phair, the daughter of a renowned scientist and an art teacher, with a degree in Fine Arts, burst onto the Chicago scene with a personality and a style of music that made her a “sensation.”

Having entered the entourage of Urge Overkill, photogenic and outgoing, with a romantic past as precocious as it was turbulent, and endowed with a strong, low voice, Phair recorded two unassuming cassettes, later collected on the mini-album Juvenilia (Matador, 1995).

What launched her into the stratosphere at the age of 26 was Exile In Guyville (Matador, 1993), a double album modeled (song by song) on the famous Rolling Stones masterpiece (with her in the role of Jagger’s lover, responding from a post-feminist angle to his crude macho propositions). This postmodern device actually serves to confess her own obsessions with sexual relationships, and thus to conduct an intense and raw autobiographical excavation (Fuck And Run, perhaps the most violent, Girls Girls Girls). With lines such as “I want to fuck you like a dog/.../I want to be your blowjob queen” (Flower) and “I can feel it in my bones/ I'm gonna spend another year alone/ It's fuck and run,” she seems above all intent on offending herself.
Despite its sparse arrangements, with a Juliana Hatfield–style folk-pop, the album includes driving rock moments such as Never Said and Johnny Sunshine. In the long psychedelic “dream” of Canary and the piano romance of Divorce Song, she also displays experimental ambitions. She excels, however, in the songs where melody triumphs, especially in Help Me Mary, which borrows a heartfelt note from Bob Dylan. In the end (aside perhaps from Shatter), it is precisely the Rolling Stones who are largely absent from the list of references.
Despite several lapses in tone and a certain monotony, the album stands, by virtue of its uniqueness, as a milestone of modern singer-songwriter music. The work also offers a realistic snapshot of Wicker Park, Chicago’s bohemian neighborhood.

Compared to that hyper-realistic orgy of lust, Whip-Smart (Matador, 1994) is a less thematic and more cerebral work: breaking the ice with a sort of piano mantra (Chopsticks), which frames her preferred paradigm of romantic relationships reduced to their bare essentials, Phair ventures into the martial and dreamlike atmosphere of Nashville, worthy of the Dylan of Blonde On Blonde, mimics Lou Reed in Go West, rattles along with a “railroad” rhythm in Jealousy, and luxuriates in the languid jazziness of Shane, but always with her disenchanted and fundamentally coarse tone. These are songs whose romanticism counterbalances the crude cynicism of her debut. But perhaps Whip-Smart is simply a more musical work, as the catchy Supernova could be her first hit, X-Ray Man recalls the grittiest girl groups of the 1960s, Cinco De Mayo has the gait of a jaunty nursery rhyme, and the title track is a calypso-tinged sing-song in the manner of generic female singers.

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Ending a long absence due to marriage and maternity, Whitechocolatespaceegg (Capitol, 1998) proves that, out of puberty, Liz Phair is a "rocker", and a far warmer and far less girlcentric one than her overly intimate lyrics would imply. Phair is a musician, engaged in a more oblique approach to dealing with her sexual and moral appetites, to reconciling sex and love, and approach which disposes with her controversial wit in favor of a more melodious musical persona.
Phair's new side is playful, catchy and groovy, well represented by upbeat and taut country-rocker Johnny Feelgood. No less poignant, her soliloquies now indulge in plenty of pop refrains and progressions (Big Tall Man, Love Is Nothing), with a tinge of psychedelic folk-rock (Ride). Her ordinary voice lends them the sentimental epos of a Billy Joel (Polyester Bride). As a matter of fact, the album, as well as Phair's melodic and scoring talent, peak with the epic and nostalgic waltz of Shitloads Of Money.
The sound is a complicated puzzle of colorful chords, simple to the point of mimicking the acoustic folksinger of days gone (Uncle Alvarez), elegant to the point of coining a sort of rock chamber music (Perfect World, complete with strings).
Phair and her producers have obviously studied the history of rock and roll, as debris of classic styles (gospel organs, rhythm and blues drums, blues chords, lisergic timbres, folk arias) surface almost everywhere.
What does not fit is, surprisingly, the harder edge, i.e. songs like the grunge-y Chocolate Space Egg, wrapped in a shower of distorted guitar riffs, or Baby Got Going, garage-harmonica and frenzy pace and all (as a matter of fact, she didn't write the music of either). Compare with the suave motion of Headache, as she whispers her litany over a spare and vaguely psychedelic arrangement of fuzz guitar and chirpy organ.
As a less ambitious and angry songwriter, freed of any vestigial ties to the controversial riot grrrrl of Guyville, Phair ranks as an impressive innovator of the folk-rock form.

Devoted as much to success as to marginalization (with a stated agenda of recording records that are as melodic as they are obscene, i.e., as radio-friendly as they are censorious), Phair projects an image that sums up two decades of female empowerment in rock music, a swaggering Joni Mitchell, Chrissie Hynde, Joan Jett, Madonna, and Kim Gordon mix.

Liz Phair (Capitol, 2003) not only introduces a new Phair (a divorced, 36-year-old single mom), but also a new musician, one that strives to reinvent the canon of folk-pop (Red Light Fever, Why Can't I?, Firewalker, It's Sweet). When she harks back to her past, she falls flat: the erotic imagery of Rock Me, H.W.C. and Favorite sounds tired and strained, and a little embarrassing at her age (more like a midlife-crisis than a confessional urge). But elsewhere (Extraordinary, Friend of Mine) she manages to find a new voice that is both gritty and sophisticated.

The unremarkable, bland and frequently obnoxious Somebody's Miracle (Capitol, 2005) could have been made by any of the many aspiring divas of pop muzak. And the lyrics are even more obtuse than the music. Everything to Me was the first single.

Funstyle (2010), which includes the rarities of Girlysound Tapes, was a confused collection that mixed bad experiments with bad songs.

Liz Phair pivoted to pop muzak on Liz Phair and never looked back. Soberish (Chrysalis, 2021), her first album in 11 years, produced by Brad Wood, the same producer of her debut Exile In Guyville, boasts several cheesy singalongs over martial rhythms and occasionally of a truly infectious hook. If Dosage updates Carole King to the romantic pop of the Bangles, and the refrain of Hey Lou harkens back to the bubblegum-pop of the 1960s but powered by the guitar twang of country music, Bad Kitty finds a glorious compromise between the punkette of the 1980s and the spunkly country girl of the 1990s (think of Patty Loveless of I'm Not that Kind of Girl). There are several adventurous moments, from the lethargic trip-hop shuffle Soul Sucker to vocal harmonies of the doo-wop era borrowed for Spanish Doors, peaking with Ba Ba Ba, a goofy nursery rhyme over a cheap beat-machine that echoes the synth-pop of the 1980s but with a neoclassical cello and Laurie Anderson-esque babbling... The album swims in a lake of guitar riffs stolen from dozens of hits of the past. But the filler is truly embarrassing, starting with the electronic dance ballad In There. This could have been a delightful 5-song EP.