Horror Stories: Liz Phair's autobiography and my Liz Phair

When I was 17, Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville came out. At the time I had a subscription to Rolling Stone. I think I mostly got it for the movie stuff. Weirdly, I didn't have a subscription to a magazine like Premiere. I had a take it or leave it attitude towards the mag; I don't remember if my dad got it for me, or I got a subscription because of some school promo or what. As I get older I try not to make up lies for myself about what I do and don't remember, and as I get older, there is just more that gets lost in time to the fact that who fucking cares (but I do I know I had the Twin Peaks cover issue, that much is certain). I don't know if that's how I heard about Liz Phair, but it seems likely. I was watching MTV's 120 Minutes around that time also, but I remember 120 more from College, as the University of Oregon provided its students with free cable, and I don't know if one of her videos - which were never all that amazing - hooked me. I doubt it. But at that time, it was for sure not radio play (outside of College radio, I don't think I've ever heard Phair on the radio). 

The reason I would love to have an origin story is because there are few acts of art that have reverberated through me like Exile in Guyville. It was like reading Plato's Symposium or the cave metaphor for the first time, or films like Jaws, Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Rules of the Game, Happy Together.... these pieces of art are touchstones of my being. And as such, Liz Phair became my everything. (Side note: because of the nature of rock and roll, I never considered getting a boner from the until I heard her. Though Rock is usually sexual, I don't think I would have considered masturbating to an album before Guyville. Every woman reading this is probably rolling their eyes.) As much to that point as I loved Davids Byrne and Bowie, or Prince, they never opened up worlds for me like Liz. Much of the art I was most invested in to that point came from men. I wouldn't say I lived a double life, but as I entered my senior year in High School, as my disconnection from schoolmates went into overdrive, she was my Northern Star.

I've probably written about this before, but my mom got my brother and I into the rich kid's public schools while we were lower middle class, so I always felt a out of place from my surroundings. I would hang out with kids who kept their G.I. Joe toys in boxes, maybe never to be opened, while I would do chores for days and weeks on end to get to go to the store that had piles upon piles of the Gonk and medical repair droids STAR WARS toys. We grew up in a neighborhood that was twenty years away from gentrification, and had more minorities than the rest of Portland, so I felt both out of place in my neighborhood and my school. They wanted me to skip fifth grade at one point, but I believe I was held back mostly because it was readily apparent I wasn't socialized. But that was a problem long past high school for me. Maybe most of us try to patch up those holes our entire lives. Some never succeed. And in some ways I feel like I've been getting better and better about being aware and connected for the last thirty years of my life, but also that I'm still learning. The other weekend someone commented on my posture. I slouch because I'm six four. I slouch to make myself less physically intimidating. I see myself as inherently threatening so I try to reduce that threat by wearing glasses and making myself as small as I can. But I don't slouch consciously, at least I didn't until then... The glasses I knew.

But back to Liz Phair: From the get, from track one Six Foot One, I was fucking in. There was something urgent to the music, but also the album is all over the place emotionally in such a way that that becomes the through line. A contained narrative and something more. An essay, a memoir, a confessional. Exile - to me - showed every facet of being a woman in the nineties, the highs and the lows, and the peaceful, somewhat stoned, happy place of someone believing in something that lies between religion and mysticism. But maybe I loved the naked honesty most. Though during high school and much of college my best friends and closest confidantes were women - those friendships weren't sexual, they were born of being in school together - Phair's dialogue wasn't something those friends could or would share with me. I remember an Arsenio Hall interview where an actor said because of an IN LIVING COLOR sketch where an Asian man said he was super horny, he hadn't thought about Asian men as being interested in sex. That is fucking stupid, but also - culturally - this is understandable as we're growing to see how important representation is to show the humanity and interests of other cultures. Because when you see them you can see that you're like them. When the white male gaze is the dominant one in television and cinema, if you are a straight white male, you don't think about how other people see things because you're afforded the luxury of not having to.

So listening to Phair sing about fucking blew my god damned mind. As much as a song like Flower may have turned me on, it was Fuck and Run and The Divorce Song that made me love her. The sense of repetition, that these were things that even if you knew were coming would still be unavoidable, the Raymond Carver-esque detail for humanity, I was in. Phair was every girl I had a crush on. But she was also me. She struck me as smart enough to observe the mistakes she was making while she made them. The patterns we fall into, but are unable to avoid.

And not to besmisrch artists like Alanis Morrisette or Sheryl Crow, one got that Phair was the author and creator of her material in a way that made it all personal. Honest. Not... presentational? I'm not saying they're phonies, that's not it, but their art seems more commercial and by that nature more opportunistic, whether talking about having fun or blowing someone in a theater. Phair also has a swagger, which I think is why I gravitated to her and PJ Harvey over artists like Tori Amos, who was more sad angry than aggressive angry. I mean, seriously, PJ Harvey's Dry is one of the most badass songs ever written, and I love her too, but maybe because Phair is an American there's a bit of a difference. But also Phair was obviously a white upper-middle class woman who liked smoking pot and having sex and playing music and there's less of a confrontational vulnerability to her. And perhaps - like Catherine Bigelow - there's an element of her borrowing from men to make herself better understood, I mean Exile was scene as a response to The Rolling Stone's album.

I have listened to Guyville more than any other album (the only competition is Broken Social Scene's You Forgot it in People), and still it's an album that's evergreen for me.  I followed Liz's career intently for the next decade. Her follow up, Whip-Smart, is solid but is also very much a sophomore effort. It's a little more aimless, but it's mostly great. The only problem is you can just feel how some songs have been kicking around for a while, and some are new and the structure isn't as perfect because you feel her trying to replicate what worked about the first album with the same narrative hook. Guyville was conceived as a song by song response to Exile on Main Street, and that gave it a structure that (even if the original concept was abandoned) gives a greater focus than anything else she's done before or since. That said, I think her second best is Whitechocolatespaceegg, because it seemed to accept that Phair had grown older, and though she was wrestling with success and trying to find new ways of talking about the same things, and motherhood and adulthood, songs like Polyester Bride and Go On Ahead are still brutally honest, while also rocking. Though there is an obvious push in these songs towards a more commercial approach (they're much cleaner sounding, etc.), that's not a bad thing and it doesn't feel overproduced like her next album "Liz Phair."

Let me be clear: I don't hate the self titled album.  And I understand why it broke some fans, but also, they were attacking for the wrong reasons. Phair was obviously trying to do something more commercial, and that turned her into a pariah for a number of fans and websites that saw her as one of the great indie rock icons of the '90s, and when she tried to cash in, they resented her attempt. And if you can look back now with 20/20 vision, she was persecuted, railroaded and the worst part is that this seemed to shake her confidence. I don't want to say she never recovered, but her next two albums are hurt by an artist trying to second guess themselves.

That said, it's got obvious issues. The problem is that pop culture took a lot from Guyville, and you could see that Phair - who by then was divorced single mother - had different things to talk about and some landed better than others. People talk about HWC as a low point, but my big problem with the album is that she worked with two sets of superstar producers and you can feel their fingerprints on the sound, which makes it one of her least coherent albums. There's some stuff that feels like it's too much of Michael Penn's production, and other stuff that feels like Phair gunning for radio play at the detriment of what makes her great. Perhaps as a single mom she wanted more out of her career, but by the time of Somebody's Miracle, she started sounded a little bland.

But maybe I'm wrong. This weekend after finishing her book I revisited Whip-Smart, the self-titled album - and thought Little Digger is maybe her greatest accomplishment - and finally listened to Funstyle and I found things to like. I don't know if I've popped on Somebody's Miracle in over ten years, so there was a definitely a cultural movement against Liz Phair The Sellout that changed how I listened, and that noise might have driven me away. But also... with musicians, sometimes they have a period you really respond to, and though I think it's sad that when people see Paul McCartney in concert they treat new music as the time to check their phones between Beatles songs (where they Instagram five seconds of Hey Jude to show that they've seen Macca), but also I put on his new album and got bored at a certain point, so I get it. Maybe I didn't try hard enough, or maybe Maybe I'm Amazed is a better song than anything on it, and I'm missing nothing.

But this last year, Phair won me back and then some with the release of her memoir "Horror Stories." It is seventeen chapters on different moments of her life. No, she doesn't walk through Girly Sounds or the inspiration for much of her music (though she does note that "Fuck and Run" is meant to talk about how sometimes relationships fall apart quickly, that we often have these relationships that explode in and out of our lives, which is what it always seemed like, and does point out that when she was twelve, it wasn't actual sex, as she says she was a virgin until college). One story is about running into someone she knew in school who achieved a level of fame that was totally different than hers. Another is about giving birth while - to use her words - high as fuck. Another is about Ryan Adams and all of the sexual harassment she's experienced over her life.

On some level, Elizabeth Phair, of what I know, was never going to be a normal soccer mom. But to appreciate her art, you can tell that she was drawn to the suburban life she grew up around, and wanted that, but going by her music that was never going to satisfy. And so you get the stories you expected about shitty relationships, bad behavior on everyone's part, and some wild ass anecdotes about infidelities. But also portraits. She talks about a Trader Joes cashier who she flirted with that goes in wild directions, and points out something I have noticed about myself, which is that sometimes when you are trying to take care of someone else, you're just trying to take care of yourself in the least selfish way possible. Or the relationship she had with a guy who got someone else pregnant while they were dating and how hard she fought to stay in it, and how she felt bound to him partly because of the relationship/sex, but also because of her connection to his kids. I think like a lot of people around my generation, she realized she was doomed to repeat a previous generation's mistakes. And did. Because the tools weren't there to fully reject some of the worst rules of the game.

Her chapter on #MeToo made me weep, because she's got a laundry list of people who have creeped on her. And for me at first I was like "I would never, I have never" but then also, I had to admit to myself I've never been in a position of power that would let me take advantage of others. And I don't know, I can't honestly say that if I achieved great success at the age of 25 or 30, I might have become gross because I could. I don't know. But I know enough about myself to know that I could have gone down terrible paths, simply because I felt disconnected for much of my life that I could get sucked into bad shit. And so as much as I want to believe I'm decent person, there are some tests I've never taken. And hopefully I would or will pass them, but just the same, knowing that is something.

But more than that, her memoir is like MAD MAX FURY ROAD for all of us who love Liz Phair (I would like to say I love Elizabeth Phair, but I'm not going to pretend to know her). It's everything you've ever loved about her in it's purest, most perfect distillation, because she has always been a master storyteller. She was always a ray gun, shooting lasers of truth, and she rocked while doing it. Horror Stories doesn't have a beat to dance to but it reveals more but also everything you always suspected. The world is a better place with Liz Phair in it, and as I understand, she signed a two book deal. I would read her until the end of days. Bring it.