You break all kinds of unwritten rules when you're a guy who admires a girl. The white suburban kids who idolize gangster rappers are old news, and the rich kids have always loved to rub elbows with the poor. But when a man tries to identify with a woman, he doesn't just hit the normal problems of "white male gaze" and "exploitation of the other" and "being a jackass": There's also the third rail of male sexuality, where identifying too closely with a woman might make you seem, perish the thought, sensitive. So instead, the guys who dig a girl like Liz Phair have to play up the attraction, the lust, the submission to a rock'n'roll goddess-- even when, for many of them, the lust ain't the main draw.
The other tactic is to take credit for what she's done. And guys can take plenty of credit for Phair's early career. Rock critics like Bill Wyman brought Phair to Chicago's attention when they ranted and raved about Guyville weeks before the thing came out. The Rolling Stones recorded Exile on Main Street, the loose template for Guyville's 18 tracks-- and one of the blues-rock genomes that saved this from being just another singer-songwriter set. And a couple other guys, co-producer Brad Wood and engineer Casey Rice, helped nail the minimalist production of Guyville and its follow-up, the underrated Whip-Smart.
It was the guys like her Johnny or her Joe-- the titular guys in the indie boy's club centered in and around Chicago's Wicker Park-- who preened for her, dicked her over, and taught her how to push back, inspiring her and making it necessary for her to write these songs in the first place. And it was guys who took the piss when she started headlining at venues that were too big for an amateur. Playing a New Year's Eve show at the Metro as your sixth or seventh gig is a lot to bite off. And if I recall correctly, she bit. But stagecraft and starpower weren't the point: Those of us who were taken in by Phair loved her because she was-- sorry to use the word-- real.
Men and women have written paeons to Phair since Guyville was released, putting her swagger, strength, and mundanity in whatever context meant the most to them-- "girl next door," "older sister," "younger sister," "easy lay," "slut next door," "bitch." But let's start with "female rocker." Guyville still runs up your spine on track one with its full-on opener, "6'1'", which is the best song she's ever recorded: tough but exposed, with cute feints in the lyrics, a wicked riff, and the door slamming open on her sassy tomboy vocals. On cuts like these, guys can dig Phair because she's one of the guys.
The songs are mostly sprints or drones, and on relistening to it, it's striking to hear the full-band cuts next to the solitary head space of songs like "Glory" or "Shatter", where she's backed more by a memory of guitar than by the raunchy blues-rock of the album's other half. The production of the ballads replicates the intimacy of a bedroom recording without the tape hiss or bum notes, which is an awesome illusion; and only a beginning songwriter could make such elemental riffs sound so exciting.
Phair has famously struggled to become a star, and never quite made it. Guyville turned her into an object of fascination, but those early gigs revealed she wasn't a superstar: She had to get by on talent, and perceptiveness. She has the gift of turning everyday downers into rock, and the shock came when she sang about things that nobody else discussed in public.
The cover shot nipple, "I want to be your blow job queen," the outro of "Fuck and Run" ("...even when I was 12")-- this stuff was startling at the time, but I'm guessing it won't register with any teenagers who discover this today. You can get Savage Love right on your cell phone, and young adults today can browse mainstream blogs and read about machines that will fuck you. Sad to say that at the time, it was shocking to talk about non-missionary sex with the girl you could take home to mom, but today, on "Flower"-- the one about blow jobs-- the line that surprises is her Dungeons & Dragons-like reference to "minions.” (On the original, she said she'd fuck the guy's girlfriend.)
Also hard to explain would be the sound, which is grey and wedged entirely in the midrange. When a "remastered" edition was announced, I had to wonder if the remasterer had actually heard the thing before taking the job-- but hearing it now, the treatment works: the rhythm section, when there is one, has more punch, and Phair's vocals come a little closer to your earlobe. The package also comes with a poorly-made DVD of interviews that Phair conducted with people from Chicago who knew her when-- Steve Albini, Ira Glass, the Urge Overkill guys. It makes a scene that fancied itself "the next Seattle" seem exactly as insular and provincial as it really was.
More useful would have been a tighter focus on Phair-- say, a better set of her B-sides and demos. Would it have killed ATO to throw in more of her early, even less-inhibited Girly Sounds material? Three B-sides grace this reissue, including the meandering "Ant in Alaska" and a curious cover of Lynn Tait's "Say You". They're nice throwaways, but they explain little about what was going on around the making of her debut.
Fifteen years on, Guyville occasionally sounds dated-- for its particular sexiness, and its particular indieness. But the songwriting holds up. She ticks off all the bruises and embarrassments of relationships, and never lets her defenses get in the way. Naturally as a guy, I can't speak for what women saw in the record back then, or how young women will take it now. But of all the albums written from a woman's perspective, this is one of the most accessible to men. It's intriguing to watch her deal with us-- not as a mere revolutionary, but as someone who knows that sex will always be tough, so she always has to be tougher. She's been tested in ways we never will be, and we understand just enough to admire her for it. Men don't get what it's like to be a woman. But spinning this record, you swear that you could.
