Sometime over the Fourth of July weekend, Liz Phair's site announced the digital availability of her sixth album, which nobody knew was coming. The track streaming at her site, "Bollywood", is bhangra-rap about how she ended up doing TV scores out of broke desperation, featuring a bunch of "funny" pitch-altered voices imitating music-biz gladhanders ripping her off. It's one of Funstyle's four key tracks, all in a similar prefab-beats-and-wacky-voices vein; another is "U Hate It", a patchwork thing (with fake Prince harmonies) about how much everybody's going to think her record sucks, unless it's a hit, in which case they'll pretend they all loved her in the first place and her success was their doing. Its refrain goes, "I think I'm a genius/ You're being a peni-us... colada, that is."
Two things are immediately evident about those four songs. One is that they're horrible on just about every conceivable level, and there's no way Phair can't know it (psst: "U Hate It"!). The other is that they are not the particular flavors of horrible anybody would ever have guessed Phair would perpetrate. The sub-Jewel alt-country move? Sure. The pro forma kid-music album? It's plausible. Suppressing her unique songwriting gifts to sound like a lesser Sheryl Crow clone? She's kind of done that already. But this? This is Phair razing her image to the ground: spitting at anyone who thinks they know who "Liz Phair" is, or expects her to make Guyville VI: The Return of the Exile. The only comparable album that comes to mind is Bob Dylan's 1970 double-middle-finger double-LP Self Portrait, on which he successfully alienated the audience that had been paying too much attention to him.
Naturally, the immediate reaction to Funstyle was "What is this shit?" That was, of course, followed by a wave of contrarianism: admirers of Phair's early records arguing that actually it's pretty okay, that it's raw and eccentric and personal in a way her albums haven't been since the 1990s, that there are some decent songs on it. And it's true--what Funstyle lacks in fuck-all-y'all formal purity it possesses in the flickers of songcraft she can't shake. It's hard to avoid scavenging it for salvageable bits. "You Should Know Me" is badly arranged, but it's the kind of uncertain, circling, not-quite-foursquare picking at an emotional scab she's always specialized in; "Oh, Bangladesh" never justifies its lyrical conceit or lax, doodly lead guitar, but it flatters her voice's odd contours. "And He Slayed Her" has one terrific, furious line ("I mean, what kind of kid were you when you were a kid?/ What kind of man would do what you did?"--it's the conversational sputter of "I mean" that makes it), marooned in a lyric that rhymes "crooked soul" with, all together now, "rock'n'roll."
Even beyond the ghastly FruityLoops-and-varispeed numbers, though, there are some more conventionally cruddy songs here, like "Satisfied", a Bryan Adams-level string of clichés: "I came, I saw, I kicked its ass/ I walked away and I never looked back/ I remember you when you held my hair/ As I puked, oh, everywhere". Is that Liz Phair doing a power ballad, or Liz Phair parodying power ballads? It's impossible to tell at this point. Maybe Funstyle will be liberating for her; maybe, as with Self Portrait, her deck-clearing exercise will let her shake off aspects of the way she's understood that she finds burdensome. At the very least, it's a shrewd way to lower expectations. After this, whatever she does next can only be a pleasant surprise.
