Escape From Guyville

My daughter was going to her first job interview, so we got to talking about all the dumb shit I have endured in the workplace regarding my outerwear – stupid things like being told by the publisher of Good Times in Santa Cruz that I dressed “too hip” for the job, or the time when I worked at the LA Times that I was reprimanded for not wearing pantyhose to work, even though it was 90 degrees out and I was on my way to interview the Offspring.

Ho ho ho, right? I roared with laughter telling these stories to my “too hip” friends afterwards, and yet when you relate them to a 16 year old, they add up to something much more sinister. It was fitting then that as I told her these tales I was on my way to see Liz Phair at the Swedish American Hall, because Liz’s music would have been playing on my Walkman during those years, arming me against the world of men and their barrage of micro-aggressions, snickering along with me at the way guyville would try control us without even the smallest understanding of what was truly going on in our heads.

In 1993, Exile in Guyville was the ultimate armory, a cry havoc for the ladies. Developed  from a set of musical notes in the form of cassettes (now known collectively as the Girlysound tapes) that Liz Phair recorded on a four track, the double record blew a number of people’s minds when it came out on Matador in 1993. The songs on it sounded much like many of the lo-fi, strummy guitar-based indie rock bands of the time – Yo La Tengo, Pavement, and so on — but the lyrics were coming from a new place, one that no one had ever been to. Certainly I hadn’t.

Guyville. At this remove, it’s hard to describe how radically Phair’s work differed from the regular fare of female folk, and even rock, singers, but suffice to say she took the master’s tools and used it against them. And don’t think they didn’t notice. They squealed like pigs. For years the debate as to whether Liz Phair was talented or merely lucky, pretty, and connected — because white, well-educated and middle class — raged in the tiny little confines of the indie rock world, while major publications fixated on the fact that she once used the Samantha-Bee ‘c’ word about herself and wrote songs about enjoying sex.

Sure, the record did moderately well. But you might notice Liz Phair did not become a household name. The average person can’t name a song from it, and no one was buying houses or pools. Also, her subsequent records didn’t really do even as well as that: indeed, one of them, 2003’s “Liz Phair,” was acrimoniously dismissed by the New York Times who excoriated her for ‘getting dolled up in the marketplace’ when she was “approaching 40.”  The nerve!

Years passed, as they do. And now Liz Phair is undergoing a rebirth. The release of the Girlysound-to-Guyville box set, which features the three homemade tapes she made in the early 1990s, a tour and a media campaign based on it being the 25^th anniversary of Guyville, have unleashed an avalanche of press, and this time, for the first time, that press is all good. Scratch that. It’s not just good, it’s spectacular. It turns out that Liz Phair has been everybody’s favorite artist for the last 25 years – the one that everyone was listening to in their bedrooms all along, the one who inspired them to pick up a guitar, the one who told them how to think about things, the one who was better than the rest.

For me, watching this stuff roll by on twitter and is redemptive and heartening, but it’s also interesting to see how few people are willing to acknowledge that Liz Phair has been shit on for the past quarter of a century. Oh, not by anyone who will ever cop to it now. No, no, no. It seems they all LOVED her, all along. No one had ever said she was a mediocre musician, no one ever accused her of sleeping her way into the scene or exploiting her good looks. No one called her a soccer mom, or a blowjob queen, or used all the other gendered language and similarly belittling ha-ha praise that was clearly meant to denigrate her in the same way that making me go to the restroom of the LA Times and buy a package of L’Eggs from a vending machine just to make myself presentable to the workforce did.

That history is being erased in front of us right now and the truth is, that’s probably a good thing. Who needs to know now? Surely not all the young women in the crowd who still (alas!) recognize their lives in all her songs and love her work. Definitely not the older women, who were with her all along and didn’t even know about the anti-Liz Phair narrative, because they didn’t buy music magazines or pay attention to the cant. And not the many men who either no longer feel threatened by the way she bravely met them on their own ground or have recognized something that, at the time, seemed too difficult to grapple with.

And so, let us go then, you and I, into the nightclub to see Liz Phair perform the Girlysound tapes to the adoring masses – and as she does so, let’s pretend that this is her first gig in San Francisco, instead of her millionth. Let’s watch her blow this crowd away, as they greet her every word with shouts and sing along to every song, and make the floors of the hall shake and rattle, as they treat her as she should have been treated in 1993, i.e. like she was their Justin Bieber, or Replacements.

At the Swedish American Music Hall show that she played the other night, it seemed absolutely impossible that anyone could have called her (like Steve Albini once did) “a pandering slut.” Rather, it was patently obvious that the songs on Girlysound (and later, on Guyville,) were complex and nuanced, tuneful and unique, hard to play, super authentic, and amazingly fun to think about, like all the best rock music is. You could deconstruct this stuff for ages and never get to the bottom of it. I wrote a whole goddamn book about Exile, and I still found myself thinking, damn, why didn’t I catch all those allusions, and, gosh, there’s a lot of key changes here, and, wow, what a beautiful shift in perspective THAT was.

Watching Phair rock out on stage was revelatory as well. She was backed up by one musician on another electric guitar, but he merely thickened her music and made it richer and more robust. As the central figure up there, she shone like a hard hard diamond, beaming the kind of charisma and ease we’re used to seeing coming out of guys like, I don’t know, Ryan Adams. Or Jack White. Or Bruce Springsteen.

Watching that happen last night choked me up. It was like one of those Coke commercials where we see the whole life of some downtrodden kid who is training for the Olympics flash by in 15 seconds — falling down a million times, crying late at night, wrapped in bandages, getting beaten over and over — and then all of sudden we see them make the team and their faces light up with pure cinematic joy as it all becomes worth it, they raise a coke to their lips, and are awarded a goddamned gold medal.

Seeing Liz Phair take the Swedish American Music Hall – and the world — these past few weeks is exactly that narrative, playing out in front of our eyes. Because this is the thing. The history of rock music is actually pretty new, and the history of women’s role in rock music is even newer. Seen in that context, Liz Phair isn’t just Liz Phair: she is Bob Dylan, and she’s just gone electric. The booing has stopped now, just the way it stopped on a dime for Dylan, and what lies ahead should be exactly the same future: adulation, canonization, a Nobel Prize, you name it.