56. Liz Phair, "Exile in Guyville"

 

I am beyond shocked that this beautiful, angry, funny, almost perfect album, which I love with the fire of ten thousand suns, was somehow ranked highly enough by enough people to land it here, in the Top 60 albums of all time, which is entirely deserved but which, if you told me or any other 20-something who loved this album when it came out, would cause us to laugh and laugh in our bitter Gen-X way.

And this is a Gen-X album, through and through, written by Ms. Phair in her 20s, after an unsuccessful year spent in San Francisco trying to get noticed for her music.  As a fellow Gen-Xer, Phair is my Joni Mitchell, and this album is my Blue, the voice of a worried and distracted generation, told we were gonna die from nuclear war NO I MEAN AIDS NO I MEAN air pollution NO I MEAN the ozone layer.  No wonder we just gave it all up for drugs and booze and semi-meaningless sex and sarcasm and Winona Ryder and John Cusack.

The songs themselves are mostly stripped-down and spare.  Some of them are almost entirely Phair and her (usually) electric guitar.  Others have the full complement - bass and drums - but were recorded exactly backwards, with Phair and the guitar first and then the backing tracks laid down to match what she had done.  It's exactly the way you would record if you had written all the songs in your bedroom with a guitar and didn't have a band, both of which happened to be true.

A lot of them were shocking at the time, because even though the Riot Grrrl movement was well underway and female artists were finally being able to express themselves, the industry was like "go ahead and express yourself but NOT LIKE THAT."  The lyrics were baldly, painfully confessional (although Phair swears they're not based on her real life) and often overtly sexual, but in a real life way, like in "Flower":

Every time I see your face
I get all wet between my legs
Every time you pass me by
I heave a sigh of pain

Every time I see your face
I think of things unpure unchaste
I want to fuck you like a dog
I'll take you home and make you like it

Of all the wonderful, beautiful songs on this album, two have always stood out for me (as well as thousands and thousands of other people, I'm sure), "Divorce Song" and "Fuck and Run."  "Divorce Song" has one of the best lyrics of all time, carefully studying the minutiae in a failing relationship.  It's really about stealing a lighter or losing a map, instead of the big, ugly fights, isn't it?

And it's true that I stole your lighter
And it's also true that I lost the map
But when you said that I wasn't worth talking to
I had to take your word on that
But if you'd known how that would sound to me
You would have taken it back
And boxed it up and buried it in the ground
Boxed it up and buried it in the ground

But the last verse is the most heartbreaking of all:

And the license said you had to stick around
Until I was dead
But if you're tired of looking at my face
I guess I already am

"Fuck and Run" is a lament of a different sort, that of a woman who keeps having one night stands despite yearning for something more stable and longterm.  I sort of intuitively understood the cryptic passage "I want a boyfriend/I want all that stupid old shit/Like letters and sodas/Letters and sodas."  Letters and sodas!  The little day-to-day tokens of a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship.  It's so sweet and has so much longing wrapped up in it.

Honestly, I could write something about every song but there's probably already a 33 1/3 book about this album [Ed. note - of course there is] and I'm sure it does a better job than I'd do.  This record was famously composed as a song-by-song response to the Stones' Exile on Main Street and although it doesn't seem to be an exact track-by-track match, Phair has certainly talked about some of the songs specifically (for example, "Help Me Mary" is a response to "Rip This Joint;" in Phair's own words, "[Their song] was all about sort of the attitude of these rock guys that would just kind of roll into town, create trouble, sleep with other people’s girlfriends and leave a big mess behind. I was writing about my own experiences hosting these spontaneous gatherings of rock dudes and how just hidden my real self was in that male scene.") matching up with specific Main Street songs.  

You go through so much in your 20s and it's a time of great upheaval and change in your life and I guess that's why I felt this album in my bones.  Listening to it now brings back so many of those memories - house parties and being on the roof and smoking cigarettes and big unruly dinners and trying to figure my shit out.  Liz has a song for all of it.

Is this album in my personal Top 100? Of course!