A feminist take on Liz Phair, half a lifetime after her landmark Exile in Guyville
Darren AnkenmanWhen Liz Phair released Exile in Guyville in 1993, I was fourteen years old and only beginning to understand the less than optimal implications of growing up female in a man’s world. Phair has described herself as a “diamond of pressurized anger” in creating the collection of songs that became a soundtrack for disgruntled, dissatisfied girls, and that has ranked on Rolling Stone and Spin lists of greatest albums of all time. So many of us latched on to her sentiments of anger and dismay, buoyed by the accessibility of her lyrical rage, sexual agency, and unabashed “fuck the haters” attitude. Given our culture’s recent wave of nineties nostalgia, typified by this month’s Matador at 21: The Lost Weekend in Las Vegas (where Phair performed), this seems an appropriate time to revisit her status as a feminist icon.
Now I’m thirty-one, sitting with Phair at a hotel bar on Robson Street in Vancouver, watching her drink an herbal tea. Five albums later, she’s candid about everything from music industry drama to (almost-too-personal) emotional trauma, much like Exile was over fifteen years ago. When I apologize for rambling from early morning flight exhaustion, she leans forward and touches my leg reassuringly, still fulfilling the unintentional promise she made to teenage girls so many years ago: that someone should and will listen to you.
Meanwhile, I’m trying not to be distracted by how stunning she is. I remind myself that detailed descriptions of her “shiny blonde hair” and “striking blue eyes” do not a feminist interview make. When I confess I’m a culture writer, not a music critic, Phair is eager to strike up a conversation about gender. “It’s so hard for me to just say small things for you,” she admits. “I’ve shut up about (feminism) for the last five years. I’ve been patted on the head. But when I start it’s hard to stop. It feels like I’m vomiting because I repress so much. And then I have to dial it down, dial it down.”
Phair, forty-three, is clearly still interested in battering at the boundaries of what mainstream culture expects of her, and of women in general. She doesn’t shy away from the F word like so many of her pop contemporaries, and lets me know she’s on a “feminist march” that supersedes so many of the criticisms she’s received — not being cool enough, not being talented enough, being a sellout. Her brand of feminism is simple: “All you have to do is live your life with some pride and some honesty, and you’re pushing it forward,” Phair says. “We’re all caught between feeling like the subject of the sex scene or the object. You know, ‘How can you call yourself a feminist and take sexy photos or sing about sex?’ Because I’m trying to place myself as the subject. Go ahead and fuck. Do whatever you want. That’s feminism to me.”
Phair has just come out of a pretty terrible year, enduring what she describes as “the worst breakup imaginable” while simultaneously suffering through a widely reported falling-out with her record label, ATO. Funstyle, a difficult album with a messy past that was finally released last week, hasn’t received the warmest critical or fan reception — it’s been generally described as a disjointed disaster of an album, one that by Phair’s own admission cost her management, her record deal, and ultimately her happiness. A shift in management at ATO led to a dislike of the music she was making. The label didn’t know what to do with her or Funstyle, and ultimately she asked to leave. “People spend so much time batting back and forth my image, and they don’t get that I’m totally small, normal, funny, nice, personable,” Phair tells me. “Nobody who is sensitive enough to write really is thick-skinned. You can become it. I’ve gained my armor. But I’m not naturally like that.”
Phair feels everything deeply yet uses the emotions practically — she’s been wounded by the process of making Funstyle and its perceived failure, wounded by the injustices of being a woman in what is sometimes a boy’s club industry. These trials have empowered her. Does Phair believe that her musical career would have been different, that she would have been received differently, if she were a man? “I would be Ween,” she jokes, before adding, “I think it’s to my advantage. I think I’ve gained ground and gained attention because I’m a woman doing this. Because of my musicianship, and my technical proficiency. I’ve gained a lot more than I theoretically deserved, and I’ve also suffered a lot more than I theoretically deserve.”
Fact is, critical reception is only a very minor component of Phair’s creative identity, which, despite the hardship, appears to be flourishing. She’s working on a novel, which she felt driven to write because of the ongoing strife with Funstyle. “I said to myself, I do not have to do music, and I was fully prepared to never make another record for as long as I lived. I sat there, and I was like, ‘What do I do better than other people? I don’t play guitar better. I don’t sing better. I tell stories. I will write a book.’”
Because of her tumultuous life in a fickle record industry, Phair seems uniquely prepared for the manic process of writing and publishing a novel. (Actually, three. She sees the first as the beginning of a series.) “Because of my records, I know what that’s like. I’m ready for it. Slaving on something, putting it together, (going from) ‘Oh my god, I’m a genius’ to ‘I suck,’” she says.
As for the pressure of Exile being a musical touchstone for feminist women? “It’s a lot of weight. It feels like more than I put into it, because I was just speaking for myself. There’s a sense of feeling humbled by it. I’d reached my boiling point. I’d had enough. And I continue to have enough every so often.”
That evening at Granville Street’s Venue club, Phair gives the kind of performance rabid fans long for — small, intimate, and invested. A group of women in the front dance unselfconsciously while lip-synching every word, as a cluster of boys hang off the end of the stage, staring adoringly at Phair and her black-sequined mini-dress.
Whatever happens with Funstyle, with the future of her career in the music and publishing industries, with her personal life, up on the stage she is obviously in a place to take it in stride and continue as boldly and as defiantly as she ever has. Quite simply, and as Phair herself had emphatically stated as we’d finished our conversation, she cannot be broken.
“Whoever is profiting off my music, I made it. It’s mine. This is my expression in the world. I will last.”
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