Liz Lemons

What the hell is Liz Phair thinking?

by M.J. Fine

	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Dec 15, 2010

She faces that question every time she deigns to make music, even as fewer people care about the answer. It's been a constant refrain, from her audacious 1993 debut, Exile in Guyville, which titillated and terrified music nerds who didn't know that pretty girls could be could be intimidated and turned on by them, to 2005's Somebody's Miracle, which was so aggressively bland that it self-destructed in the memory of the handful of people who gave it a chance.

Throughout, her lyrics teem with WTF sing-along choruses like "Fuck and run/ Fuck and run/ Even when I was 12," "It's nice to be liked/ But it's better by far to get paid," "Give me your hot, white cum" and "Uh oh, I think I'm a genius/ Uh oh, you're being a penius/ Colada, that is."

You can draw your line wherever you want, but if you've gotten any pleasure from listening to Liz Phair, it wasn't from watching her coloring within the lines.

With Funstyle (Rocket Science), her latest fuck-you to music-biz scum and fans alike, she lures listeners with a carrot — 10 of her long-sought-after Girlysound demo tracks — then slams them with the stick. The new material's a mess of contradictions, with the stress on mess. To give her credit, there's some decent stuff here: vulnerable pop ("Miss September"), feel-good funk ("My, My") and a chill thriller ("Bang! Bang!"). But the good's jumbled up with the bad and the ugly. Which is the lesser evil: a few blah tracks produced by Dave Matthews before his ATO Records dumped her, or the label-baiting skits that don't know when to quit? Depends whether you're more partial to watching nail polish dry or a trainwreck. In Column A, there's the noodly, needly love song "Oh, Bangladesh!"; in Column B, you've got "Bollywood," a bhangra-rap hybrid. Either one'll make your gut ache, but they're both preferable to "Beat Is Up," which employs Phair's Valley Girl-via-Chicago whine to comic effect. A tragedy, really.

But you can't say it's out of character. For comparison, check out "California," the last track on Funstyle 's Girlysound supplement. Recorded in 1991 and reworked for 1995's Juvenilia EP, it's got the same basic building blocks as "Beat Is Up" — exaggerated accent, cracked humor. One was born in a suburban Illinois bedroom and the other in an L.A. studio, and neither is as charming as it thinks. More endearing are "In Love with Yourself" and "Love Song," which show the singer at her bruised best — hurt and lashing out, with a keen sense of self-awareness. It's clear why she felt she needed lo-fi goofs on "Miss Mary Mack" and "Wild Thing" to draw attention to her snippy snapshots of single life, but such curiosities are worth just a cursory listen. Nearly 20 years on, it's a shame she thinks it's still the best bait she's got.

Hard to believe, but her third album, 1998's whitechocolatespaceegg, met with cries of disbelief and disappointment. After mining the Girlysound trove for nine of the 18 compositions on Exile and four of the 14 on Whip-Smart, Phair had moved on in her life. No longer the shy 21-year-old who was bolder in her lyrics than in her life, by 28 she'd earned two gold records, beaten stage fright, gotten married and had a kid. As so often happens, listeners who'd identified with the romantic turmoil in her work felt left behind.

In hindsight, it's obvious that jealousy and projection played a large part in the negative response. Even if you didn't know Phair's marriage would fall apart within a few years, it's impossible to miss the domestic discord in "Go on Ahead" and "Love Is Nothing," or the seeds of infidelity in "Perfect World" and "Fantasize." Only two of the 16 songs here date from the Girlysound days: "Polyester Bride" is such a perfect single it's hard to believe Phair was allowed to hold it back for so long, while "Shitloads of Money" matches a sharp character sketch with a prickly chorus. They're in sync with the rest of the record, in tone and in quality. The album's populated with judgmental friends, dysfunctional families and liars of all stripes. But Phair's never sounded better — her unadorned voice is strong and bright even as she sings about getting off on being mistreated on "Johnny Feelgood" and it soars as the self-hating narrator of "Only Son" slips down a shame spiral.

(m_fine@citypaper.net)

Liz Phair plays Thu., Dec. 16, 9 p.m., $32.75, with Chris Brokaw, TLA, 334 South St., 215-922-1011, livenation.com.

Cuddle Magic
Citizens Arrest
Zappa Plays Zappa
Ross Bellenoit
Piffaro
Reading Rainbow
Tomas Fujiwara