Bobby Evers writesRediscovering our Record Collections: Learning To Lean In to Liz Phair

by Bobby Evers

The early oughts was a tumultuous time. George W Bush was president, we were gearing up for a second concurrent war, and all the best celebrities were picking sides. The internet was democratizing music scenes in ways that were still new and hard to predict, showcasing indie artists in Omaha and the Pacific Northwest, and music fans primary concern was coolness and authenticity. After 10 years of releasing increasingly top 40ish albums, Liz Phair, a once powerful indie artist going full-blown mainstream pop was most certainly not cool.

And the critics were the first to let us know. In their album review, PopMatters called her a "soon-to-be-has-been," writing: " this once-adored darling of indie rock is a mere shadow of her former self.... The resulting album, Liz Phair, is a highly overproduced, shallow, soulless, confused, pop-by-numbers disaster that betrays everything the woman stood for a decade ago, and most heinously, betrays all her original fans." 

In the Pitchfork review, the author eviscerates her eloquently with: "It's sad that an artist as groundbreaking as Phair would be reduced to cheap publicity stunts and hyper-commercialized teen-pop. But then, this is "the album she has always wanted to make"-- one in which all of her quirks and limitations are absorbed into well-tested clichés, and ultimately, one that may as well not even exist."

Both writers are male. Both call her different forms of shallow, vain, degrading, vapid.

But now that we live in an age where pop artists like Beyonce, Kesha, Taylor Swift, and Carly Rae Jepsen are celebrated for their strengths and contributions, and their albums are evaluated and debated as works of pop art, I think it's time to take a second look at Liz Phair's 2003 self-titled album, that brought her so much scorn. It brought her both top 40 success, getting airplay on my hometown radio station, and also lost her her entire fanbase.

I first discovered Liz Phair in 1999, when we got DirecTV for the first time and I could watch obscure music videos on MTV2. I saw the video for Polyester Bride, the breakout single from her third album, and this lead me to download earlier tracks as well, like Headache, Ride, and Fuck and Run. This was during the days when you would labor over fanzines that collected the lyrics to entire discographies. I bought Exile in Guyville at the Mall of America when I was 17 and listened to it over and over and shared it with friends. This actually lead me to seeking out more artists who were women. I was hooked.

When her self-titled came out, I was in college and devouring all music that came in my path. Hearing that Liz Phair had a new album, I had to have it, so I went to a friend's dorm and downloaded it track by track on either Limewire or possibly the shared server their dorm had at the time. Listening to the album, I felt betrayed at how cookie cutter it sounded. I thought she was trying to be Brittany Spears and it was kind of sad.

I think part of the problem of evaluating this album as a piece of art is the comparisons it immediately draws. Being produced by the same production team as Avril Lavigne's breakout singles, it's easy to compare it to that. Or as a watered-down attempt at achieving the notoriety of the Christina/Brittany set, a scene the original Phair fans excoriate. Even comparing this Liz Phair album to previous Liz Phair albums is a weird experience, since it is such a different vibe and different production tactic.

So maybe we should evaluate it on what the album is actually doing, instead of what it's not. Imagine a 36-year-old white woman in 2003, booking some studio time to make her first album in five years, and she wants to go really big. She thinks to herself, "my brand is really strong, and there's no reason I shouldn't be as big as any of these other talentless jerks. And every album I've come out with has brought me wider acclaim than the one before. This album should be my really big one. I'm not getting any younger, and I've been in this game a long time. What have I got to lose if I work with the top people in the industry?"

Maybe she thought to herself, "my brand is a single mother in her mid-thirties who can still get young hotshot dudes whenever I want. My brand is sexually frank, emotional, vulnerable, but wise with the experience of dating men for 20 years. What does a song sound like when written from that perspective?" And then she begins her songwriting with the team.

She isn't doing anything different from what Taylor Swift did in the 1989 studio. Taylor also worked with a songwriting team to make the best album she could. Taylor also looked at her own brand to write songs from the perspective of what she thought that brand looked like.  In the outtakes of that album, you can hear her trying out different things with the team, showing them the skeleton of what she's working on. How is that different from what Liz Phair did on her self-titled album?

If we can find justifications for our favorite pop stars working with producers and songwriters to make the best finished product they can, surely we can forgive Liz Phair for doing the same thing. Is it because we were uncomfortable in some way with the idea of a woman in her late 30's being sexually provocative? Beyonce is now the same age Liz Phair was when she released her self-titled album, and she too receives condemnation from some critics for being too sexual. What if we had a feminism that included everyone, including women in their late 30's who explicitly communicate their sexual desires and conquests?

I know that at the time the complaint for me was the album sounded too poppy, she should just write her own songs from the heart, because that's her biggest strength. Well, she did do that, on her next album, Somebody's Miracle. It was a return to form, sounding more like her whitechocolatespaceegg days, in that Lilith Fair, Sheryl Crow camp. And guess what! It didn't win her fans back, was not critically successful, and peaked at 46 on the Billboard 200, where her s/t peaked at 27. So maybe if you're no longer a young pop icon, you just can't win.

The album opens with the buzzy guitar line of "Extraordinary" which evokes a kind of Michelle Branch vibe. At first brush, it sounds like it's about being put on a pedestal, or trying to convey yourself as very cool when you are in fact a normal, vulnerable, insecure person. "Red Light Fever" continues the kind of insecure longing motif, and in hindsight it is almost a perfectly composed pop rock song. I think calling it pop-by-numbers is a pretty sick burn, but if you're listening to it with an open mind, all of these songs might strike you in that same way. And haven't we all wondered why we can't breathe whenever we think of someone? Why is ability to breathe always related to crush intensity? Scientists have been unable to solve this problem, at at least there are songs like "Why Can't I" that are there to express how we feel.

"Rock Me" is an interesting one, where she explores the fantasy of going home with some college guy and blowing his mind. What's puzzling is that she namedrops herself, "You don't even know who Liz Phair is." It's almost like she's writing to a college age audience who was in middle school when her first album came out, and trying to re-introduce herself and her brand.

I remember thinking "Favorite" was kind of cheesy but it getting a lot of play on my Windows Media Player as a kind of guilty pleasure. Like all of these songs, it has a good hook and is really catchy, and there was something about being a listener and connecting with a singer over a well-worn pair of underwear, as a metaphor for an old lover.  "H.W.C" is similarly catchy and provocative and funny to me. The Pitchfork review said it was something they would have expected Tenacious D to do, but when she does it it's sad and strange. And that she had embraced it as a female empowerment song. I think my defense of that would be, if you've asserted yourself as a frank-talking woman and have built your brand on "going there," maybe you too would be proud of your song that evokes both rigid Cosmo beauty tips and a celebration of sexuality.

"Love/Hate" is actually a great song out of the context of this album, and if you heard it on its own, it functions as a really effective fist-pumper. My roommate Mary at the time asked me if I knew of any songs by women that were sort of about gender. She was producing an updated version of Trojan Women for the theatre department that was supposed to evoke the current Iraq crisis, and she needed a song for one of the women to sing after some heroic defeat (I am fuzzy on the details now, apologies). I suggested "Rebel Girl" by Bikini Kill, something else, and "Love/Hate" from this album. The version performed in the play had sparse foot-stomping percussion and no other musical accompaniment. It was slow and sad and incredibly effective. Ever since that, "Love/hate" has stood out to me as a kind of profound song. "It's a war with the whole wide world, it's a war with the boys and girls, it's a war and nothing's going to change." For me, "Good Love Never Dies" is equally evocative and a good closer to the album.

I guess the complaint about this album is that she went from a rock singer-songwriter to a pop-rock confectionery. And my point is, in the year of our lord 2018, is that still the death sentence it was in 2003? We love pop stars now. Let's love Liz again. Looking at it through that lens, it takes away its pariah status and is just a catchy collection of songs that can sometimes hit you in your feelers.