Wednesday, May 28, 2003

ENTERTAINERS BRING MAY FLOWERS: I am really torn up about the article on Liz Phair in the current Entertainment Weekly (subscribers only, I fear).

Basic point of the article -- Liz Phair is trying for mainstream success, even if it means mainstreaming her sound, and she doesn't give a damn what you think about it:
''I didn't want to be some '90s act that was great in my 20s and never did anything else,'' says Phair, tackling an appetizer of crab claws. ''People are like, 'Don't be commercial, then. Just be...Wilco.' And that's one way to live. But even when I made ''Guyville,'' I was hating indie then. The whole album was about how much I hated indie. I was sick to f---ing death of that snobbery. You know, I liked radio hits my whole life, including when I was cool. When Shakira goes [sings] 'Underneath your clothes...,' that works on me. So here's your question in life: Do you acknowledge who you are even if people don't like you for it? Even if people say, 'That's so lame'? Should I pretend to be cool so that you will approve of me? After I had my kid, the revelation I had was, Life is incredibly short. I like who I am. And I'm just gonna like what I like and go for what I want to go for. It's simple.''

So Phair's new album, "the brazenly glossy" Liz Phair is due on June 24, featuring the production work of the Matrix, the same people who designed Avril Lavigne's hits. Ugh.

And I've heard the first single already, "Why Can't I" -- and you can too, via this link. Triple ugh. It's 75% Lavigne, 25% Sheryl Crow, and all horribly, terribly banal.

But here's the thing: I want Liz Phair to be a huge star. She deserves to be. Her name should be on the lips of every teenage girl, and every guy from 18-54 should be mesmerized by her; see her as cool, tall, vulnerable and luscious; want her to be his blowjob queen.

Just not for this. Liz Phair should not become famous for watered-down pop music with generic lyrics. It'd be like Willie Mays being remembered for his years with the Mets, or the Grateful Dead only being known for "Touch of Grey".

No, Liz Phair should've made her mint off Exile In Guyville, her debut album, that magnificent, magical, intimate, introspective, nuanced, low-fi, completely awe-inspiring document of a complicated woman and her sexuality, one that sounded better than anything else out there, was better-written than anything else out there, with its worst track from its eighteen ("Never Said", imho) still leaps and bounds ahead of anything else. On Exile, girl-with-a-guitar Phair was sometimes vulnerable ("Divorce Song", "Canary"), sometimes triumphant ("Girls! Girls! Girls!), sometimes wistful ("Strange Loop"), sometimes horny ("Flower"), always compelling.

As Cynthia Joyce once wrote, "Sure, plenty of pop stars have inspired imitators, but Liz Phair was possibly the first pop star to make women feel like she was impersonating them." Or, as Scott Manzler put it, it's "a series of semi-fictionalized diary scribblings, the musings of a young woman locked in her bedroom as she practices her moves"

It was my favorite album of the whole 1990s -- yes, more than Nevermind -- and one I still listen to regularly.

But I'm not asking her to just record Exile all over again or for Phair to be the same person she was as a single woman in Wicker Park c. 1992, because it's clear she's not a one-hit-wonder. On whitechocolatespaceegg, songs like "Polyester Bride", "Perfect World" and "Uncle Alvarez" make clear that she's a solid artist capable of making vulnerable, complicated music even with a fuller, more mainstreamed sound.

That album -- with full Rolling Stone coverage and a radio-friendly lead single -- didn't make Phair the star she deserved to be. But instead of turning back to her base, she's running away from it, and I'm disappointed. Generic, bland and impersonal is no way to go through life.

But not angry. Look: she's 36 years old, so if mainstream success is ever going to happen for her, it's got to happen soon. And she's entitled to make money, make herself comfortable, allow herself to raise her son with a good nest egg. She's allowed to make the money that those who followed in the wake of Exile did in the space she created (Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, Jewel, etc.). I just wish it didn't have to be this way.

Phair, of course, prepared us for this back in 1997, on "Shitloads Of Money":
It's nice to be liked
But it's better by far to get paid
I know that most of the friends that I have don't really see it that way
But if you could give 'em each one wish
How much do you wanna bet?
They'd wish success for themselves and their friends and
that would include lots of money

In a perfect world, this album is huge, and it leads lots of teenage girls to discover Exile In Guyville. In an imperfect world, it'll be chased off the charts by the latest flavor of the week in a fortnight, if it ever makes it there in the first place.

Good luck, Liz, and I hope you get what you want out of this.

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