Liz Phair Is Not Your Feminist Spokesmodel
Twenty-five years after “Exile in Guyville,” the architect of a landmark statement of ’90s rock reflects on women and the music industry, then and now.
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In 1993, Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville” was the album of choice for a certain cohort of angsty young women. It was a song-by-song response to “Exile on Main St.,” the double LP by the Rolling Stones, which Ms. Phair considered the ultimate guy band. But it was also a reaction to Guyvilles everywhere: the male-dominated indie-rock scene she strived to be a part of; the boyfriend who said she could never make an album; and, for those of us listening, our own stand-ins.
Ms. Phair was defiant and sexual and unapologetic and vulnerable at once — a kind of girl-next-door casually swinging a sledgehammer at rock ’n’ roll as we knew it, singing about sex, love and power in a direct, unmediated way that few women before her had. Part of her punch came from the tension between her clean-cut Midwestern look and her explicit exploration of desire and death. “Guyville” catapulted her — 25, unemployed and smoking a lot of pot in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago — to the cover of Rolling Stone, under the proclamation, “A Rock & Roll Star is Born.”
In the years since the album’s release, it has been both a triumph and an albatross for Ms. Phair. She was chided for never achieving its critical and commercial success again, for changing her sound, for being frustrated that she had been rebuked for changing her sound. Ms. Phair, now 51, released five more albums from 1994 to 2010 and is at work on a sixth. She is writing a memoir called “Horror Stories,” part of a two-book deal with Random House. It has been years since she’s toured.
But if ever there was a time to revisit Guyville, it is now — in a moment when its walls seem to be tumbling. Matador rereleases the album this month, along with songs from three cassettes Ms. Phair put out under the name “Girly-Sound” in 1991. Those young women who were touched by it 25 years ago are now marching, running for office, proclaiming #MeToo.
We spoke with Ms. Phair about the reissue, Lilith Fair and growing older in a youth-obsessed music industry from her home in Los Angeles. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
I tend to want to burn most things I wrote five years ago, let alone 25. What’s it like preparing to perform songs you recorded three decades ago?
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