Twenty years after its release, two things are apparent about Liz Phair’s début album, “Exile in Guyville.” The first is that the record is still worth listening to. If you haven’t heard it recently, “Guyville” is many things. It’s an eighteen-song record of what used to be called indie rock, arguably the quintessential example of the form. It was conceived and written by Phair when she was a twenty-five-year-old Oberlin graduate, and then reconceived as an impressionistic, atmospheric song cycle in a Chicago recording studio by a young producer named Brad Wood.
“Exile” is part coming-of-age story and part systematic inquiry into the fractured psyche of American nineties womanhood. At the time, it was a landmark of foul-mouthed, compromised intimacy, a tortured confessional, a workout in female braggadocio, and a wellspring of penetrating self-analysis and audacity. Phair was as lyrical as Joni Mitchell but played as tough as Chrissie Hynde; she was as smart as Courtney Love and as comfortable toying with sexual imagery as Madonna.
There were still LPs back then, and “Exile” was designed as a double album—it was, the young singer-songwriter claimed, a song-by-song counterpart to the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main St.,” designed to be consumed in 5-4-5-4 bursts matching the sides of the original two records of the Stones’ dense classic. Thus fortified, the songs jump out at the listener. They are built around Phair’s distinctive style, and the guitar lines that mark so many of her compositions display a musicality that is still underappreciated (“Strange Loop,” “Explain It to Me,” “Gunshy”). One of the unexpected signifiers of “Exile” was the sound of a diminutive woman sometimes straining to accomplish the guitar part that she’d written. This was paralleled by Phair’s melody lines, which forced her voice, which was not innately strong, to attempt everything from an almost guttural throatiness to a thin soprano. Part of the point of the record was that Phair (a) had written the songs and (b) was going to sing them, no matter the damage.
The first words on the album—chanted over a set of friendly, ringing guitar chords—are “I bet you fall in bed too easily,” addressed to herself as much as to the jerk she’s singing to. Her voice struggles to stay on pitch, but the over-all effect is enthralling. The next song, “Never Said,” contains one of Phair’s most enduring tricks, stirring in youthful, almost adolescent concerns to a very adult admixture, worked out over another set of enticing chord changes. What at first seems to be articulated in terms of a schoolyard dispute—“I never said nothing!” she insists—quickly slides into a gangster patois: “All I know is that know is that I’m as clean as a whistle, baby / I didn’t let the cat out.” The song’s not about truth or lies, and not whether you believe the character but whether, in the end, you understand that, lying or telling the truth, she’d probably say the same thing.
In “Help Me Mary,” Phair sings about boys who are unaccountably living in her house. (“They leave suspicious things in the sink.”) Her vow at the end of the song is a cold one: “Weave my disgust into fame / and watch them as they run to the flame.” This is either a statement of intent from the singer herself, a penetrating interior monologue by a character the singer made up, or a parody of a scheming woman—either to make a sophisticated point about male-female relations or just to stir up a little controversy. As Phair herself puts it in the song “Girls! Girls! Girls!,” “I get away / Almost every day / With what the girls call murder.”
The record plays with so many rock tropes it is difficult to categorize them: the Stonesian naughtiness, the wise-beyond-her-years world-weariness, the blistering putdown, the porny sex incantation. “Flower,” set to an abstract backing track, begins with one straightforward line, “Every time I see your face / I get so wet between my legs,” and then gets explicit. It's a tour de force of button-pushing: delivered with just enough salaciousness to play into every indie boy’s dreams yet mechanically enough to raise the question of whether she is acting the part of a woman reduced to the role of sex doll. Phair used language trenchantly and precisely, yet still revelled in the ambiguities. Fucking and running, the subject of another song, was about just that, but the desire expressed in “Flower,” to “be your blow-job queen” was, by contrast, hot, soul-freeing, and (as Phair well understood) just the sort of distraction that gets guys seeing double and puts women in a position of power. All these moments were key to the allure of “Exile.” The album captured the imagination of just about everyone who heard it.
The second point that seems obvious about “Exile” is that Phair, in some fundamental way, did not live up to the album’s promise. More than a few great songs followed—I’m thinking of the unforgettable “Bloodkeeper,” from the EP “Juvenilia”; the high melodicism of “May Queen”; the chirruping production of the title song on “Whip-Smart”; the lulling, troubling acoustic triumph “Perfect World,” on “Whitechocolatespaceegg”; and a few more.
So it’s not precisely that Phair’s artistry collapsed. My theory, in the end, is that she was not to be possessed of whatever that stuff is that one needs to be actual star. That’s not how it seemed early on, though. I met her in the Chicago night club Lounge Ax on a very cold January night, and she gave me an unmarked cassette of her songs. We began what became a long series of interviews over the months before her album came out. (The product of my first chat with her, if anyone cares, is here.) Phair’s striking hyperverbality, obvious canniness and poise, and absolute command of the overtones and undertones of her compositions bespoke someone who would slip easily into whatever level of stardom her manifest talents afforded.
But a combination of the doctrinaire and the iconoclastic hampered Phair’s career. She was skeptical of the indie mentality that was running wild in the underground rock world (don’t promote your work, don’t sign to a major label, etc.), but, at the same time, she was held captive to it. To cite just one example, she made her own videos (this was at the perfervid height of MTV’s influence). It’s hard to think of a star of Phair’s import whose videos were as bad as hers. At the same time, her brand of confrontational feminism led her to exult in posing for cheesecake pictorials. Those throwbacky signifiers (the tackily revealing clothes, the come-hither moues), in retrospect, just seem weird. (The Internet teems with the relics of this odd branding strategy; even Phair’s apparently moribund Web site displays this legacy.)
Another missing element: despite her preternatural in-person poise, it was hard for Phair to play live. She wasn’t comfortable in front of an audience. Beyond that, the atmospherics that marked her début album were hard to create onstage. She never had a band that jelled enough to play live versions of her songs cleanly and alluringly. Her earliest shows—solo in tiny rooms, sometimes without even a stage—intriguingly displayed the bones of the songs. But those charming moments when Phair strained to make a chord change—she’s a tiny person, often dwarfed by her guitar—didn’t work in bigger venues. The goodwill from fans she elicited was immense, but audiences tended to leave somewhat unfulfilled. I saw her many times early on, and then occasionally over the years, and, while the shows were not unenjoyable, I don’t think I ever saw one in which a disinterested viewer would come away thinking she was an important rock artist.
And for all of Phair’s fame on the indie scene of the era, her actual stardom was limited. “Guyville” sold only a few hundred thousand copies on its first release. By the time her work came out on a major label, some of the consequences of her early decisions came back to haunt her. A year later, Phair appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, but only as part of a condescending “Women in Rock” issue.
Two more substantive albums followed—“Whip-Smart” and then “Whitechocolatespaceegg”—and she then slid out of the cultural consciousness, only to be remembered as a feminist disappointment with every attempted comeback. The anniversary of “Exile” hasn’t gone entirely unnoticed, and even got a few shout-outs on Twitter. But it seems pallid next to the rapturous reception given to, say, the Pixies reunion. To me, each song on “Exile in Guyville” reverberates powerfully, making it patently one of the strongest rock albums ever made. But the legacy of its maker is going to be of the what-might-have-been variety, the story of someone who took a look at what Joni Mitchell called the “star-making machinery” and neither engaged it nor quite walked away, with ambiguous consequences.