Liz Phair
"Exile in Guyville"
(Matador, 1993)

By CYNTHIA JOYCE When I was little, there was Chrissie Hynde, but she was so much older and cooler it was clear I'd never catch up. As a moody adolescent, I loved Suzanne Vega, but gave it up because I didn't want to spend the rest of my life feeling like "a small blue thing." In college, the Indigo Girls did manage to inspire -- that is, until they were co-opted by the "even my sweat smells clean" womyn's music crowd. But earnestness was getting old by then anyway, and I made room for something more interesting, more raw. That something came in two small but very different packages: Liz Phair and PJ Harvey. While as a musician PJ Harvey demanded plenty of awe and admiration, as a person she only left me wondering who did her make-up. Her presence on stage was like a strange force from another planet -- fascinating, but best not to get too close. Liz Phair, by contrast, was smaller than life. Not exactly the girl next door, but the girl who lived just around the corner. And it seemed like everybody knew her, or at least knew someone who knew her. For an entire year after "Exile" came out, the favored party pastime was to swap "I knew her when" stories: "I went to high school with her -- here, look -- here she is in pearls." "I knew Johnny. Man, he really dicked her over." "I went to Oberlin with her. I heard the original 'Exile' four-track." "She had sex with her boyfriend on my dorm-room floor while I was passed out. My roommate told me." The stories proved she was real, maybe even accessible. But more important, they proved that it could happen to you. You could be a dorky suburban kid with a Dorothy Hamill haircut in high school and still become a rock star; graduate from a liberal arts college and still write well; move to California and then move back after deciding you preferred the bleakness of your Midwestern hometown after all; whine about wanting a boyfriend and then get one; read your diary on stage and have men, as well as women, not only listen but lip-synch the words; and even talk like a slut and find a husband. But if Phair's achievements showed it was okay to like it both ways, "Exile" made it clear that for every cocky victory, there was a slap in the face. There are moments, as in "Girls! Girls! Girls!," where Phair is on top of her game and gives her sexual self full reign ("I get away/almost every day/with what the girls call murder"). But there are also those, as in "Johnny Sunshine," when she's been walked on -- "I think I've been taken for everything I own/I've been hurt so badly/I'm alone, baby I'm alone." While most music takes you back to the time when you first heard it, somehow "Exile in Guyville" retroactively defined my every romantic milestone, crystallizing each event so that the album became for me the diary I never kept. I'm sure I was hearing "The Divorce Song" when I drove with my friend/lover to a Tennessee motel room during a long and revealing road trip ("It's harder to be friends and lovers/and you shouldn't try to mix the two/cause if you do it and you're still unhappy/then you know that the problem is you") even if it was two years before the album came out, much as "Stratford-on-Guy" was floating around in my head from the first time I flew solo and had a window seat ("The sun was setting to the left of the plane/and the cabin was filled with an unearthly glow/In 27D I was behind the wing/watching landscape roll out like credits on a screen"). Her second album, "Whip-Smart," had the similar effect of making me feel like Liz lived on the other side of my mirror. I can't wait to hear her next one, just so I can figure out what I've been thinking about lately.

Download a clip (1MB) of "Girls! Girls! Girls!"
from "Exile in Guyville"

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