June, 2003: Liz gets on the radio
I’d just graduated high school and had not one responsibility. My only job was to survive until community college started in the Fall. I was also freshly out of the closet. The purest form of summer vacation had begun, and it was the heyday for teen queens like Avril Lavigne, Hilary Duff, and Britney Spears — makers of the kind of sugary pop shit that 19-year-old girls and gay guys would inject into their veins if they could. We were the crack addicts of the music industry.
It was no wonder Why Can’t I by Liz Phair (who?) became the new summer jam. It oozed production value and had lyrics like, “We haven’t fucked yet but my head’s spinning.”
Though the album’s adult content was deemed stupid enough to pass as teen pop, Wal-Mart only sold the edited version of the self-titled Liz Phair. I had to go to a real record store and pay like eighteen bucks of my parents’ money to get the one with the dirty words.
And, ohmigod, if that wasn’t the best eighteen bucks I’d ever spent. I played the album on repeat and raged out (ugh, hormones) for months. No, really. I banged this shit so loud in my Camry that I blew out the bass. I’d roll around screaming the lyrics at the top of my lungs with the windows down (and I kind of still do). People straight up stared
But never mind that, how could I resist with gems like these to howl:
“All you do is fuck me every day and night.”
“You’re like my favorite underwear.”
“Give me your hot white cum.”
From three different songs, by the way. There were gay teens just like me all over the nation masturbating to this album. It was genius.
The critics, however, said it was anything but. Pitchfork gave it their lowest rating possible — a 0.0. They said that Liz Phair sold out her indie roots for mainstream bullshit, and that she’d committed career suicide. They were kind of right. Seemed more like her career had been murdered, to me …
Seething, I bought all three of her prior albums at once to draw my own fucking conclusions.
1994 — 1998: the beginnings
The third album, whitechocolatespaceegg was almost as good as the last album (quite a feat). The second album lost some production value and took on a “grungier” theme. Her first and most critically acclaimed album, Exile in Guyville, was some of the shittiest music I’d ever purchased. So there you go. Critics know nothing. Mainstream was the direction Phair was headed her whole career. Duh.
October, 2005: gasping for breath
Just warning you, shit is about to get real abrupt.
Liz quietly dropped her last real album. You don’t even need to know its name. The critics who bothered said it was even worse than the last (which isn’t even mathematically possible). Stupid fucking men.
This album proved to be the worse-selling Liz Phair album, ever. Phair was no longer commercially relevant, so Capitol said goodbye. Phair was lost to the bowels of Hollywood, becoming a composer for 90210 or some bullshit. I mourned my loss.
(This is where we’d cut to black for a pregnant pause.)
July, 2010: beyond career
What the what? Liz releases a so-called “pseudo-album” called Funstyle, which — out of eleven tracks — contains at least four joke songs. I won’t get into it. Critics tried to attack it, but they weren’t sure how. And you can only download the album from her janky-ass website (I really thought Angelfire was dead). No iTunes, no CD release. Nothing. Website. Fuck it.
Days later, she posted a response on her website to the new “album.”
These songs lost me my management, my record deal and a lot of nights of sleep. Love them, or hate them, but dont [sic] mistake them for anything other than an entirely personal, un-tethered-from-the-machine, free for all [sic] view of the world, refracted through my own crazy lens.
For Phair, any semblance of a career had officially come undone. But hey, at least she was still making music, even if it meant feeling like waking from a 5-year coma; even if I was the only one listening to it.
The end. For now.
