The Exile In Guyville sleeve: Liz Phair's response to Kaiser Chiefs' Employment was less well received
Can it really be 15 years since Liz Phair released Exile In Guyville? Indeed it is. Monday sees the release of an anniversary re-issue, which includes the remastered album, rare tracks and a DVD. But has it stood the test of time?
Exile was released after Riot Grrrl and before Jagged Little Pill. An emotionally open, starkly confessional, sexually explicit double album, pitched as a song for song response to the Rolling Stones' Exile On Mainstreet.
Phair wasn't a natural singer - her dry vocal delivery matched the scrappy lo-fi production. But it was the sheer honesty of her songs that shone through. They were like diary entries from the frontline of the gender wars.
As former Sleater-Kinney member Carrie Brownstein said in a recent blog, "They spoke of the fine lines between power and powerlessness, autonomy and isolation, they depicted epiphanies and the subsequent letdowns."
The inspiration for the album came from the Chicago indie scene at the time (which included Urge Overkill and Smashing Pumpkins). "Guyville" was a phrase coined by Blackie Onasis of Urge Overkill to describe, as Phair told NPR: "a mafia of music lovers who were representing 'alternative' but I found them to be oppressive."
For Phair it represented a clique that she was both "dating and labouring under". Years of being "the girlfriend" of the guy in the band and not being listened to for her musical opinion had built up a "diamond of pressurised anger" and, luckily for us, a brace of songs. The idea of using The Stones' "Exile..." as a jump-off point came to Phair via a crush.
"I invented in my crazy-ass mind that Mick (Jagger)'s 'character' in Exile On Mainstreet was this guy," she says. "And then I wrote (songs) back to him." (His identity, we are told, will be revealed on the DVD portion of the re-issue.)
The album topped Village Voice's prestigious Pazz and Jop poll for 1993 and became an instant classic. But Phair's career was never the same again. After failing to repeat the success of Guyville, her label, Matador, became part of Capitol (the partnership was dissolved three years later in 1999, when Matador became independent again). One brave, but disastrous, attempt to reinvent her as a MILF via Avril Lavigne's songwriting team later and she was at sea.
Happily she recently said that "for the first time in 15 years I feel creative." As well as working on a new album, she is scoring the music for the TV show Swingtown. Listening to Guyville with the benefit of hindsight, she says now: "As much as I'm acting tough, it's actually a portrait of a vulnerable young woman trying to establish some power for herself."
So why has this indie classic been forgotten? A case of Phair's subsequent work sullying her debut's name? Or is something more sinister (and sexist) at play here?
