Setting: a grimy coffee house in the University District, Seattle. A typical rainy day, fall 1999.
My friend Eva and I are discussing one of our favorite topics: our goals. More specifically, her desire to be on “Saturday Night Live” and my desire to be hip. We spent countless hours talking about this during college. Apparently the quest to be hip is my holy grail because I’m still looking for how to do it.
The surly guy working behind the counter put on Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville.” Even at that time, it was a fairly old album. But I had never heard it and only knew what it was after I asked Eva. As the album played and we drank our coffee, the album spoke to me. I bought my own copy that afternoon. I annoyed my roommate by playing it over and over. She described the theme of the album as “I hate men but I want to sleep with them anyway.” And that pretty much captured my sentiments at the time.
Time passed. Phair’s music changed and I also changed. I found myself increasingly less bitter. Maybe I wasn’t really exiled in Guyville at all. I felt like I had moved on and matured, but her music still meant something to me.
Then Phair’s fourth album came out. It shocked me to my very core. Unlike her past albums, I could not see it as a step forward. It was like she was trying to be Britney Spears even though she is old enough to be Britney’s mother. I was shocked and appalled. I had viewed Phair as a big sister of sorts — someone who had gone through the kind of things I was going through. Did this mean that what I had to look forward to was a mid-life crisis where I became out of touch with everything that was real and genuine?
I found myself confused. Liz Phair was a musician I had formerly seen as true to herself, even when it meant she was more popular with music critics than kids at the mall. And now she was trying to be sexy. Sexy female musicians are a dime a dozen. Are we all just heading toward losing our credibility and what we used to believe in?
But I thought seeing her in concert might illuminate the situation. I expected to see lots of people like me at the concert.
I was surprised to see that the venue was half-empty and most of the people in the audience appeared to be gay men. I suppose they also saw themselves as current or former exiles in Guyville. Although there were flashes of the Liz Phair I wanted to see, there also was a song where instead of actually playing the guitar, she just writhed around next to it. The old Liz Phair wouldn’t have done that.
I find myself torn between waiting for Phair to redeem herself and wanting to move on. Should I just accept that she has sold out or should I be more tolerant of her mid-life crisis because I might have one of my own coming up in a few years?
Amanda Wolfman is a Medill graduate student. She can be reached at [email protected].