An Elle interviewer asked Liz questions about what her Guyville-era self would think of her recent career moves. And Liz was, as usual, completely honest: “She’d probably look at [Somebody's Miracle] and think, ‘How come you’re not living in a better house? Why aren’t you richer?’”
Also: “What Guyville teaches me right now, what I’m trying to take into new record, is that the biggest gift you can give the world is to share what truly happens to you, what really hurts, what’s really embarrassing. That’s the thing that Guyville had in spades that I got away from.”
And: “People thought it was this straight-up confessional diary of this naive person. I thought, ‘Don’t you get it’s kind of funny and I kind of know what I’m doing?’ But I’m not even sure that it comes through when I listen to Guyville now.”
(I think it does).
Holla at me!
i didn’t think there was anything naive about it. does that mean i was naive? also, she’s right: guyville resonated cuz we lived it or lived something like it. later we just liked her songs cuz they were liz phair. maybe i’m more naive than i thought.
anyway, have fun at the show. i’m jealous.
“And Phair’s multi-faceted songs spoke to that audience with a frankness and empathy that still resonates. “
maybe it was naive … ’cause she didn’t realize that people would rather adopt a premature scowl and subsequently criticize a woman’s output as a confessional self-indulgent diary than actually listen to the music, and realize that it is kinda funny, and that she totally knows what she’s doing. ‘Cause she did, and she does, and yay!
I think the “Guyville”-era Liz would ask “Got a sports almanac handy? I totally want to do what Biff did in Back to the Future Part II.”
Emily, I was not sure how else to get a note to you, but I learned about you for the first time this morning. I write a personal blog about my experiences as a wife and mother who is trying to become an elite athlete at 36.
I got my first shitty comment this morning, which prompted me to write a complicated and painful post about my marriage, which I felt obligated to write, and bitter about feeling obligated. After I posted it, a coaching client of mine sent me your Exposed article for the NY times magazine.
I just wanted to say thanks. Your experience is so parallel in so many ways: addicted to my online presence, feeling free and brave to expose the emotional and personal, glad that my honesty can inspire other people to take risks, but your article helped me feel okay about needing to draw boundaries and keep some of my life personal.
Thanks for being brave and going there. Good luck in the future.
Kate Howe
perform to your potential!
http://www.hardheadcoaching.com
http://www.skiingintheshower.blogspot.com
Re: best/worst bathroom post.
Never say never…or worst, or smelliest, or scarriest, or…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmk7Lfs1Dho
yeah… I wouldn’t compare yourself to liz phair.
Is it fair to say that you see your own reflection in everything?
Tim, that is not nearly as traumatizing as the imagery of the mouth of a bathroom or of someone sitting at the mouth. How can anyone listen to music at a time like this?
Would it be fair to say someone might be waist-deep in a “Liz Phair phase”?
That’s not derogatory. I’m almost always in some kind of musicial phase. Right now, it’s not a musician or a band, but a larger genre — 80’s power ballads. Cinderella, Warrant, Scorpions, Bon Jovi, etc — can’t get enough. This week, anyway.
I have absolutely no explanation for this. I’m not in love with anyone right now. And I know how cheesy it is. I loved the songs at the time, though. Maybe that’s it? Mere reminiscence?
All I know is, I wish I’d seen her blow those candles out…
@Kramer @pj
I am glad you said this.
I think this Liz Phair correspondence Emily is attempting to work is dangerous for many reasons.
For one, it’s kind of embarrassing how *obvious* it is!
Also, on a more practical level, no one took Liz Phair too seriously after Whipsmart. I’ll accept Whitechocolatespaceegg as the dealbreaker, but the smart money is Whipsmart. And that was 10 years ago!
The End.
Yeah, I relate to Liz Phair. So do a lot of people. Fuck you for telling me I’m not allowed to. And fuck you for reading my blog just to hate on it. If you hate me and you hate my blog, stop reading it and go read a blog you don’t hate. And at least have the balls to sign your hate with your real fucking name, you stupid fucking cowards.
Rrrowr! Love it! Go Em!
Sometimes, to clean the porch, ya just gotta stoop down & get dirty.
Yeah, because Emily would NEVER say anything cruel and hateful anonymously. EVER.
The thing that pisses me off when people bitch about Liz Phair is that it’s usually GUYS who do it, who have this stupid sense of what selling-out is, when the truth of the matter is, “selling-out” isn’t a real thing at all. Liz Phair became famous kind of by accident, and if you listen to the guys who knew her in Chicago, they all complain about how much they hated her and she wasn’t honest, etc.
I watched the documentary that came with the reissue of Exile last night, and the guys that she interviewed (including Urge Overkill’s Nash Kato, the guy who inspired most of the songs) were at least friendly to her, but they still kind of beat around the bush about why the album is important. Steve Albini, who wrote a letter to the Chicago Reader lambasting Phair in 1993 by saying she was a “fucking chore to listen to,” reduced the album’s integrity to “something that inspired a lot of women in the music scene, and you can’t say that’s irrelevant.”
Anyway, I think it’s silly to hate on someone who became successful for sharing something personal about themselves, as if that’s so fucking terrible to do. It’s much worse for a girl, and it’s bullshit. At least she’s (and you and discuss amongst yourselves to whom I’m referring) attaching her name to it, which is a hell of a lot harder (clearly) than doing things anonymously.
Esquire gag: Blind man with seeing-eye dog walks into a store, picks up his dog by its leash, swings it around over his head; clerk shouts: “Hey man, what’re you doing?” Blind man: “Oh, I’m just looking around.”
One of the similarities I see with EG and LP is that they are the only ones in a cacophony of critics who have actually come forward and honestly acknowledged what their real mistakes were and, I think, successfully justified their decisions. And then kept producing! Like the badass women they are!
So yay them, and fuck you “kramer,” “pj” and (snort) “accomplished reader “
Why does Liz Phair gets more love than PJ Harvey?
‘Rid of Me,” which is contemporary with “Guyville,” is far more confessional, sexually-frank and aesthetically complete than Ms. Phair’s more celebrated album. It’s also more rockin’.
“50ft Queenie” > “6′ 1″”; “Rid of Me” > “Fuck and Run”; etc.
And Ms. Harvey has continued to make challenging and successful albums without having to court the press with her biographical details. What has Liz Phair done? She’s still a terrible guitar player, a limited, pitch-corrected vocalist and continues to write rudimentary songs that go nowhere (except back to her fragile ego).
“Exile in Guyville” is the “Frampton Comes Alive” of our generation. It’s unfortunate that people continue to confuse nostalgia with great art.
I really hate to open up and be oh so sincere in what I perceive as an often time glib forum, but the cause of Ms. E’s completely justified diatribe against those teeny tiny haters’ brains drives me out.
Now I came to this blog because of the NYT article Ms E authored. In that article I found someone who just put her all of her heart out there and in that I found a commonality with others. I felt like the anger, the disappointments, the hurts and the joys of my life weren’t so different from others. So I wanted to come sit around the fire here. I actually wanted to become vulnerable and not just in the blogosphere but in also in the real.
So I quietly came in and tossed out a few cryptic sentences of admiration for the people here and once used a word too multi-faceted for one of the professional comedy writers here. ZAPP! I got dinged and did not like it at all. I actually obsessed about it for a day and thought out many responses from rebuttals to gratitude. Then I felt that part of what you had written about. But I still hid for a while.
Back to the point of this soliloquy, Ms. E, of course as you know, your work has been published in the NYT – a full blown non-fiction piece read by millions. That is such a big deal. There are countries that would pay to get any coverage in the NYT. You have created a blog so we don’t have to. It is populated by, in my opinion, quite a few accomplished writers and artists. There are admirers and biters. And who knows how many as yet unspoken readers with new hope. The haters can only take the spotlight away from you if you so choose. You’re right; the haters are cowards because even in the relative anonymity of blogosphere they won’t sign with their names. That shows how fragile their tiny egos are. They should go find another place, as they evidently have nothing of value to contribute here.
Love that word “screed” BTW!
Thanks again.
[...] Liz Phair’s “Exile In Guyville,” of course! (reminded of said historic date via Emily Magazine); The M’s latest, “Real Close Ones,” via Chicagoist and their Tankboy, from whom [...]
I just came back and read this thread today (must have missed it before).
I find the “you see yourself in Liz Phair” criticism almost as hilarious and inane as the “you used ‘I’ too often in a personal essay” criticism. You said somewhere else that you don’t see Liz Phair as a reflection of yourself, you just enjoy her music and love her honesty and all that.
Well good. But I say, isn’t that what we love about art anyway? I mean, don’t we all love to see something that we’ve experienced in it? Isn’t that what it is all about? We see someone else express the things we ourselves feel in a new, creative way.
I’m probably not expressing this well enough. I mean, I have no idea why you love Liz Phair and I don’t really care why you love her Em, but I don’t think it would be a crime to love any artist because you see some of yourself in their work.
Who are these people, posting this crap here? To me it seems like they are so busy trying to prove they are intellectually superior they must never have taken the time to truly love or appreciate anything.
I don’t blame you for stopping the commentary. (even though I’m glad I get to slip this one in under the radar…).
One more thing. Clarence Darrow explained his own penchant for swearing by sighing and saying that there were so few words he could be sure everyone would understand. Sometimes “fuck you” is the only thing that will do.