It’s not my job to review the Liz Phair ‘Exile’ show, thank goodness. But one of the people I was watching it with was a professional music critic type, though he was off-duty last night, and he said that in a hypothetical review he’d talk about how her lack of stage presence makes him uncomfortable because she seems uncomfortable. It’s true, she’ll never have the effortless, Beyonce-type ability to treat a crowd like it’s just a couple of old friends who she doesn’t even care about impressing. She cares, and she can’t help but show that she cares, and that’s actually one of things I like about her.
Afterwards I came home and gchatted with Bennett, who had to miss the show due to being out of town, about the time we saw Liz together in 1998. We talked about how Liz is the only person we don’t know who we actually feel love for. It’s a little embarrassing to admit this, that I felt this love last night for Liz Phair. Admitting that you love a stranger is always sort of pathetic because obviously, the stranger doesn’t love you. There’s a lot more dignity-preservation inherent in criticizing or hating a stranger. You’re still having strong feelings about someone you don’t really know, but you’re not risking anything.
After I finished talking to Bennett I posted a comment on my own blog that said “fuck” a lot of times, in response to anonymous commenters who accused me of comparing myself to Liz. The odd thing was that I hadn’t — I’d just pulled the quotes from her interview that I found the most interesting. I don’t love Liz because she reminds me of myself. I love her because she is always very much herself — even when she was being Matrixed and autotuned into Avrildom, you got the sense that she was doing exactly what she wanted to do, even if she was doing it for silly reasons. Or maybe she was just doing it for good reasons but going about it all wrong. Regardless, she was hopelessly, helplessly herself.
A review of the Chicago show described Liz as “now 41 and more MILF than coquette …” and went on to describe the show as ” just another car wreck/hit and run in a live career that has never offered anything else.” “Zing,” Stereogum said, of the review. It’s easy to go for the “zing.” It’s harder to love.
I think if you wrote an endorsement of a brick or a sandwich or James Joyce, the anonymous haters would still find a roundabout excuse to [make the effort to come here, read the entire thing/most of it and then] post a comment accusing you of being self-centered. “yeah… I wouldn’t compare yourself to a grilled cheese.” fuck them for real.
I like Emily Gould. (I also pick up caterpillars that have fallen off trees into the middle of the sidewalk and put them on the nearest leaf.) And anybody who doesn’t find something to reflect on or empathize with in Exile From Guyville is a big ol’ bag of snatch.
Hey Emily,
This was really a perfect way to explain the rarely occurring feeling of love for a stranger or a celebrity. I confess, I have never listened to Liz Phair, so I can not speak to your emotions specific to her, but I 100% agree with loving her “because she is always very much herself.” I have one artist in particular whose songs have always broadcast his own feelings and analysis of his own life, and yeah, thats absolutely what endears him to me.
One might think that singing or writing about global, accessible, universal issues would make the material more easily accessible, but I think that in doing so, the artist runs the risk of approaching a common issue from one single side. Being unabashedly oneself, i.e. taking one’s own issues from one single side, just provides a window into one’s own mindset and, well, life. Kinda like blogging, in a way, eh?
Matthew- who is your Artist?
Personally, after the initial shock and disappointment of her “commercialization”, I appreciated her more for going in that direction. She fought to be recognized by the boys club that is indie music, and then when she finally got some, she became their little plaything. She never promised to embody what the guys from guyville idealized as the perfect indie girl musician. Exile in Guyville was an “f-you” to those expectations, so why do people expect her to eternally jump through hoops.
I meant to end that with a question mark
\
I feel the same way for Simon Le Bon . . .
Back in the day under old rules (modernism, the Enlightenment) the nature and essence of loving was requital (without which the object of one’s love is an object; e.g., one doesn’t love salt as salt cannot love in return). Postmodern, magical-realist, writing doesn’t care diddley for logic, reason and sensible underpinnings of this sort. It’s okay to love a stranger now. A 21st Century postmodernist condition of this globalized technological on-time world about anything, however, puts it this way: Nobody knows nothing. In the time it takes one to text a response to an insult the world has moved on since the hate post.
My discontent began the day I realized I’d never be a Beatle.
Alice, it’s Rufus Wainwright. And I do mean it when I say how much I love him.
You got the sense that she was doing exactly what she wanted to do.
Regardless, she was hopelessly, helplessly herself.
It’s harder to love.
Aye, aye, and aye.
Only way to roll.
I had a huge crush(who I am kidding, still have) on Liz, but I think I understand what you are talking about because it reminds me of my sometimes unexplainable love for Eddie Vedder. I’ve always had this older brother type fascination with him that nobody around me seems to understand or be able to relate to. The closest I have ever come to meeting or being linked to him personally was a mention in some teen magazine back during the 2000 Presidential Election. Current First Daughter Barbara Bush, who is the same age as myself, was a Student Council State Convention that I was also attending and we were put together in a roundtable discussion with other students on political topics when the issue Roe vs. Wade came up and Barbara of course was speaking about being in favor of overturning that landmark case for choice. I wasn’t looking to pick any fights over this, although I strongly disagreed with her, but when she brought up the fact that celebs such as Eddie Vedder were doing harm by being so adamantly open with thier opinions on things like reproductive rights I just couldn’t resist and had to lay a verbal smackdown on her. I was already no fan of her family, but tring to pick on Eddie, well that was just not going to sit with me. Of course when Barbara brought the same subject up again later that year during the election in the aforementioned teen mag interview I felt like I must have gotten under her skin well enough for her to not let it go. I like to consider it my annonymous 15 minutes of fame.
Ms. Pac-Man is my Liz Phair. Totally more coquette than MILF though.
Don’t you think HWC was a) pretty cool and ballsy, b) her tongue-in-cheek way of making fun of her Avrilizers? Putting it another way, how boring and pointless would it be to keep re-recording Exile over and over again? Also, Emily, “illegitimi non carborundorum” is your next tattoo.
ok, i’m going to say the thing i’ve been thinking this week of reissue, but haven’t. i adored phair’s records at the time. adored. but i think also of bjork and pj harvey and the deal sisters and mary lou lord and mary timony, and the depth and breadth of their careers–
funny maybe, neither here nor there–phair graduated from the same high school julia allison did, new trier.
I just read your NY Times Magazine article about your experiences with blogging and Gawker. It was a great article! I really loved everything you had to say. Stay strong, girl! There will always be mean-spirited people out there, but you have to just focus on what you love the most – writing.
Great blog. I’m glad I found it.
As to the review of the Chicago show, Jim DeRogatis, “Pop Music Critic” for the Sun Times, once interviewed me for a truly mediocre book about the late great Lester Bangs and I remember getting off the phone and thinking, “what a major asshole. This does not bode well for Lester.”
Definitely easier to hate, than love as a former music critic hater for R.S. and a serial hater in the Comments section, mostly directed at asshole commenters like me, which explains why I opted out on Friday.
And yes, I disrespected Emily as well, mostly as an unthinking lemming to the sea. For that, my sincere apologies to her and anyone else I’ve said bad things about.
Except DeRogatis.
Loved Liz since Guyville, and met her — briefly, of course — when she did an in-store performance/signing at Tower in Chicago back in 2003, where I got her Liz Phair liner notes signed. Hot as hell, and funny to boot. Somewhere back in Chicago, I’ve still got a setlist from her 8/22/03 show at the Metro.