These and other, ruder barbs (a perfect 0.0 review on Pitchfork Media, for example) have obscured the fact that Liz Phair is that rarest of items: a work of art about an adult woman's life. The last time we saw a girl get such a public pink belly, Ronald Reagan was in office, so it's well worth examining why the collective media of the world is bent on keeping her down.
If Liz Phair's new record really sucked, it'd be one thing. But this is more hypocritical than that -- the scarlet letter, circa now.
The criticism of Liz Phair, and not the album itself, sucks beyond measure, particularly in its exposure of 21st-century America as a place where you still can't be a smart, sexy woman whose main aim in life is to please yourself rather than men -- at least not in public. (Please take note, Mrs. Clinton). It highlights the failure of rock criticism to move beyond the whole lo-fi/high-brow paradigm, whereby good music sounds bad, and vice versa. Understandably, critics don't like to feel manipulated, but all this hysteria begs an obvious question: If Liz Phair can still shock and appall people, in what way is she selling out?
Liz Phair has presented the world with a conundrum: a commercial record by an edgy artist. As such, it has created the greatest example of raging idiocy in rock criticism since the mainstream press decried Elvis Presley for wiggling his hips. Perhaps this was inevitable, since, like Presley before her, Phair is a breaker of gender stereotypes -- from the first she has written great, true songs about what assholes guys are, and how it feels to be female. Given the society we live in, it's not surprising that she wasn't embraced by the mainstream for doing so. Back in 1993, at the height of Phair's endlessly adored debut CD, Exile in Guyville, she was featured in the lowest newsstand-selling Rolling Stone issue ever. What's more depressing is that ten years later, things haven't progressed. Now, in addition to commercially stiffing, she's being vilified for existing, and not just by men who think her free-spiritedness is intimidating.
Of course, it's all being couched in other terms: Her enemies insist Liz Phair is "bad" -- particularly, it "sounds bad." This is an insidious fallacy, since a re-creation of Exile's grungy lo-fi rock aesthetic would have sounded ridiculous on the radio. Whether the record is "bad" is, of course, open to discussion, but in fact, few reviews focus on the music, concentrating instead on the so-called reinvention of Phair herself. The idea being bruited about is that Liz was once superhip and cool and groovy, but now she's dull and boring and trying really hard to sound like Britney Spears.
This line of reasoning merely points out (among other things) the incredibly short memory of rock critics. Guyville is now universally acknowledged as one of the best LPs of the '90s, but when it first came out, the record -- or, more accurately, Phair herself -- was also excoriated by (mostly male) critics who found her persona (smart, blond, sexy, self-aware) too threatening for their weak little brains to contemplate. Indeed, before the sheer force of her talent was reluctantly acknowledged by all and sundry, Guyville was slammed in Spin by a writer (one Peter Margusak) who was angry (in real life) at Phair for breaking up with his best friend.
At the time, Phair wrote a letter to Spin complaining of their biased choice of critics, thus cementing her reputation as a "difficult" blond. That was ten years ago, but history repeats: Recently the Times published a letter from Liz -- structured as an off-the-wall parable comparing whiny critics to Chicken Little -- protesting the paper's scathing "career suicide" review of Liz Phair. Phair doesn't really mind criticism of her new record; she takes umbrage at all the criticism leveled at her.
Too Old to Be Sexy
"People forget what a shit storm my first record created," Phair sighs, ringing in from the road on her current headlining tour. "It was totally the same thing: a bunch of people attacking me and not the music, saying I couldn't carry a tune or whatever. I have radar now about when it's too personal, and what really irked me about the New York Times [review] was just that it seemed so ill-informed. That girl [writer Meghan O'Rourke] had all these comments about my life, but she didn't have anything to say about the music. You know, if a critic says, 'I'm not into this record,' that's fair, you're a critic, you need an opinion. But that's not what that review said."
