That being said, I think Liz Phair is an all out genius, one of my all time heroes of american culture and continue to follow her career with fascination. I won’t bore you with ALL the details of why I feel this way. But, most of the commenters so far have focused on what she has to say about sex and relationships and I want to point out one of her songs that I think is actually more universal than those. My current favorite song on Guyville is “Help Me Mary” and it is about what it is like to be a minority trying to succeed in a dominant culture. She is singing about being a woman trying to make it in the man’s world that was rock n’ roll, and specifically she is talking about a time in Chicago when her roommate would have all his guy musician friends over partying all the time, and what that was like for her. I can actually reproduce the lyrics from memory!

Help me mary please
they bully the stereo and drink
they leave suspicious things in the sink
they make rude remarks about me
they wonder just how wild I would be
as they egg me on, and keep me mad
they play me like a pit bull in a basement
and for that
I lock my door at night
I keep my mouth shut tight
I practice all my moves
I memorize the stupid rules
I make myself their friend
I show them just how far I can bend
as they egg me on, and keep me mad
they play me like a pit bull in the basement
and for that
I am asking you, Mary, please
temper my hatred with peace
roll my disgust into fame
and watch how fast they run to the flame

This is practically a blueprint of a career strategy for career climbing in a hostile culture:

step 1: accept your isolation and protect it
step 2: refine your skills until you 4x as good as anyone else
step 3: conform and generally make nice with people in power
step 4: try to contain your rage sufficiently that it doesn’t destroy you from within

I am not exactly recommending the strategy, but I think it represents a path chosen by many people trying to reconcile their “different” status with their ambition. Phair articulated it here as clearly as anyone that I am aware of. She also hits on the fatal flaw of this “keep your head down” approach, which is that there is no known solution for the rage issue. Here, she is resorting to appealing to a higher power because she hasn’t got any better ideas.

but i think i’ve identified another reason you had such a nothing response:

“I listened to “Flower.” Then I went to “Fuck and Run.” I spent some time pondering “Hot White Cum,” switched over to “The Divorce Song” and then, listened to “6″1.”

After that I gave up.”

like any work of art, Guyville needs to be heard from start to finish. if you only listen to the sensationalistic sex-drenched songs you get a totally distorted image of the record. (especially if one of the worst songs you heard isn’t even on the record you’re talking about.) I’m pretty sure if the first songs i heard were flower, fuck and run, and white hot cum, i wouldn’t have liked it much either.

I assume, however, that the critique would be the same if you did listen to all of it. this is Liz Phair speaking HER story. her story is hers, not yours. none of our stories are universal. while overzealous Phair fans might have claimed that, i’m fairly sure Phair herself never claimed it was.

but thanks for another reminder that NOTHING is universal.

and thanks especially to Latoya and everyone else for the music recs!

If you don’t like Liz Phair, don’t listen to her. If you don’t like Queen Latifah, don’t listen to her. If you like either of them, then by all means, give them your ears…

It’s not a question of “I’m a white suburban feminist who is x years old, therefore I must listen to Liz Phair”.

How many times have you had to listen to someone (male or female) say something like, “You know what the problem with feminism is, you don’t support women who want to be mothers instead of being purely career-minded”. Oh? Don’t we? Or how about, “I’m wouldn’t say I’m a feminist because, you know, I like to wear makeup and stuff.”

Did I miss the memo that decreed that as a feminist, I must also toe the line on everything from food choices (Why are all feminists vegetarians???) to music choice (Oh, no, you can’t listen to *insert music genre* and be a feminist, you have to only listen to female folk singers)?

I loved Exile in Guyville when it first came out… and I still do. I just got to re-listen to a lot of the songs, and play them for my fiance – at which point we talked for hours about the impact that music can have on your life, by opening doors to a new form of expression, or by making you question the influence that all media seems to have on us.

What it comes down to, however, is your own personal opinion.

And nobody should dictate to you what that “should” be.

But really, she was just okay. When I felt like listening to women singing about the experience of being a woman, I felt more connection to Tori Amos or P J Harvey (I loved Kate Bush but totally saw her as a woman of my mom’s generation/perspective, which since she’s much younger than my mom probably wasn’t fair.) But I never felt that there were *any* bands or singers who gave me a “click” moment regarding feminism, as I had identified as a feminist since I was three. So I wasn’t actually aware that Liz Phair was supposed to be like this great feminist icon who turned hordes of women my age onto feminism.

I am not a pretty girl
that’s not what I do
I ain’t no damsel in distress
and I don’t need to be rescued
so put me down punk
cause I am not your maiden fair
and I am not a kitten in a tree somewhere

that’s not necessarily word for word…just from memory. Man, I really identified with her music back in the day (oh, 13 ish years ago as a 19 year old just entering university).

Eva: “I guess what I am trying to say is: Liz Phair made me feel like the fact that I had been in a lot of hetero relationships that didn’t reach my own feminist ideals did not make me an idiot or a bad feminist. And in that sense it was empowering, and also thought provoking in that it made me really think about why and how those things happened.”

I would also add that it was empowering to speak these kinds of words through the music of people like Difranco (you know, while I was singing) – even though I never felt like I exhibited that type of awareness or strength in my own relationships.