Returning with Whip-smart, Phair is still the ideal ’90s woman: smart, sexy, charming, crude, autonomous. Opening a wardrobe of dramatis personae that includes sexual bully (“Flower”), simpering victim (“Divorce Song”), romantic skeptic (“6’1″”), self-critical pushover (“Fuck and Run”), housebound hostage (“Help Me Mary”) and defensive punk (“Never Said”), Phair reflects the uncertainty of real life, caulking brash outspokenness about her personal experiences with fears and irrationalities anyone can understand. In truth, presentation matters little to Phair, whose ingenious gift for tartly expressive lyrics and memorable melodies fills the album with songs that express strong ideas in a most alluring fashion.
“Glory” is an acoustic whisper “Soap Star Joe” a bluesy raunch. “Explain It to Me” and “Gunshy” lose themselves in woozy tremolo swirls. “Fuck and Run,” “6’1″,” “Divorce Song” and “Never Said” march to brisk rock strength. The spare arrangements feature Phair strumming oddly shaped guitar chords and singing in a soft, unsteady voice, as Wood and engineer Casey Rice add lean portions of drums, guitar, bass and organ to fashion a fascinating variety of sounds. It’s the individual songs, not their unfathomable totality, that makes Guyville (the title a wryly critical nickname for Chicago’s incestuous underground rock scene) so great. How Phair (and co- producer Brad Wood) approached the construction of her eighteen-track extravaganza doesn’t matter. Phair’s avowed conceptual device of writing and recording an analogue to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St produced audible echoes of that record here and there but amounted to a red herring, a pirate’s map for academically minded critics who wasted endless hours in scrutiny and debate. (She also remade songs from both for the LPs.) But the attention and adulation that met Exile in Guyville was earned strictly on the album’s considerable merits. Prior to signing with Matador, Phair had a reputation on the groovy fanzine circuit owing to her home-made Girly Sound cassettes, actual samples of which can be heard on the Juvenilia mini-album. At worst, it’s hard to imagine Alanis Morissette making Jagged Little Pill without Exile in Guyville as encouragement. By changing the terms of the struggle, Phair helped add a crucial why-not option to the creative menu for girls with guitars. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter where the truth and illusion in all this lies: Phair cuts a potent figure in modern rock by stepping outside the boundaries against which such female pioneers as Chrissie Hynde, Holly Vincent, Joan Jett and Nina Hagen had to strain. And that’s not accounting for suspicions that she’s a phony. As illuminating and resonant as her impudent declarations of independence may be, she’s also been seen as both a titillating tease and a willing victim with a cute butt. A singer who announces herself as “your blow-job queen” and promises “everything you ever wanted…I’ll fuck you ’til your dick is blue” (to quote the oft-cited “Flower” on Exile in Guyville) raises issues that can’t properly be settled in a two-minute song. Whether Phair is the daring, desirous and disgusted woman of her songs or a provocatively imaginative nose-thumber, the gap between her creations and herself led directly into a maze of fantasies, controversies and contradictions for fans and detractors alike. Arriving in the cute and coy wake of Juliana Hatfield, the soft-willed infantilists and a million wimpy boy bands fearful of letting their testosterone leak out, singer/guitarist Phair emerged from a Chicago bedroom to bare her knuckles and some portion of her soul in melodically seductive and lyrically blunt eyewitness accounts of the war between the sexes. Punk rock and hip-hop (if not John “Working Class Hero” Lennon) brought four-letter words into the music mainstream, but it was Liz Phair who reclaimed “fuck” as active verb for the undersexed indie-rock generation.
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