33 rebellions per minute
"No, there's this, there's this young bull and this old bull..."
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
1993
Liz Phair, EXILE IN GUYVILLE
Okay, now I see what the big deal was. I don't apologize for ignoring the record for years; "Never Said" was a vacuous single, and the celebrated novelty of girls talking dirty wore out for me after I'd gone out a few times in high school with a girl who referred to her mother as "that cunt". What this record does have going for it, however, are Liz's husky yet wavering, cynical yet lost, voice, and occasional remarkable soprano as a change of pace; Liz's also-remarkable guitar playing, where chords that did not previously exist, at least not together, are whipped off with benumbed casualness, sometimes playing absolutely solo and draped in humble but eerie effects; and the way many of the songs somehow elicit a foursquare rock'n'roll traditionalism from these elements.
The album's impressiveness depends, I think, on the frequent slow songs, with no drums or even bass: the see-how-low-I-can-sing "Help Me Mary"; the contemplative scratching-along-the-string guitar and timidly showing-off singing of "Dance Of The Seven Veils"; the echoey one-hand piano of "Canary"; the percussive strumming and behind-the-beat vocals of "Girls! Girls! Girls!"; the droney, feedback-laden "Shatter"; the "guitar" (by Liz) and "sick guitar" (by producer Brad Wood) so accurately listed in the credits of "Gun-Shy". "Explain It To Me" falls in the same essential category despite the bongos. They sound, in my experience, utterly distinctive. They define this album as resourceful, naive, and personally Liz-to-world expressive.
They also set off the best full-band numbers--- "Divorce Song" and "Fuck And Run" and even the woozy "Mesmerizing"--- in all their alternate-universe radio-smash middle-of-the-road glory. But none of them deserve to be filed with the utterly unique "Flower", which in two minutes takes a slow high harmony vocal loop, a double-speed low-voiced seduction, and an oblivious unsteady guitar loop in urgent need of being looked at by a plumber, into a true marvel. It fully deserves the notoriety it wouldn't have gotten without the words "I'll suck you til your dick is blue". I personally prefer the rhyme scheme "You act like you're fourteen years old/ and everything you say is so/ obnoxious, funny, true and mean/ I want to be your blowjob queen/ you're prob'ly shy and introspective/ that's not part of my objective", but whether this is objective admiration for a gifted personality sketch of her object of desire, or dependant on it being a partly obselete personality sketch of _me_, is beyond my ability to judge. It doesn't matter. Depending on the song, she's also a nostalgiac romantic, or tempted and terrified by domesticity, or nervous and self-depreating, or swaggering; whatever. She is, in each persona, eloquent, and GUYVILLE turns simple ingredients into something hypnotic that nonetheless rocks. I shouldn't have resisted.
1994
Liz Phair, WHIP-SMART
This will soon change, but: I've still (Aug. 98) never heard Phair's EXILE IN GUYVILLE. I'm instinctively distrustful when hipper-than-thou opinion coalesces around an album so unanimously: I almost always like such an album, but not all that much, and respect its creativity, but only while being reminded as I listen of three somewhat similar albums that took far more risks to far less acclaim. Besides, I still had MTV access back then, and I could hear her single, where her keen analysis of the relationships between the sexes went, quote, "I never said nothin'. I never said nothin'. I never said nothin'. I never said nothin'" [repeat], with verse lyrics explaining that she hadn't said anything.
But I still had MTV access in '94, where her new album produced "Supernova", where the dumb love lyrics ("you fuck like a volcano"? Third-degree burns are somehow good?) were easily overridden by the glammy 3-note riff and the guitar duels that you and I probably both identified easily as guitar despite no sound resembling an actual string being plucked. "Whip-Smart" set itself to a hollow metal thud of a drum hook, a perky chorus ("When they do the double-dutch, that's them dancing", 4x, but at least there ain't no double negatives in it) with synthetic jungle-animal sounds, and remarkably thoughtful (if not 100% endorsement-worthy) words anticipating motherhood: "I'm gonna tell my son to grow up pretty as the grass is green/ And whip-smart as the English Channel's wide/ And I'm gonna tell my son to keep his money in his mattress/ And his watch on any hand between his thighs/ And I'm gonna lock my son up in a tower/ Till I write my whole life story on the back of his big brown eyes". Then came the fast, low, charged rock single "Jealousy" ("I can't believe you had a life before me/ I can't believe they let you run around free"), and okay already, I bought WHIP-SMART.
It seemed a bit uniform and repetitive at first, which seems to be a common reaction to it, but turns out to be largely false. "Shane" has her singing "You've got to have fear in your heart" over and over, but the dusky Western instumentation keeps altering. "Go West" is a 3-chord groover, I just think it's a good one, and "It feels like I've got something to prove/ But in some ways it's just something to do... I've got to tear my whole life apart and go west" is, except for a geographical mix-up, a better explanation for why I moved to Boston than anything I'd said myself (what use that is to you, I can't imagine). "Nashville" sounds like Liz and producer Brad Wood had die-rolled four sets of chord sequences for it and picked the best one; that someone would be ingenious enough to write it on purpose seems unfathomable. "Alice Springs" is lovingly picked, string by acoustic string, but is slightly too dark and too weird to be a '60's Melanie leftover. The last song has a bit of 2-finger piano that echoes opener "Chopsticks", where the 2-finger piano is punctuation for a memorable opening line everyone quotes ("He said he likes to do it backwards. I said that's fine by me. That way we can fuck and watch TV") and a transformative closing line that tends to be ignored ("Secretly I'm timid"). There's a lot of conflicting impulses here, and as direct and personal as her writing is, some of her best lines sound more (to me) like they were picked because "that's a good line" than from some deeper motive. I don't feel, hearing this record, that I know or automatically like this woman. But I like her dry, flat singing voice, and her unexpected angelic autoharmonies on "Support System" and "Cinco de Mayo", and her piercing double-tracked whistling on "Support...", and the buried brass on "Nashville" and "Cinco...", and the general modest off-kilterness of Brad's production. For me, that's easily enough.
1998
Liz Phair, WHITECHOCOLATESPACEEGG
A week ago (1/11/99), I wondered in my review of Michelle Tumes's LISTEN what my reaction would be to an album of utterly charming music whose lyrics struck me as repulsive. I still don't know the answer, quite, about "repulsive", but it remains ironic (in the Alanis Morissette sense) that I had just given my first listen to an excellent test case a couple days before: my copy of Liz Phair's 3rd LP had arrived in the mail. By now, I've listened many times more. On WHITECHOCOLATESPACEEGG--- which I realize Liz wants spelled in all lower-case, but I think that's stupid, whereas my habits of capitalizing all titles is _also_ stupid, but I prefer to be consistent, because consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and if I trust the sketch illustrations in the GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System) Fantasy Module, hobgoblins are cute--- Liz's eccentric and frail voice has stopped being frail, and her music has abandoned atmospheric drift for semi-skewed pop almost entirely; it's no longer easy to not notice what she sings. The are four songs I like best here, musically. One is about a happy obsession with a boyfriend who "makes me feel dirty and dry", "knocks me around, started dragging me around" ("Johnny Feelgood", who is, oddly, "so pretty inside"). One is about "it's nice to be liked, but it's better by far to get paid" ("Shitloads Of Money"). One wins an all-time redundant verbiage award for saying the same things over and over using slightly different words more than any other song I've ever heard ever ("Polyester Bride"), which would really annoy me if it didn't make me giggle. And "What Makes You Happy", redifining successful true love as "mostly we've been living here uninjured... all those other bastards were only practice", is completely charming and doesn't support my point at all.
The interpretation I'd like to use is that Phair, like the odd-looking synth-popping British lecher Momus, uses "avatar masks", and that her songs do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the author, or anyone else. My problem with that is that the roles she chooses really _aren't_ that varied, and that both in song and interview she portrays herself as a slut who likes hanging around with rotten guys, the emotional versatility extending only to the many different ways of perceiving this--- even on GUYVILLE's "Fuck And Run", where she yearns for "a boyfriend: the kind who brings you letters and sodas", it's clear her behavior has kept those boys away. Now she's adjusting to motherhood ("all these babies are born to the wrong sorts of people"; "you and me are way over our heads on this one"), but the rest of the songs clarify she's still the gal quoted in Rolling Stone, 1997-ish, dismissing the entire population of men who treat women as human beings as "playing a sensitive guy strategy in order to get laid", a trick she wasn't going to fall for.
I remember the quote because of my extremely irritated reaction ("if that's all we 'sensitive guys' were up to, we would have noticed long ago that it _doesn't goddamn work_"), and because it shows a functionalist moral blindness akin to think-tanker David Horowitz recently warning a Republican gathering that "compassion is our missing weapon", and Congressman J.C. Watts warning the same gathering that "if we want to dominate in the next millenium, we have to learn to smile". Perhaps it makes me excessively vulnerable to the liberal-wimp line (there was a big Loud-fan discussion of this) that songs like "Johnny..." are bad whether she means them or not, simply because their message will be believed by men who want to believe them. Yet, oddly, that song doesn't bother me. In my experience, men who don't beat women are men who don't want to beat women, and men who do probably aren't Liz Phair fans and won't be affected by the encouragement regardless.
What _does_ bother me, and in its own way seems to fit the same quote's persona, is "Shitloads...". It, unfortunately, is well-equipped to poison, because its arguments fit perfectly with basic flaws in human logic. Most people, according to well-established test results in cognitive psychology, are cheerfully vulnerable to the Representativeness Heuristic, wherein the probability of something being true is judged by how well it fits the mental picture inside our heads. Long digression on cognitive psychology begins. An example, from clinical trials: most people will answer, in all thoughtful earnestness, even if money is at stake, that it's more probable that "Johnny, a big tall man who drags his woman around" is "a high school gym teacher who rides motorcycles" than that he is "a schoolteacher". This is _certainly_ quite false--- if Johnny is the former, he by definition is the latter. Furthermore, if we assume he's a teacher and guess that there's a 1/2 chance he teaches gym, a 1/3 chance the school he gym-teaches is high school, and a 1/4 chance that he rides a motorcycle (I'm making these numbers up), then what people select as "more probable" is 1/2 times 1/3 times 1/4 equals 1/24 as likely as what they choose as "less probable". And to think people really do bet probability games, in billions of dollars--- scary.
But people reason that way because "gym", "motorcyclist", and "high school" (kids today, buncha delinquents) all seem more like a generic mental image of "wife-abuser" than does "teacher". Instead of _multiplying_ the likely times the unlikely, rightly arriving at very unlikely, people average them out: three plausible statements justify believing one piece of nonsense. Similarly, "Shitloads"'s argument relies on three claims: most people, given one wish, would choose success for themselves; success includes lots of money; success doesn't necessarily include being liked. _All_ of which must be true to justify "it's nice to be liked, but it's better by far to get paid; we all need a shitload of money", and the third isn't, but I fear that people would tend, lazily, to nod at the first two and let the conclusion stand.
Or perhaps it's more the simple inability of most people to keep conflicting arguments in mind. The belief that Bill Clinton shouldn't be impeached for his sex life, crowds out the potential belief that he should be impeached for murdering tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis just to delay inconvenient hearings. By the same process, the belief that money is desirable crowds out the belief that friendship is important, that creativity is important, that contibuting something to the world is important. Whatever, "Shitloads" makes a false argument--- being liked is, by virtually all studies, much more closely connected to happiness than having lots of money--- that seems all too believable simply because money, in fact, is nice to have. Since almost everybody makes real-life decisions about how to value money versus other goals, I could see this song having an active and destructive influence on people.... On the other hand, it's catchy, and there's 15 other songs here I don't mind too much. So.
Musically, the album's pop aesthetic is still permanently limited, but made appealingly distinct, by the need to fit notes Phair's voice is comfortable with; even if Phair _wanted_ to write something like the Bangles' "Manic Monday", I doubt she could sing it convincingly. Nonetheless, the laid-back classic rock moves put WHITECHOCOLATESPACEEGG in the sonic territory of Sheryl Crow. A Sheryl with artistic ambition, a sly sense of humor, and a weakness for geeky synthpop moments, mind you. I'm squeezing this record, reservations and all, onto my top ten list, while the real Sheryl I'll award a passing nod of modest respect. The extreme echo of "Whitechocolatespaceegg"'s drum thumps, and the inquisitive-sounding synth gurgles, lend its country-rock an otherworldliness. "Johnny..." opens with one measure of cheap electro-rock. "Polyester..." blends two different anthemic choruses and a bridge that functions as a distinct third chorus into one soaring achievement. The harmonica-and-drum driven "Baby Got Going" has an old-fashioned train song rhythm, but its simple repetitious synth line quite reasonably merges Kraftwerk's TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS into the tradition. "Uncle Alvarez" ("Oh oh oh, imaginary accomplishments! Hey hey hey, you visionary guy!") has a lounge-exotica flavor, with vibraphones and cocktail piano and an accurate keyboard imitation of an African talking drum, which here seems merely preoccupied with hiccuping. "...Happy"'s strummed verses are overrun by a chorus that's partly a Magnetic Fields whizzy baroque keyboard arrangement, and partly a 4-chord guitar pattern that could have been sampled from Soul Asylum or the Offspring. "Shitloads Of Money" is a graceful waltz with accordian.
Still, any of those could pass on standard Adult Contemporary Rock channels without strain; what matters, to me, is I'd want them to be there, and it all lends a nice unity. The only real outliers are "Headache" (the simple shiny artificiality of very early Magnetic Fields), "Go On Ahead" (a throwback to the simplest GUYVILLE tracks), and "Girls' Room" (where Liz's deliberate syllable-holding vibrato sounds like opera overactress Beverly Sills in some frightening audio opposite of time-lapse photography, but where I surrender to the equivalence in which "I've never heard anything like _that_ before" usually turns, for me, into "that's kind of neat"). Even those are cool, and constitute pacing for an appealing, just-off-the-mainstream record. Liz's voice is clearer and more versatile than ever, the choruses are plentiful and infectious, and the lyrics are, um, interesting. Suits me.
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