Just thinkin’
Carlene’s interview with Liz Phair is great! One quote (of many) that struck me is this:
I can think of getting kicked out of the [Chicago club] Rainbo for being a loudmouth, but I can also remember being shy. I was trying on a lot of different roles; I didn’t know who I was. I was trying to break out of the suburbs, and when I did break out, I don’t think I took my whole self with me—I think I played a role of being too cool and hip. At that stage, right before the record, I was trying to figure out who I was going to be as a person…do you remember that time in your twenties?
Who doesn’t? It’s funny — the Liz Phair of this interview and the Liz Phair who penned the New York Times review of Dean Wareham’s memoir totally win me over. Unexpectedly. Maybe I never thought of her as a particularly sympathetic figure before because my impression of her was pretty much limited to her image in the media and I never felt compelled or interested enough to dig beyond that.
Exile in Guyville is one of those indisputable things — it just is and you can’t really imagine it not existing. Yeah, I rocked out to 6″1 and I know the words to Fuck and Run, but I never felt like those songs saved my life. Probably because in the early ’90s I was too busy identifying with Morrissey to do much fucking and/or running.
I’ve liked Liz Phair songs in the near-obligatory way that I’ve admired Joan Didion’s old essays. (Didion’s screenplays are another story — love ‘em. A Star is Born will always have a special place in my heart — though so does cholesterol plaque). The smarts and the dazzling toughness reel me in, but not quite all the way. With Didion, I think it’s the coolness of her tone. With Phair, I want to say it’s vanity. Like you can feel there’s almost always a mirror around. And the whole exhibitionism-as-a-defense-mechanism thing.
I can’t think about Liz Phair without thinking of PJ Harvey, and wonder at the differences between being an exhibitionist and being an entertainer and being an artist. How PJ Harvey seems more interested in making music than in defining/explaining/defending herself. How she gets away with that.