The upside of moving into a house full of strangers is that there is a whole slew of new music to listen to. Luckily the girls I live with have awesome taste in music. I consider it a blessing that between them they have a large chunk of the Butthole Surfers catalog. Top that with their love for Sleep, Tom Waits, and not only owning and listening to CDs by Crash Worship, but actually having seen them. Things could be a lot worse. I don't think they could get better, as far as musical compatibility goes.
As a result, I get to listen to a bunch of stuff that I am not familiar with or have wanted to hear but just haven’t gotten around to, or, such as the case right now, music that I never listened to when it came around the first time but over time has developed a reputation as being groundbreaking or highly influential, therefore compelling me to give it a whirl if only to have ammunition when the time comes to shoot down the praise when some dick-neck starts spouting off. That said, I was perusing a small selection of CDs in one part of the house, I came across Liz Phair's Whip Smart. Now, the guitar-rock bomb that dropped in the early 90s was not my cup of tea. I was more into the grindcore/death metal frenzy that was competing unsuccessfully with brainless pop music movement and the aforementioned six-string backlash to its vapid existence.
Time has gone on and now, as an older and wiser person, I have learned to appreciate Napalm Death and Dinosaur Jr. I'm still wary of a lot of the big names from the era, like Soul Asylum, the Lemonheads, Sugar, as well as the lesser known but no less revered bands like Seaweed, Jawbreaker, and Toad the Wet Sprocket (one of these doesn't belong… if you don't know which one it is you are dumber than I am, and Jesus weeps for you as he orchestrates various genocides and SIDS deaths).
So, back to Whip Smart. I gave the disc two listens and I am now wondering—Is it just me, or is Liz Phair boring? This may seem sexist, and I don't intend it to come across that way, but how much of her enshrinement in the early indie scene is tied to the fact that she was a pretty attractive woman who played the guitar in a non-folk manner and had the habit of throwing the word "fuck" around and talked about sex in a frank and alluring manner? As far as I know, that was a rarity in semi-mainstream circles back then. If that is the case, and I am aware that life isn't a competition, but really, if that is the case, then PJ Harvey could snap her neck with one trebly guitar chord. The very existence of the Rid of Me album should have rendered Whip Smart totally null and void.
But that is probably not the case, and if we were going by that logic, then I would have to stop listening to the Thrills and move backwards to Rod Stewart who I'm pretty sure would have an airtight argument for suing them on the basis that their singer is Rod Stewart with better hair (not hard to do, admittedly). Though if Rod Stewart did enter a courtroom for this or any other musical argument, I would hope that any self-respecting judge would have him shot on sight for raping more than one Tom Waits song, but that's another rambling, loosely constructed story in itself.
Now, my knowledge of this era, this genre, is seriously lacking, so I'm looking to you, my two readers, for some input. I assume that Liz Phair made a splash precisely because she was a girl who didn't play the typical girl role. She came across like an approachable girl who a lot of guys would like to hang out with (OK, hump), and who a lot of girls could relate to as the Carole King model of womanhood had collapsed long before and not really been replaced with any accurate or valid representatives. The 80s by and large offered up nothing but a ton of albums that made legions of mid-to-late20s/ early 30s people feel good about doing coke and dancing to hideously mechanized and soulless tripe. Not much was being said to your average late-teen/early-20s kids that weren't into the questionable and occasionally laughable nihilism offered up by punk music.
So I can imagine when Ms. Phair came along a lot of people jumped in her direction, as they did with a lot of the bands of this moment, as they were voices that spoke to reality. Songs about everyday business, the shittiness and excellence of relationships, work, drugs… all of it must have been overwhelmingly refreshing because music was for the most part being made by real people again for the first time in awhile (who, strangely, later on, after the explosive success and visibility of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, would be attacked for being too mopey and depressing, which was what a lot of people this age tend to be, and paved the way for, among other regrettable backlashes against the backlash, the ska/punk debacle, music made by that mildly retarded kid who always got beat up in school).
Assuming that this were the case, I must go on record and say, for me anyway, that this has not aged well. As most things that are considered revolutionary or groundbreaking, they don't tend to age well as the machines that they were inadvertently or quite blatantly raging against tend to fade into history, more so than the reactions to it. Well, on a grand scale this doesn't hold water (hello, Jews, Rwanda, Atari Teenage Riot), but for minor things, like musical trends, I have no reason to believe that this isn't accurate.
I suppose I am guilty of this behavior now that I think about it, getting great satisfaction of something that was a pipe bomb in the face of majority musical consensus. For example, I still love Napalm Death's Scum album because nothing like it had existed prior to it. Same for Carcass' Reek of Putrefaction and Naked City (any release). Since I was closely tied to these episodes of musical evolution (an arguable assessment, I agree) I can relate to them. But as far as the Guitar Rock movement, it was peripheral at best for me so I can't see the draw.
And if the attraction was just to the jagged backlash to all things synthesized, then thank god it happened, but c'mon, the Brits trumped our guitar explosion with the placenta-ripping cacophony of Grindcore. Sure, like most things that become a genre, it is comprised of roughly 97 metric tons of garbage, but the first ones to do it, to push that envelope, well damn… they really pushed the envelope. Hell, they lit it on fire, shat on it, ate its shit stained ashes, then shit it out again and mailed the results to The Thompson Twins. Pack it up, Doctor, Doctor, your King For Just One Day request has expired.
But I can allow that it takes a sensitive ear (or one wracked with tinnitus) to appreciate songs like "Polluted Minds" and "Siege of Power" and when people question my love for Napalm Death I typically have to drop into a minor history lesson to justify it. I appreciate it from the POV of a serious musical paradigm shift, but also, fuck it, Scum and From Enslavement to Obliteration are awesome albums. Everything beyond the Lee Dorian years are, as far as I can tell, pretty useless. We'll leave it to some other metal apologist to argue that one.
When probed for answers about the longevity of the ghost of Liz Phair (as everyone seems to agree that her newest albums are soccer mom rock and are largely reviled, which is odd as her original fans are now, more than likely, soccer moms themselves. Or Wynona Ryder) I suppose that I would get the same sort of justification that I drop in regards to my fascination with early grindcore.
…
Shit. Here is the part when I totally forget why I am writing something, and how exactly I got to this point where I end up totally, mind-numbingly lost. I suck at staying on track AND at summing things up. If I had a dollar for every time I had to re-read something I was writing to figure out what the hell it is I was talking about, I could afford a plane ticket to visit the two people that read this crap, thereby encouraging me to waste precious gigabytes of some server in a distant land. I assume (maybe 'hope' is a better word) that this happens to a lot of people and that they never admit to it. I have to dig deep now for some off-the-cuff, slipshod summary. My fondness for dot, dot, dots can only take me so far
…
Oh yes, Liz Phair started this. I guess, if my previous assumptions are right in even the slightest respects, I understand why she has such clout. Those were rough and tumble times and there was a lot of disenfranchised people who just couldn't get behind Annie Lennox, whether as an Eurythmic or as a Diva. Ms. Phair was a godsend for a whole generation, I suppose and had I not been so pissed off at puberty and the dawning realization that life was going to get complicated with bills, jobs, relationships, and drugs I may have been able to find solace in the voice of Billy Corgan instead of Al Jourgensen.
Jesus, now that I just wrote that last sentence, about the growing awareness of life being a beautiful and delicate flower growing out of a mound of raw manure, I suppose all those bands were speaking directly to me and that by all rights I should have totally embraced this particular community.
But I didn't, and I don't. Sure, I can now admit that J. Mascus is a guitar genius who could, apparently without any effort, hide an awesome melody inside a sloppy tangle of noise, and others may follow for me. Someday I may be singing belated praise for Soul Asylum, but I don't get the feeling that Liz Phair will ever rise any further than a sign post on the treacherous and many-forked highway of music history. A lot of history fades away with little to no fanfare (Canudos, Julius and Ethel Rosenburg, The Great Space Coaster) but that doesn't make it any less important as it sits on the sidelines waiting for someone to unearth it and champion it, reanimate it for public appraisal once again. These days that resurrection usually comes in the form of jerky, low budget documentaries. I have no doubt Ms. Phair will return, in celluloid form (Jesus, I'm talking about her as if she's been dead for 100 years. She's like 35 or something. Life is cruel, and it isn't helped by dismissive assholes such as myself) or another medium. More power to her, I wish her the best because, unlike my feelings towards Hootie and the Blowfish, I wish her no ill will. I just don't get her.
I will say that I do like that line about the guy she met telling her he like to fuck backwards so they could watch TV. She had some good lines, I'll give her that. And as a co-worker I asked, who also couldn’t explain why he liked a few of her songs, he quoted a line from her song Flower:
As a result, I get to listen to a bunch of stuff that I am not familiar with or have wanted to hear but just haven’t gotten around to, or, such as the case right now, music that I never listened to when it came around the first time but over time has developed a reputation as being groundbreaking or highly influential, therefore compelling me to give it a whirl if only to have ammunition when the time comes to shoot down the praise when some dick-neck starts spouting off. That said, I was perusing a small selection of CDs in one part of the house, I came across Liz Phair's Whip Smart. Now, the guitar-rock bomb that dropped in the early 90s was not my cup of tea. I was more into the grindcore/death metal frenzy that was competing unsuccessfully with brainless pop music movement and the aforementioned six-string backlash to its vapid existence.
Time has gone on and now, as an older and wiser person, I have learned to appreciate Napalm Death and Dinosaur Jr. I'm still wary of a lot of the big names from the era, like Soul Asylum, the Lemonheads, Sugar, as well as the lesser known but no less revered bands like Seaweed, Jawbreaker, and Toad the Wet Sprocket (one of these doesn't belong… if you don't know which one it is you are dumber than I am, and Jesus weeps for you as he orchestrates various genocides and SIDS deaths).
So, back to Whip Smart. I gave the disc two listens and I am now wondering—Is it just me, or is Liz Phair boring? This may seem sexist, and I don't intend it to come across that way, but how much of her enshrinement in the early indie scene is tied to the fact that she was a pretty attractive woman who played the guitar in a non-folk manner and had the habit of throwing the word "fuck" around and talked about sex in a frank and alluring manner? As far as I know, that was a rarity in semi-mainstream circles back then. If that is the case, and I am aware that life isn't a competition, but really, if that is the case, then PJ Harvey could snap her neck with one trebly guitar chord. The very existence of the Rid of Me album should have rendered Whip Smart totally null and void.
But that is probably not the case, and if we were going by that logic, then I would have to stop listening to the Thrills and move backwards to Rod Stewart who I'm pretty sure would have an airtight argument for suing them on the basis that their singer is Rod Stewart with better hair (not hard to do, admittedly). Though if Rod Stewart did enter a courtroom for this or any other musical argument, I would hope that any self-respecting judge would have him shot on sight for raping more than one Tom Waits song, but that's another rambling, loosely constructed story in itself.
Now, my knowledge of this era, this genre, is seriously lacking, so I'm looking to you, my two readers, for some input. I assume that Liz Phair made a splash precisely because she was a girl who didn't play the typical girl role. She came across like an approachable girl who a lot of guys would like to hang out with (OK, hump), and who a lot of girls could relate to as the Carole King model of womanhood had collapsed long before and not really been replaced with any accurate or valid representatives. The 80s by and large offered up nothing but a ton of albums that made legions of mid-to-late20s/ early 30s people feel good about doing coke and dancing to hideously mechanized and soulless tripe. Not much was being said to your average late-teen/early-20s kids that weren't into the questionable and occasionally laughable nihilism offered up by punk music.
So I can imagine when Ms. Phair came along a lot of people jumped in her direction, as they did with a lot of the bands of this moment, as they were voices that spoke to reality. Songs about everyday business, the shittiness and excellence of relationships, work, drugs… all of it must have been overwhelmingly refreshing because music was for the most part being made by real people again for the first time in awhile (who, strangely, later on, after the explosive success and visibility of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, would be attacked for being too mopey and depressing, which was what a lot of people this age tend to be, and paved the way for, among other regrettable backlashes against the backlash, the ska/punk debacle, music made by that mildly retarded kid who always got beat up in school).
Assuming that this were the case, I must go on record and say, for me anyway, that this has not aged well. As most things that are considered revolutionary or groundbreaking, they don't tend to age well as the machines that they were inadvertently or quite blatantly raging against tend to fade into history, more so than the reactions to it. Well, on a grand scale this doesn't hold water (hello, Jews, Rwanda, Atari Teenage Riot), but for minor things, like musical trends, I have no reason to believe that this isn't accurate.
I suppose I am guilty of this behavior now that I think about it, getting great satisfaction of something that was a pipe bomb in the face of majority musical consensus. For example, I still love Napalm Death's Scum album because nothing like it had existed prior to it. Same for Carcass' Reek of Putrefaction and Naked City (any release). Since I was closely tied to these episodes of musical evolution (an arguable assessment, I agree) I can relate to them. But as far as the Guitar Rock movement, it was peripheral at best for me so I can't see the draw.
And if the attraction was just to the jagged backlash to all things synthesized, then thank god it happened, but c'mon, the Brits trumped our guitar explosion with the placenta-ripping cacophony of Grindcore. Sure, like most things that become a genre, it is comprised of roughly 97 metric tons of garbage, but the first ones to do it, to push that envelope, well damn… they really pushed the envelope. Hell, they lit it on fire, shat on it, ate its shit stained ashes, then shit it out again and mailed the results to The Thompson Twins. Pack it up, Doctor, Doctor, your King For Just One Day request has expired.
But I can allow that it takes a sensitive ear (or one wracked with tinnitus) to appreciate songs like "Polluted Minds" and "Siege of Power" and when people question my love for Napalm Death I typically have to drop into a minor history lesson to justify it. I appreciate it from the POV of a serious musical paradigm shift, but also, fuck it, Scum and From Enslavement to Obliteration are awesome albums. Everything beyond the Lee Dorian years are, as far as I can tell, pretty useless. We'll leave it to some other metal apologist to argue that one.
When probed for answers about the longevity of the ghost of Liz Phair (as everyone seems to agree that her newest albums are soccer mom rock and are largely reviled, which is odd as her original fans are now, more than likely, soccer moms themselves. Or Wynona Ryder) I suppose that I would get the same sort of justification that I drop in regards to my fascination with early grindcore.
…
Shit. Here is the part when I totally forget why I am writing something, and how exactly I got to this point where I end up totally, mind-numbingly lost. I suck at staying on track AND at summing things up. If I had a dollar for every time I had to re-read something I was writing to figure out what the hell it is I was talking about, I could afford a plane ticket to visit the two people that read this crap, thereby encouraging me to waste precious gigabytes of some server in a distant land. I assume (maybe 'hope' is a better word) that this happens to a lot of people and that they never admit to it. I have to dig deep now for some off-the-cuff, slipshod summary. My fondness for dot, dot, dots can only take me so far
…
Oh yes, Liz Phair started this. I guess, if my previous assumptions are right in even the slightest respects, I understand why she has such clout. Those were rough and tumble times and there was a lot of disenfranchised people who just couldn't get behind Annie Lennox, whether as an Eurythmic or as a Diva. Ms. Phair was a godsend for a whole generation, I suppose and had I not been so pissed off at puberty and the dawning realization that life was going to get complicated with bills, jobs, relationships, and drugs I may have been able to find solace in the voice of Billy Corgan instead of Al Jourgensen.
Jesus, now that I just wrote that last sentence, about the growing awareness of life being a beautiful and delicate flower growing out of a mound of raw manure, I suppose all those bands were speaking directly to me and that by all rights I should have totally embraced this particular community.
But I didn't, and I don't. Sure, I can now admit that J. Mascus is a guitar genius who could, apparently without any effort, hide an awesome melody inside a sloppy tangle of noise, and others may follow for me. Someday I may be singing belated praise for Soul Asylum, but I don't get the feeling that Liz Phair will ever rise any further than a sign post on the treacherous and many-forked highway of music history. A lot of history fades away with little to no fanfare (Canudos, Julius and Ethel Rosenburg, The Great Space Coaster) but that doesn't make it any less important as it sits on the sidelines waiting for someone to unearth it and champion it, reanimate it for public appraisal once again. These days that resurrection usually comes in the form of jerky, low budget documentaries. I have no doubt Ms. Phair will return, in celluloid form (Jesus, I'm talking about her as if she's been dead for 100 years. She's like 35 or something. Life is cruel, and it isn't helped by dismissive assholes such as myself) or another medium. More power to her, I wish her the best because, unlike my feelings towards Hootie and the Blowfish, I wish her no ill will. I just don't get her.
I will say that I do like that line about the guy she met telling her he like to fuck backwards so they could watch TV. She had some good lines, I'll give her that. And as a co-worker I asked, who also couldn’t explain why he liked a few of her songs, he quoted a line from her song Flower:
I want to be your blow job queen.
Nuff said.
3 comments:
i bought one of her cd's like 2 years ago because i liked one of her songs...but it wasn't worth it. the whole cd sucked so bad it made that one song suck too. im not sure where it went, but its not in my collection anymore.
There's one vote against. From a girl. I feel like it is important, considering Liz's lyrical content, to keep a tally of male/female view points.
Yeah, I think you're right on the money--Liz Phair was in some ways the indie rock Madonna. That is, she crafted a premeditated sexual persona that would appeal to her market demographic. That may seem a cynical statement, but I think her recent attempt to try to be a bonafide top 40 pop diva proves me right.
You're also correct in assuming Polly Harvey could/would chew her up and spit out her bones. Check this out and see for yourself.
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