Day 20: Liz Phair, “Exile in Guyville”

When: Released June 22, 1993

Why? Liz Phair is the only artist on this list that I’ve really known prior to listening to this album. I own and thoroughly enjoy both “Liz Phair” (2003) and “Somebody’s Miracle” (2005), albums that have gotten a lot of flak from long-time fans for being too overtly commercial, particularly in light of how Phair’s career began. “Exile in Guyville” is an album that critics have called “an astonishing debut,” “one of the best albums of the Nineties,” and “a masterpiece.” Since it also has a reputation for being markedly different than Phair’s later work, I wanted to give this one a listen.

What? “Exile in Guyville” is an 18-song, 57-minute double album.

Some background: Guyville was a nickname given to Chicago’s indie music scene in the early 1990s when Phair was working to break through there. In other words, it was a guy’s scene; women need not apply. This is Phair’s assessment of and rebuttal to that situation, ostensibly presented to mimic the flow of the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” (1972).

First Impressions: In a series of concise, focused songs—many of which eschew traditional verse-chorus structure—Phair explores toxic masculinity and female agency in a variety of scenarios. Some songs are full band performances, others are built on just a piano or a guitar accompanying Phair’s distinctive voice.

From the very beginning, in opener “6'1",” it is clear that Phair has no desire to measure up to men’s expectations for what a woman should be, do, or want. Yet those misogynistic ideals continue to threaten: In “Help Me, Mary,” the narrator says that the men who surround her “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 the basement…” She closes with the plea, “Weave my disgust into fame / And watch how fast they run to the flame.” To these men, she will always be just an object until she has something they’re desperate for.

There is nothing like a traditional love song here—or, for that matter, a traditional song of any type. On “…Guyville,” love more closely resembles lust, and relationships between the sexes are often abusive, unequal, demoralizing. In song after song, Phair’s voice highlights hypocrisies while fighting back with quiet power and agency. And even though she can be biting in her satire, it never feels bitter or self-pitying. She’s simply a woman who has had enough and believes it’s time for a reckoning.

“If I want to leave, you better let me go,” she sings in “Girls! Girls! Girls!” Why? “Because I take full advantage of every man I meet. / I get away almost every day / With what the girls call…murder.” In the album’s most unabashedly raunchy song, “Flower,” she takes the stereotype of how men think women should think about sex—as submissive, virginal partners or even bashful ones—and explodes it with an inventive and hypnotic vocal arrangement and lyrics that spell out exactly what she wants to do. To the extent that, other than the line “Every time I see your face / I think of things un-pure, unchaste,” there’s almost nothing else in the song I feel comfortable quoting here!

But Phair’s frank sexuality here highlights an interesting point about this album, I think. When male rockers sing about sex, they tend to couch it in the kind of metaphors best delivered with a wink and a nudge. When Phair sings about what she wants sexually, she cuts to the chase. She uses the words. That brings female sexuality into the light and puts it on the same plane as everything else she’s exploring so honestly: divorce, manipulation, fame, desire. I respect that.

The penultimate track, “Stratford-on-Guy,” brings a revelation. As the narrator flies high above Chicago in a plane, she realizes that Guyville, with all its seemingly overwhelming flaws, doesn’t represent the world. Looking down at it from 30,000 feet, it’s insularity shrinks to insignificance. Up in the sky, free of the gossip, the backstabbing, the narrow-mindedness, she gains perspective: “It took an hour / Maybe a day / But once I really listened / The noise just went away.”

So? Like Patti Smith’s “Horses,” this is a tough album for me to evaluate after a single listen. There are layers and themes to the stories in these songs that will only come to light through additional listens. And while I still prefer the more straightforward pop-rock of Phair’s later work at this point, I’ll definitely listen again.

Day 9: Patti Smith, “Horses”

When: Released November 10, 1975

Why? I’ve never heard a Patti Smith song, and she and this album are frequently cited as having planted the seeds for what would become punk music.

What? Eight songs, 43 minutes.

First Impressions: This is one of those times when I fear that it’s nearly impossible to base a judgment on a single listen. But here goes…

This is contemporary poetry of the highest order, often delivered in poetry-slam style with a conviction and insistence that demands we listen. But it isn’t out to shock (necessarily) or be abrasively in your face: It’s insistent not out of anger or rebellion but because the messages seem so personally important to the artist behind the words.

While most of these songs are lengthy, I never felt that any were overlong. They are telling stories with multiple layers, often delivered in multiple sections, that rise and fall, push and pull. There is an hallucinatory quality to much of the imagery here, which will certainly reward deep and repeated listening.

Apple Music—and every reviewer I’ve read—labels this album “punk.” But if you expect Sex Pistols, you’ll be disappointed. As the Apple Music liner notes state, “Calling Horses one of the first statements in punk begs the question of what punk is: A sound? An attitude? A political orientation? A stylistic one? In some ways, Smith was a traditionalist.” That’s most clear in the instrumentation, which can be surprisingly spare, artfully interacting with Smith’s lyrics.

Here, “punk” has nothing to do with the sound, which is sometimes tinged with Fifties jazz, sometimes Seventies rock. Instead, it’s an attitude, a willingness to break down barriers and kick open doors. Consider the opener, “Gloria,” a cover song. Smith takes a raw-sounding popular track by Van Morrison’s band Them and turns it on its head—adding multiple new verses of her own storytelling and flipping the song’s gender to create something truly thrilling.

This feels corny to say, but each song here truly is a multifaceted jewel.

In addition to “Gloria,” highlights for me include “Redondo Beach,” the hallucinatory journey of “Birdland,” “Kimberly” (this song in particular made me think Smith’s vocal delivery was a strong influence on Blondie’s Debbie Harry), and “Land.”

So? Almost 50 years on from its initial release, this album still feels both fresh and relevant. I have no doubt that it will reward multiple plays over the course of many years. It is true, timeless art.