I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that a first-time listener’s immediate reaction to the line, “I’ll fuck you ’til your dick is blue” off Liz Phair’s “Flower”, is not “Wow, that was vulnerable.” More likely, it’d be something like “woof” followed by disgust at the vulgarity or possibly appreciation for the sexual audacity. Vulnerability seems to fall outside of the realm of plainly stated horniness.
However, the Girly-Sound Tapes from 1991 are vulnerable. Most of Liz Phair’s work is. Amidst the confident announcements regarding her sexual peccadilloes and admonishments about male inadequacy, this element of her work is often overlooked. Phair has repeatedly spoken about the divide between “Liz” and “Elizabeth” and both the liberation and imprisonment of having this “Liz” alter-ego.
“‘Liz’ is talking to you right now, she’s raw and she gets things done, she’s very decisive and not that emotional. She’s fun, she laughs,” she explained in a 2019 interview with Adelaide Review. “Elizabeth,” on the other hand, “is much shier and much more vulnerable and uncertain.” Although “Liz” was the person Phair introduced to the world through her early work, “Elizabeth” became more and more visible in every subsequent release.
‘Cause Secretly Liz Phair Is Vulnerable
The tension between these two selves is ever-present in her discography. “Chopsticks”, originally a Girly-Sound demo and later the first track on her sophomore record Whip-Smart (1994), is a perfect embodiment of this disparity.
“Chopsticks” follows Phair driving a stranger home after meeting at a party. Immediately, the lyrics get profane: “I met him at a party, and he told me how to drive him home/ He said he liked to do it backwards, and I said that’s just fine with me/ That way we can fuck and watch TV.”
The conversation then turns to trivial things, such as playing jacks and going to summer camp with Julia Roberts. Despite the sexual setup, Phair does not go inside when she pulls in front of the stranger’s house; the song ends with Phair admitting, “I dropped him off and drove on home / ‘Cause secretly I’m timid.”
The placement of the song is also notable. On the 2018 rerelease of the Girly-Sound Tapes, it is the final song on the tracklist, acting as a return to reality from the boldness of the earlier songs, many of which Phair has admitted were born of fantasy because she was depressed and lonely.
“I wasn’t connecting with my friends. I wasn’t connecting with relationships. I was in love with people who couldn’t care less about me. I was yearning to be part of a scene. I was in a posing kind of mode, yearning to have things happen for me that weren’t happening. So I wanted to make it seem real and convincing. I wrote the whole album for a couple of people to see and know me,” she told Time Out New York in 1998.
In occupying this bold, sexy version of herself, “Chopsticks” did not have a place on Exile in Guyville. The fantasy ends on the tapes, but is allowed to dominate Guyville unchecked and uninterrogated. The “Elizabeth” on the tapes reemerges at the end; she drives home because, secretly, she’s timid. Her timidity ends the story that never truly existed beyond her head.
Liz Phair Gives a Masterclass in Social Awkwardness
The choice to make this track the opener on Whip-Smart leads with her vulnerability. The audience is now left to question who the real Liz Phair is. Is anything she’s telling us true? What is the product of an idealized, courageous self of “Liz”?
Rather than omitting the vulnerability like on Exile in Guyville or revealing the confidence was an illusion at the very end like on the Girly-Sound Tapes, this next chapter of Liz Phair’s career opens with the truth, and that acknowledgement recontextualizes the whole album. The vulnerability is immediately followed by the horny whiplash of “Supernova”, where Phair praises a lover who “fuck[s] like a volcano.”
While the conversation itself is an awkward and failed attempt at connection, it is also apparent that Phair has already romanticized the moment without any real cause: “It was 4.00 am and the light was gray / Like it always is in paperbacks.” There is an undercurrent of yearning, an expectation even, that this moment is clad in a storybook setup, whereas in reality, it is just an ugly hour of the night and a mundane social interaction.
“Supernova’s” composition is drawn from “Chopsticks”, a simple piano piece taught to children early in their piano education. This choice serves to undercut Phair’s maturity, instead positioning her as almost childlike, clumsily navigating social interactions with rudimentary attempts at confidence. It is a masterclass in social awkwardness, discomfort, and the sadness of not being able to connect.
However, Liz Phair is not content to just sit in the sad and let it fester. She is intent on making relics and shrines to her failures and flaws; there is an inherent romance to the way Phair describes emptiness and loneliness. Her prose acts like window dressing to an empty display case. Phair is haunted by negative space: the unchecked potential of landscapes or weather, the silence in conversations. She is both captivated by and tortured by her imagination. This tension is highlighted in the penultimate track on Whip-Smart, “Alice Springs”:
“See the sun rise so loud
This whole town gets drowned out
Skywriting with the sweep of a flashlight
I’m driving over that way
Some pot of gold, it’s just a carpeting store on opening day
See the moon rise so slow
And shallow, it burns halos in my eyes
It’s harder to swallow, it’s harder to breathe
So many opals, nobody here knows what to believe
They’ve got me underground.”
The grandeur of an Australian mining town is appreciated, then dismissed by Phair, who concedes that what she initially perceived as majestic, “some pot of gold”, is “just a carpeting store on opening day”. This deflation of awe is followed by an apparent anxiety attack and the implication that she has been buried by the claustrophobia of the small town. The romanticization has passed, and the reality is suffocating. She is an opal trapped by the pressures of normalcy, encased in unremarkable stone and treacherous to reach.
“Liz” is emboldened by fantasy, whereas “Elizabeth” is overpowered by reality. In her head, she fights back; she is the outspoken heroine of a Jane Austen novel. In the real world, she occupies so little space that she almost disappears. Despite the bravado Phair uses regarding either praising “fucking like a volcano” or demeaning “check out the thinning hair”, her actual interactions with the subjects in her songs are rife with insecurity because secretly she’s timid.
Her perceived inadequacy as a partner, and as a woman, is apparent in “Perfect World” off her third record, whitechocolatespaceegg (1998). Phair is captivated by a crush, musing “[w]hat a pretty life you have.” Her awe at this crush’s “pretty life” is immediately hit by Phair’s doubt that she could ever fit into it, that she “would need a map/Just so I could navigate the backyard.” She finds herself too complex for the simplicity of a “pretty life” and invokes her internal disjunction of being both “Liz” and “Elizabeth”.
“I know I was born to lead a double life/ Of murderous strife and misery/ And when I find it, I know I’ll make sense of me.” She is so caught up in the Twilight Zone of being perceived that she disassociates. She stays passive, convinced that finding “it” will magically fix her. Breaking from her fatalistic mantras, Liz Phair lets herself be human. She remarks, “I want to be cool, tall, vulnerable and luscious,” before admitting, “I want to be involved with you.”
The line “[n]o need for Lucifer to fall if he learned to keep his mouth shut” speaks to her tendency to stick to timidity as a method of self-preservation. Yet the repeated “I want to be involved, be involved, be involved, be involved, I want to be involved with you” that follows this reminder signals that she is abandoning her typical caution. There is no need for Lucifer to fall if he stays timid, but Phair does not want to be timid; she wants to be involved with this person, she’s willing to fall, and she’s already fallen.
The Phair of whitechocolatespaceegg is less lyrically guarded than her previous incarnations. She gazes with awe at her newborn son on the title track, “Once I felt you, I couldn’t lay you down.” She desperately tries to gain her mother’s approval of the man she would later marry, on “What Makes You Happy”: “I swear this one is gonna last/ And all those other bastards were only practice.”
“Only Son” finds Phair singing from the perspective of her estranged alcoholic brother as he spirals, “All these things I have done / To my little, little sister / When I try to support her / She don’t believe me —why should she? / I hurt her.” She sings frankly and with a measured approach to reality that comes from both growing up and surrounding herself with real relationships rather than ghosts of them. She isn’t pining, she isn’t projecting, she is living.
“In a way, I’m more honest right now. I shouldn’t say this — my managers told me not to say this — but a lot of Guyville is bullshit, total made-up fantasy crap. That stuff didn’t happen to me, and that’s what made writing it interesting. But this stuff did happen to me and is part of my life. I couldn’t spit it out directly, because it was so real. What you’re seeing is the difference between when I didn’t have a life, my made-up life, and trying to make it real so I felt like I had a life…” she admitted in the Time Out New York interview.
She isn’t timid in the same way because her musical success has obliterated her ability to hide. It has led to the fusing of “Liz” and “Elizabeth”.
To Hell with Her “Shell of a Life”
The tragedy of Liz Phair’s career is that the musical world wasn’t ready for her maturity; it wasn’t ready to accept “Elizabeth”. “Elizabeth” grew up, and she was punished for it. In the infamous 0.0-rated Pitchfork review of her 2003 self-titled record, the publication mocked her enjoyment of dating a younger man in “Rock Me”: “It’s hard to imagine that the Liz Phair of ten years ago wouldn’t have had something profound and devastating to say about older women who shack up with clueless college kids,” writes Pitchfork.
Rather than the respect previous declarations of horniness had been afforded, Phair’s desires were now mocked and denigrated. While the writer of said review, Matt LeMay, has since apologized, it’s worth noting that LeMay, a 19-year-old boy, was commenting on Phair’s first album following a painful divorce and focused on her return to dating while parenting a young child. His perspective is so far removed from Phair’s lived experience that he approached the material from a place of detached snark rather than objective, critical discernment.
The experiential dissonance becomes particularly striking when Phair’s actual feelings regarding the release of “Flower” are considered: “I was up at my parents’ one night — I remember it was time to decide whether I was going to put ‘Flower’ on or not. I woke up in a cold sweat, a panic, knowing that if I did that it was going to be a big deal. I really felt like I had to do it. I knew what portrait I was painting — I thought it was part of a well-rounded portrait, fulfilling all of what a woman is,” she told Spin in 2013.
Liz Phair’s 2003 self-titled record still presents her as a complex, multi-faceted woman. She’s in her 30s and still has sexual urges, and remarks in “Rock Me” that she enjoys hooking up with her younger lover because he is “[s]o uncomplicated, so in tune.” Following her painful divorce, Phair describes meaningless casual sex with a younger guy who thinks she is “a genius” as empowering. The song serves as a moment of levity, especially in conversation with the reflective “Little Digger”, in which Phair takes responsibility for the end of her marriage and worries about how the divorce will hurt her son.
“I’ve done the damage, the damage is done/ I pray to God that I’m the damaged one/ And all these grown up complications/ That you don’t understand, I hope you can/ Someday, I hope you can.” In openly reflecting on her reality, that she is a single mom scared of her child being messed up by her choices, while still wanting to be desired, while still wanting romantic love, Phair chooses to once again paint that well-rounded portrait of a woman. It’s an uncomfortable one, but an honest one.
“You were never supposed to hear these songs. These songs lost me my management, my record label and a lot of nights of sleep…But here is the thing you need to know about these songs and the ones coming next: These are all me. Love them, or hate them, but don’t mistake them for anything other than an entirely personal, untethered-from-the-machine, free-for-all view of the world, refracted through my own crazy lens,” Phair declared in a statement regarding the release of 2010’s Funstyle.
Following the catastrophic rollout of the record, Phair fired back at listeners who had reacted negatively to her newer work in a 2010 Daily Beast interview, “When I made Guyville—and I still love Guyville—it was a really fucked-up time in my life… I was pent-up, lost—and you can’t stay there!” She spoke about being happier at this stage of her life than she had been as the tortured, unemployed art school grad recording the Girly-Sound Tapes, how the music industry seemed to love her only when she was drenched in her own misery, when she was living this shell of a life.
Her listeners, she declares, saw “some pot of gold” in what was actually “a carpeting store on opening day” and now “they’ve got [her] underground”. “No wonder that you hate it, ’cause it’s all about you,” she sneers on Funstyle‘s final track, “U Hate It”. It would be her last new release until 2019.
Phair’s Inspiration to “Chopstick”-Wielding Women Artists
The nearly decade-long silence in Liz Phair’s discography would ultimately vindicate her as a titan for her vulnerability and her bravado. The age of poptimism has nurtured the growth of “Chopstick” wielding women inspired by Phair’s vulnerability. “But you know I’d stand on the corner/ Embarrassed with a picket sign/ If it meant I would see you when I die” Phoebe Bridgers, who has cited Phair as one of her influences, concedes on “Chinese Satellite”.
Bridgers’ lyric is a pathetic declaration of love, and that’s what makes it brave; it reeks of Phair. “And I don’t want your pity, I just want somebody near me/ Guess I’m a coward, I just want to feel alright,” Mitski begs on the critically acclaimed “Nobody”.
“I want to be involved with you,” Liz Phair once asserted, but 23 years later, she admits, “I don’t have the guts to tell you/ That I feel safe”, on her critically acclaimed record Soberish. The 2021 album was met with near-universal praise, much of it directed towards her lyricism. “I don’t live in a world that appreciates me/ You could say that I’m ahead of my time,” she insists to the listener on “Bad Kitty.”
The statement isn’t an opinion; Phair is examining her legacy, knowing that she is ahead of her time, and that the industry, media, and fans may finally have caught up to her. Either way, Phair is over it, concluding, “You never cared what I was about.”
Liz Phair’s discography serves as documentation of someone growing comfortable with herself, stopping from driving away, and eventually going inside the stranger’s house and “do it backwards” despite being timid. Her lyricism becomes less internal because she isn’t living in her head anymore; she’s existing, she wants to be involved with you, she’s putting herself in harm’s way.
When you follow the stranger to their door, they have the power to invite you in or turn you away. In choosing to be brave, you open yourself up to the possibility that the rest of the world might not be as brave. The inherently tragic reality is that her listeners, well, secretly, pejoratively speaking, they’re timid.
Works Cited
Belle, BreAnna. “Pitchfork Critic Apologizes for Bashing Liz Phair Album; Singer Graciously Accepts”. Variety. 6 September 2019.
Gould, Emily. “Liz Phair Talks to Emily Gould About Exile in Guyville, Funstyle, and Hot Soccer Players”. The Daily Beast. 4 July 2010.
Hopper, Jessica. “Girly Show: The Oral History of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville“. Spin. 24 June 2013.
LeMay, Matt. “Liz Phair: Liz Phair“. Pitchfork. 23 June 2003.
Marsh, Walter. “Liz Phair’s Escape from Guyville”. Adelaide Review. 21 February 2019.
O’Hara, Gail. “You Loved Her First Album”. Time Out New York. 6-13 August 1998.
Phair, Liz. Statement on Funstyle. LizPhair.net. 3 July 2010.