Seminal Works – Exile in Guyville

There are a lot of bands and artists that define my teenage years: the Pixies, Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, PJ Harvey, but none more so than Liz Phair. Phair’s seminal debut album Exile in Guyville was the record I listened to the most and the one that best captures the desire, anger, ambition, bravado and hope I felt as a young woman.  Unlike the glorious mess of Courtney Love or the older and impossibly cool  Chrissie Hynde or Debbie Harry, Phair seemed accessible to me.    The Chicago of Phair’s album was  only three hours from my home in Kalamazoo; it was the big city where we visited museums and saw shows and  Phair  was like the older sisters of my best friends, whom I secretly worshipped. These girls  were smart, knew everything about music and had wry, Dorothy Parker-type personas, a toughness I mimicked to cover my own insecurities. I felt an immediate and deeply personal connection with Exile, I felt like I knew who Phair was and knew the people she was describing in her clear-eyed, poignant lyrics.

Released in 1993, Exile is famously lo-fi, but the truth is that the album contains an astonishing variety of styles and sounds — everything from solid rock, haunting solo piano pieces, power pop, folk songs to indie rock. There is also a surprising depth to the writing; Phair’s music matches her sharp, vivid words, whether it’s the evocative “Stratford-on-Guy,” the mature clarity she uses to describe the end of a long-term relationship on “The Divorce Song” or the macho posturing of “Fuck and Run.” And then there’s Phair’s voice, her deadpan monotone imbues many of the lyrics with a sly, winking humor or brings needed understatement to the most outrageous lines (“Fuck and run, fuck and run. Even when I was seventeen. Fuck and run, fuck and run, even when I was twelve…”)

The songs that would become Exile in Guyville were written over a number of years in classic indie fashion — on a four-track cassette player in Phair’s bedroom. She also infamously patterned the record after the Stones’ Exile on Main St. In a 2008 NPR interview on the 15^th anniversary rerelease, Phair clarified that there was a guy she had a crush on in the scene in Wicker Park, the Chicago neighborhood that served as inspiration for the Guyville of her record. She said that he became identified in her mind with Mick Jagger’s character in Exile on Main St. and the songs were mostly written as a series of imagined responses to this man.

Phair’s frank and sexually charged lyrics garnered a lot of attention from critics at the time and, I’ll admit, they were the first thing to catch my 16-year-old attention. There was no fucking and running during my virginal teen years or, indeed, during my chaste adult life, but there was something exhilarating about hearing a woman talk about sex in such a matter-of-fact way and it was a relief to hear a girl talk about being as  horny (I’m cringing as I write that word, but that is exactly what it was)  as the boys. As Phair says,  “I feel like I had been listening to records for 10 years where guys talked explicitly about sex. Women were sort of shunted to the area of emotion. But I’ve always been really pissed off, frankly, [about] that whole myth that women aren’t interested in sex. If you had 30,000 years of really bad consequences for being interested in sex, you might hide it, too.” Even now, 15 years later,  Exile’s lyrics still seem bold — an indication that we continue to live in a society where women are expected to be sexy, but not necessarily sexual.    Phair’s awareness of the power of her sexuality is coupled with big questions about how to  use it and the sometimes fine line between being sex  positive and playing into harmful, business as usual, notions about women and sex.

But, there is so much more to Exile than sexual frankness. Exile is about finding your way in the third wave of feminism, when you believe in equality, but you aren’t quite sure how it is supposed to look.  There is a lot of repressed good girl anger being let loose on Exile, music critic Laura  Sinagra says Phair’s “genius has always been for fantasies sprung from the precise pen of the passive observer. Her first songs weren’t about thinking on your feet, or slinging zingers at the straw-man rockboy she called “Johnny Sunshine;” they were about crafting retorts later in your bedroom and living off their power.”

There is a small incident that occurred during my freshman year at BYU, which, for me, captures exactly this element of the album. My friends and I moved in the same circles of a collection of punkish ska bands, not entirely unlike the cooler-than-thou denizens of Guyville. We were not in the inner circle, but there were crushes, hanging out and some dates with the guys in the bands. Towards the end of the year, I was hanging out with a boy I had a crush on and we went back to Deseret Towers to get a King Crimson CD he wanted me to hear. While there, we ran into the lead singer in the most successful of these bands. He greeted us coolly, looked me up and down and said,

“Why are you wearing red lipstick?”

Running through my head was something like the following: I’m wearing red lipstick because I think it’s cool and striking, it reminds me of old movie star glamour, Debbie Harry and Twin Peaks. I’m wearing it because boys who want freshly-scrubbed girl-next-door types are turned off by it and those dudes and I have nothing to say to each other. Wait a second, why should I have to explain myself to you? It is none of your business…

But instead of saying any of that, I shrugged my shoulders and  smiling uneasily  said, “I don’t know, I like it.”

“I think girls look better without makeup. You also dyed your hair, didn’t you,” he said, looking at the area above my head, as though my actual face and eyes were beneath his attention. And, in case I had missed the full extent of  his disapproval, he added, “You look like you are trying too hard.”

Ah, yes, I was breaking one of the cardinal rules of female beauty — trying too hard. Because men want us to look like we’ve made an effort, but too much of an effort is distasteful. We should wear makeup, but it should be natural, we should eat with gusto on dates to suggest our appetites in other places (wink, wink —in the bedroom), but our bodies should never show the consequences of that passion. We should exercise, but never seem too obsessed with it — and on and on.

Filled with shame,  I tried to  answered him bravely, but I lacked conviction when I said, “I don’t care if guys like it, I do.”

He shrugged and looked at his friend, rolling his eyes with a condescending “she doesn’t get it” smile playing on his lips as I escaped with my crush, feeling humiliated.

I was angry with this guy for being a jerk and trying to put me in my place, but I was angrier with myself. Angry that I didn’t know what a good feminist or a good Mormon (those two things always competing in my mind) was supposed to look like. I was angry that I hadn’t told him to mind his own business without fear of sounding like a bitch. And, I was angry that I was lying when I said I didn’t care if guys liked it, because I did care, even though I wished I didn’t.

As small as it was, the incident haunted me for years. On days when I was putting on red lipstick or just feeling low, I would suddenly find myself replaying  it all  in my head and imagining all the things I should have said to him. His behavior seemed like bad manners, but it didn’t even occur to me that my appearance shouldn’t have been up for his evaluation or comment or that I was free to completely ignore him, not feeling the pressure to bend myself as much as possible into the preferences of every man I met.   As a young woman, I knew that my appearance was there to be evaluated by others — to be deemed desirable or undesirable, modest or immodest, pretty enough or not pretty enough —  by everyone, but me. I didn’t realize that I could be at the center of my own experience of my body until I was much older and it took me years to  figure that I didn’t owe him any explanation at all.

Reflecting on Exile in the NPR interview, Phair said “I hear how unhappy I was.  As much as I was taking a tough stance, acting tough, it’s so clear to me now how unsure and vulnerable I really was. It is really such a portrait of a vulnerable young woman trying to establish some power for herself.”  So many things about being a young woman  — wanting to be mesmerizing, as mesmerizing as the men and mesmerizing to them, wanting, but failing to speak up for myself,  trying to figure out how to be  empowered by  my sexuality instead of shamed or owned by it  and  being pissed off — were first  articulated  for me  through Exile. Listening to Phair as she tried to find her voice, helped me find my own.

For a listen, click on any of the song titles.