Liz Phair
“Marriage and motherhood don’t seem to have mellowed singer-songwriter/cult heroine Liz Phair,” the Boston Globe’s review of her new Whitechocolatespaceegg begins. “Now she’s a new mom, a mellow mom,” argues the Tennessean. “Motherhood hasn’t mellowed rock’s bad girl,” Newsweek claims, and Denver’s Rocky Mountain News chimes in, “Motherhood hasn’t mellowed the singer’s racy spirit.” Ah, but the on-line magazine Salon disagrees: “Yes, motherhood has mellowed Liz Phair.”
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That’s a weird way to approach an artist who often writes in first-person personae that are implicitly or explicitly not her and likes to play is-this-me-or-isn’t-it games with the photos on her album sleeves. Robert Christgau (the only writer I’ll name here, in the interest of protecting the guilty) gets it right in the Village Voice: “To assume Phair’s sex lyrics were strictly autobiographical was always to forget how songwriters of her caliber work–projecting, fictionalizing, stealing other people’s stories, making stuff up out of whole cloth.” Exile in Guyville’s “Divorce Song” is a dead-on snapshot of the moment a marriage collapses: you don’t need to have been married to understand that, and, more to the point, Phair didn’t need to have been married to write it. But the suburban Daily Herald notes that the chorus of “Shitloads of Money” (“It’s nice to be liked / But it’s better by far to get paid”) “smacks with the practicality only a new mother can have.” Actually that chorus first appeared in “Combo Platter,” the B side of “Supernova,” in 1994, before Phair’s son was even a gleam in her eye. The title track of Phair’s middle album, Whip-Smart, also from 1994, is a goofy, disturbing fantasia on raising a kid (“I’m gonna lock my son up in a tower till he learns to let his hair down far enough to climb outside”); you can bet that if it were on the new album, it would be held up likewise.
Even when Phair’s reviewers aren’t exactly mapping her characters onto herself, they’re getting things just plain wrong. In Florida’s Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News, we read that “Girls’ Room” is about “a kid in the proverbial candy store at his sister’s slumber party.” How do you get that from “Me and Tiffany / Dressing up pretty / We love to ride, we love to canter”? The Rocky Mountain News again: “On ‘Headache’ Phair takes on the persona of a prostitute.” Must have extrapolated that from “You can take me home but I will never be your girl.” Meanwhile, the Miami New Times seems to have just noticed that her songs aren’t simply pages from her diary: “Having mastered the art of self-obsession, she’s finally learning to look at the world from someplace other than her own bedroom window.”
