She Bop
When the Parents Music Resource Center —Tipper Gore and her host of "Washington Wives"— waged war on the perceived rampant bad language, sexual suggestiveness, and moral decadence of the recorded music industry, the battle-lines were clearly drawn along the lines of gender. Sure, Madonna and Prince protégés Vanity and Sheena Easton were on the Tipper (s)hit-list, but, for the most part, the dust-up was framed as a collection of busy-body biddies with too much spare time on their housewife hands, trying to put a dampener on the swaggering, swinging sausage party of '80s heavy-metal and hip-hop.
By 1993, the 'Warning: Parental Advisory' sticker was an established institution, and the kind of content that demanded it felt like it had hit cultural mass, with a generation of recalcitrant suburban kids having felt the lascivious lure of 2 Live Crew and Ice T, or the rebellious reactionism of Big Black or the Dead Kennedys.
It was, in short, still a male bastion. Then along came Liz Phair. The Chicago singer-songwriter surely hadn't intended to be a trail-blazer, just honest to herself. Starting out recording songs on a rudimentary four-track, Phair was part of a growing movement of lo-fi confessionalists, who used the immediacy and intimacy of home-recording to make veritable diaries. Phair wrote bruised tunes about being in your early 20s, sleeping around and feeling directionless; scrappy, alt-rock-ish songs that spoke in impossibly frank language. These were, after all, intimate broadcasts; what need was there to hide behind pantomime?
This is Hardcore
Still, Phair dared to use those Seven Words You Can't Say on Television; not as puerile, prurient provocation, but as matter-of-fact discourse. So many of her songs dealt with sex: as gymnastics, as regret, as emotional war-zone, as thing to aspire to, and to admire the view. She sang about blatantly using her sexuality, and then feeling empty with what she got. And she said "suck" and "f**k" and "cock" and "c**t," "blowjob" and "come" and "wet" and "cherry." As if some proto Lil' Kim or Peaches, she dared to dolefully croon a verse like "I just want your fresh young jimmy/Jamming, slamming, ramming in me."
When Phair was singing these songs in the underground, trading around her home recordings —the near-mythical Girlysound tapes— to the kind of people who also dreamed of being in Galaxie 500 videos, she was, in some ways, part of a movement; another artist whose essential independence gave them the freedom to say exactly what they wanted.
But, when Phair's debut album, Exile in Guyville, came out in 1993, she was a movement unto herself; a crusader of one playing claggy indie-rock. She was the girl who dared to sing songs about f*cking; who dared take command of her identity, her destiny, in a realm in which men still pulled all the strings. The LP's release was met with a furor of breathless acclaim, then suffered a stinging backlash tinged with misogynist resentment; some witless enough to fall back on the stereotype that meets any sexually adventurous woman: 'slut.' Courtney Love would've written it on her arm in marker; Phair took it in her stride.
Cocksucker Blues
Psrt of Exile in Guyville's almost instantaneous mythology is Phair's big-game-talking claim that it was her song-by-song response to the Rolling Stone's long-beloved double-album Exile on Main St.. If you set them side by side, such 'inspiration' is obviously not literal. But, hell, even if that was a blatant lie by Phair designed to drum up interest, it's still a genius idea.
If you're gonna be a provocateur, why stop at sailor-talk, at in-the-act descriptions, at skewering male insecurities and emotional immaturity? Why not take to playfully mocking one of rock's sacred cows, thereby calling into question the whole Rolling Stone Classic Rock pantheon? Whether Phair's electric "F**k and Run" —where the singer laments that she's been finding sex but never love, ever since she was 12— is really a counter to Keith Richards' clodding "Happy" —where even though he's an internationally famous rockstar he still needs love— is really a moot point.
Just by daring to re-write the clichés of rock'n'roll —a genre whose very name is euphemism— from from the lady’s perspective made this better than the "classic" it riffed off; a work of iconoclasm razing away a work of orthodoxy. Phair gave a face, a voice, and a name to the women who, in the Stones' day, could've only found one place in rock culture: groupie. The sloppy indie-rock and tentative balladeering of the music on Exile in Guyville may not measure up to the Stones at their cocksure best, but, conceptually, Phair versus Jagger/Richards marked an unexpected mismatch; a triumph of an all-time underdog.
Record Label: Matador
Release Date: June 22, 1993
