DISCUSSING THE landmark 1993 album "Exile in Guyville" earlier this month, Rachel Martin, host of NPR's "The Bryant Park Project" program, blurted out a list of emotions the album evokes for her: "A young woman's really kind of raw ambition, her disappointment, it's her lust, it's her joy." Liz Phair, its creator, responded in a tone that was kind but mildly corrective. "Don't forget sadness," she said. She added that when she listens to "Guyville" now, "My heart goes out to the person I was."
This exchange lights up the distance between an artist's motivation in creating a work and the way in which fans come to embrace it. "Guyville," reissued this week on ATO Records, is a milestone in the development of third-wave feminism and one of the proudest moments of indie rock. Catapulting the Chicago-born, Oberlin-educated Phair to prominence at age 26, the record won most major critics polls; gave its label, Matador, its first gold record; and set a bar for confessional songwriting that few musicians have reached.
Then that bar hit Phair smack in the face. None of her subsequent albums has earned even half the praise rendered unto "Guyville," and by the fourth, an eponymous attempt at commercial pop, Phair had become indie rock's lost cause. Hard-to-top debuts are common, but the shunning Phair received, especially from female journalists, went beyond aesthetics -- her efforts to become a pop star were framed as a betrayal.
No wonder Phair avoided listening to "Guyville" for seven years. Finally revisiting it, Phair still seems doubtful -- she will perform it, track by track, in concerts in San Francisco, New York and her hometown of Chicago this week, but everything indicates that she'll be happy to move on again after that's done. But why did "Guyville" make the rest of her career so much harder? Most detractors say Phair compromised her own talent. But maybe it's because "Guyville" represented a larger reality that her fans, especially women, couldn't get past.
Phair directed a sly documentary that's included in the reissue, chronicling the album's making and its reception. For the first two-thirds, Phair talks only to men: her producer Brad Wood; Matador label owners Gerard Cosloy and Chris Lombardi; Nash Kato, the singer for Urge Overkill, who was the object of the crush that inspired Phair to write the "Guyville" songs; and a handful of others who give their version of the events that contributed to the album.
