When the term “women in rock” became an inescapable buzz
phrase around 1993, the women to which that label applied—Polly Jean Harvey,
Kim Deal, Tanya Donelly, and Juliana Hatfield, to name a few—often reacted to questions
about it with irritation, bugged that lazy journalists were reducing their
considerable musical achievements to gender matters. Their irritation was
completely legitimate, yet the Rock scene was becoming more gender-balanced
than it ever had been before, and to ignore that would have been to pass on a
pretty noteworthy story. It was a frustrating inevitability for the talented
musicians who had to field the same tired questions about their gender over and
over and over again.
Liz Phair was one artist whose gender was actually relevant
beyond the big “women in rock” scoop, because unlike a Deal or a Donelly, she
often wrote about what it’s like to be a woman and that perspective was a key
factor in the sensation Exile in Guyville
stirred. Critics gawped at her use of profanity and her sexual explicitness.
One might expect to hear these kinds of things spew from Mick Jagger’s puffy
lips, but not from a woman. Gasp! So once again the discussion was
reduced to a buzz phrase. Liz Phair was “Miss Potty Mouth” and way too much ink
was wasted on her choice of words instead of the insight behind the cussing or
the spine-tingling atmosphere of her lo-fi music. Another frustrating
inevitability.
Gina Arnold’s new study of Exile in Guyville for the 33 1/3 series is frustrating too. Exile is arguably the best album of the
nineties, and as stated above, for reasons that aren’t always entwined with
Phair’s gender. The best 33 1/3
books flip albums over from every possible angle, getting into their
historic importance and potential meanings, but also their creation, quality,
and aftermath. Arnold is only concerned with Exile’s place in the sexist indie rock world—not inappropriate
since that world is precisely the Guyville
in Phair’s record’s title. I have no issue with Arnold’s analysis of the
record as a reaction against that scene even if Exile often seems to be floating around her discussion instead of
standing at center stage (the most satisfying part of the book is definitely
her track-by-track look at Phair’s “conversation” with the Stones’ Exile on Main Street… an album Arnold
loathes, incidentally). However, Exile in
Guyville is an album with a truly unique story, the product of the kind
of gritty home recordings one can’t make anymore (full of songs that didn’t make it to Exile and receive no mention in this book) then distributed through an
underground tape network that can’t exist anymore, leading to her signing with
Matador records and the creation of a quirky album the artist seemingly
disavowed when she then went courting a strange concept of mainstream success.
I’d suggest that Arnold could have gotten much deeper into that fascinating historical
by honing down her thesis or reining in her more indulgent flights—the extended
introduction in which she goes on about how she wrote this book in a Starbucks
in Seoul for example— but she makes it very clear from the very first page of
her book that she isn’t concerned with anything as prosaic as a straight
history. Fair enough, but I can’t help but feel a little sad that this great
album has now received its 33 1/3 book and it is this. No doubt Arnold wrote
the book she wanted to write. Too bad someone else now can’t write the 33 1/3 book
on Exile in Guyville I wanted to
read.
