Saturday, June 22, 2013

WELL, THE LICENSE SAID YOU HAD TO STICK AROUND UNTIL I WAS DEAD. BUT IF YOU'RE TIRED OF LOOKING AT MY FACE, I GUESS I ALREADY AM:  Ready to feel old(er)?   Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville was released twenty years ago today. Rather than repeat myself, I'll make myself feel older still by pulling up what I wrote about it here a full decade ago, calling it
that magnificent, magical, intimate, introspective, nuanced, low-fi, completely awe-inspiring document of a complicated woman and her sexuality, one that sounded better than anything else out there, was better-written than anything else out there, with its worst track from its eighteen ("Never Said", imho) still leaps and bounds ahead of anything else. On Exile, girl-with-a-guitar Phair was sometimes vulnerable ("Divorce Song", "Canary"), sometimes triumphant ("Girls! Girls! Girls!), sometimes wistful ("Strange Loop"), sometimes horny ("Flower"), always compelling.
Here's "Strange Loop."   [This post has been edited to include "twenty years ago today," which was the point.]

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