Liz Phair Reissue Is Leaving Me In Exile In Think-Pieceville

noah | June 20, 2008 4:45 am
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A note to Guardian music blogger Priya Elan, who spends a bunch of paragraphs and a bunch of links concluding that Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville has been “forgotten”: Darling, “forgotten” albums don’t get reissued with lots of attendant press, celebratory concerts, etc., etc. “Forgotten” albums are the ones that you find crammed into the 99-cent bin at the Princeton Record Exchange because they’ve been left to die.

I mean, I loved Guyville and think Phair’s other two pre-Matrix albums are pretty underrated because of her debut’s outsized stature, and I’m sure glad that talk of the album is at least serving as something of a Katy Perry corrective as far as “women in music” are concerned. But every time I read a “think piece” pegged to Phair these days I want to claw my eyes out at the simplistic theorizing within, none of which has even attempted to grapple with the fact that 1993, for better or for worse, is not 2008, and that simply saying “women are awesome, yay!” or “sexism is bad, boo!” doesn’t really even scratch the surface of the surface of the problems with music and gender in the current era, which we’ve gone into in some detail before.

The Phair sex war (repeated) [Guardian]

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