Penthouse & Pavement

Dear Liz,

I thought long and hard before writing you this letter. I hesitated many times (because I am a wuss who cares to some degree what others think), and thought that for anyone to care enough about what Liz Phair’s musical output to actually write a letter to her…? Well, that would just smack of nerdism pretty much off the scale. I mean, does anyone even write “fan letters” anymore?’ Some still do, I suppose, but I know deep down I am old enough to know better.

I downloaded your new album Funstyle and was stealthily blown away by its creeping brilliance. It’s confused, self-determination. It’s 100% fuck-you-and-your-industry totem, its erratic nature, its need to be let out of the bag, its absolute refusal to not be silenced and also its capacity to make one, at times, feel slightly uncomfortable. It is an album that few would dare unleash on their audience for fear of shame (which is sad). Yet it is that lack of fear of shame (or stubborn concealment thereof) that makes you so endearing as a musical artist, as well as so unfathomable. I am not writing to guffaw and spit through chuntering teeth about how much I loved your kooky mess of a record (as many have done). No, I’m writing to thank you. To thank you for allowing those that want to hear Funstyle - and who really choose to hear it, I mean - the opportunity to do so.

Most reviews have chosen to delineate the “experimental” tracks from the “conventional” ones, but this seems to reject what the record represents as a whole, which was, I suppose, the reason why you chose to release it as a complete work. Some reviewers (most notably Jakob Dorof in Tiny Mix Tapes) appear to have - I cannot use the term “got it”, because Funstyle is a work not only open to all interpretations of it - in their reviews presented an abstract to the reader which offers the most food thought and that is, perhaps, closest to how it was intended to be interpreted. Your work has always oozed sarcasm and black humour and irony, yet this seems to be mostly lost when opinion is measured on this record. Reviews which proclaim “Liz Phair raps badly…”. Well, duh, did they really expect you to rap well? And how! Utterings which illustrate the missing of points by country miles.

Two years ago I came across a Guyville-era interview you gave to the British indie rock magazine, Sounds. Whilst probably no artist wishes to be pinned to conversations with journalists 25 years previously, it made really interesting reading; comparing your hopes and fears then with the reality of events years later. I was able appreciate the pretty consistent thread that you’ve tried to maintain throughout your career; in terms of how you view your work, the process, your attitude towards it, and what you are trying to achieve with it as an artist. And it seemded to me that through the Girlysounds era to Exile in Guyville* through whitechocolatespaceegg etc. there is no dramatic change of person. Those who wonder who kidnapped “the REAL Liz Phair” (and still give a shit) should dig out that interview. What they will find are mutations and transformations, rather than this wholesale sell-your-career-down-the-toilet-and-lose-your-yes-genius-and-credibility-in-the-process that so many speak of when referring to you. I was relieved to read that interview because then I knew better where you were coming from, artistically, and the whole arc of your material made much more sense to me from that point on. And that for all the missteps and twisted turns, which, for all the brickbats thrown at your door in my opinion have only produce one bad album (Somebody’s Miracle), this deeply humourous, ridiculously intelligent artist was still there, albeit near-drowning under the weight of other people’s shit being slung at her. What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that Funstyle is a meaningful and rightful addition to your catalogue. My two favourite tracks are The Beat Is Up and Bollywood. But I’m sure that says far more about me than it does about you.

Whilst I’m on my soapbox, can I also just say that it makes me genuinely sad and perplexed that the female musician is - still - so narrowly defined in the eyes of the rock/music critic, and is almost always defined through masculinity and its perception of femininity**. So you can be Katy Perry and you can be PJ Harvey and you can be Cat Power. But you can be very little else. Had Ryan Adams released Funstyle, Pitchfork and the entire outer blogosphere could not fall over themselves fast enough to iterate it as “genius”, “radical”, “brave”, “honest”, rather than branding it “risky”, and it’s architect “a bundle of insecurities”. All musicians are insecure, for Chrissakes!!! It seems that male artists are aloud to be elastic, female ones much less so and that the nurturing of an artist from the shipwreck of doubt to the safe haven of an affirmation of the artistic vision is less open to women than it is to men. But that is another headache for another day.

So why am I writing this letter? Well, with a half-hearted toast to the Sisterhood, I think it is for the same reason you released Funstyle rather than let it run idle on your hard drive. My ego-driven hope is that you might appreciate and think it cool that there are those out there who believe the constant lampooning of you funny as well as sad - people who pretend they once actually gave a shit about your music rather than what other people wrote about it, and who laviscously heap mock-horror on mock-tragedy at what they determine is the latest episode in your descent into unwanted outsiderdom.

I’m really I’m gonna shut my mouth now - I’ve already said way too much. But that’s what people do when they care.

Peace an’ all.

xoMARIExo 

*Which, incidentally, I always consciously swooned and admired at it, ather than falling head-over-heels in love with it. And what I admired about it most of all was not the album itself, but the breathless male rockcritistocracy’s reaction too it.

**This, strictly speaking, might not be the fault of the male rock critic per se as much as the fault in the fact that rock critics are, still, bewilderingly, overwhelmingly, male.