I feel a little self-conscious about rhapsodizing over these records, two forever favorites that were—please don’t make me say instrumental—in wresting my 19-year-old consciousness into the musical present tense (where, alas, it basically stayed), blasting open my perception of the expansive possibilities of persona in songwriting, and establishing a gold standard for themes, tones, and temerity that continues to prevail, as people now seem extra fond of saying, “to this day.”
Liz Phair‘s debut album, Exile in Guyville—released June 22, 1993 (but the 25th anniversary box set is out today)—felt like a transmission from a parallel suburban collegiate reality in which the existential romantic agony of life actually did yield great art (as opposed to the mere longing for it).
PJ Harvey‘s second album, Rid of Me—released May 4, 1993 (happy birthday!)—was angrier, scarier, darker, more alien, more guttural, like a rune or a myth from the timeless subconscious murk of British psych blues rock given form in astonishing outbursts of sound.
Both were essential. Both are essential. The only sense in which either album has aged only reflects poorly on the world, or on the nature of time. Nothing can touch the songs.
However, for a variety of reasons, it seems a little OTN for a human of my particular race/gender/vintage to just sit here of a Friday damn afternoon and start (start?) holding forth about the importance and greatness of these two great, important records. So don’t take my word for it:
“Never Said”
Jessica Hopper in Spin Magazine, 2013:
“In 1993, no rock record was as divisive as Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville… Even though it landed right at the apex of the cultural moment for “Women in Rock” and riot grrrl, Phair was something else. Her feminism was not wrapped up in dogmatic choruses, her rage was articulated in quiet disses tangled up in sublime indie-pop… Even more novel and exciting was the fact that Guyville was, in both form and concept, a rookie’s rogue retort to classic rock: Phair conceived it as a track-by-track response to one of the pinnacles of swaggering musical masculinity, the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main St. Combined with its literate pop craft, untethered libido, and utter confidence, Guyville was about the most glorious, girly Fuck You ever.”
Liz Phair to Spin Magazine in 2013:
“I was dating this guy and I was living in this apartment where I was writing the songs for Guyville. It belonged to some friends who had vacated and they’d left behind these cassette tapes, and one was Exile On Main St.… I listened to it over and over again and it became like my source of strength — my involvement with Exile was like an imaginary friend; whatever Mick was saying, it was a conversation with him, or I was arguing with him and it was kind of an amalgam of the men in my life. That was why I called it Guyville—friends, romantic interests, these teacher types—telling me what I needed to know, what was cool or what wasn’t cool. I developed a very private relationship with this record, listening to it again and again and again.”
“Stratford-on-Guy”
Alyssa Edes in NPR’s Turning the Tables:
Thick with tomboy swagger, it’s a wrecked confessional detailing the insanity of dating and screwing in your twenties… In her unsparing songs, the 25-year-old Oberlin graduate broke through Chicago’s indie scene with some of the most self-assured and explicit feminist rock to date, with lyrics like, ‘I want to fuck you like a dog / I’ll take you home and make you like it.’ Phair wasn’t afraid of anything, and in many ways, this album is one big middle finger to the dudes of her personal Guyville. In addition to humor and confidence, she navigates vulnerability and heavy emotion across tracks, especially in less-celebrated songs like ‘Shatter’ and ‘Strange Loop,’ which hold up just as well as hits like ‘Fuck and Run.’ The entirety of this album is timeless: Guyville resonates as much for those maneuvering messy relationships today as it did in the early ’90s.”
Tanya Pearson in Bust Magazine, 2018:
“Liz Phair is a heterosexual woman whose music liberated me from the confines of a straight, suburban closet. Not liberated in a sense that I joined the Gay Straight Alliance (it was the ’90s) and started dating women — I was a late bloomer with a fake boyfriend, and then an alcoholic who refused to be a gay alcoholic (“the double whammy”) — but Liz Phair introduced me to the freedom of possibility.
“It didn’t matter to me who Liz Phair fucked, or whether or not she had fucked and run at 17 or 12, but it mattered very much that she had the audacity to say it. I queered the shit out of those lyrics, not knowing what I was doing, and the sentiment was so universal that I didn’t feel like I was doing anything other than identifying.
“Fuck and Run (Girlysound version)”
“’And you put in my hand a loaded gun and then told me not to fire it/ When you did the things you said were up to me, and then accused me of trying to fuck it up.’ Liz Phair gave me permission to speak the unspeakable and to expose truths that were often shameful or embarrassing to admit. Especially as a woman. It even mattered to me that she felt liberated enough to pose topless on the album cover. It mattered that there was visible ‘partial nip.’ Had I been blessed with breasts at that age, I would have taken my top off in solidarity.
“…she sang intelligibly, without distorted guitars, and when I heard her, I heard her clearly which made everything that came before seem slightly postured, or constructed in accordance with the male rock gods of the time. Liz Phair wasn’t competing. She was reacting. She was speaking her truth in lo fidelity. She was vulnerable and aware of it. She was, however, in complete control of how she exposed that vulnerability.
Lauren Sandler on Huffington Post:
“talking about this record is no mere nostalgic exhuming of the ’90s. Its formative power emblematizes the differences between many millennial feminists and Gen X ones like myself… Phair’s sympathetic, unsentimental songs, interested in desire and anger without roundly politicizing them, held up a mirror to many of her listeners, at once aspirational and damning. Musically, her sound was neither anthem nor ballad; lyrically, it occupied a messy place, a place that embraced and owned complications, that hit a note between strength and vulnerability. It was real to many of us in a way we’d never heard before and rarely have since. Many women still see the world, and ourselves, through the sound of those 18 songs.”
Jessica Bennett in The New York Times, yesterday:
“Ms. Phair was defiant and sexual and unapologetic and vulnerable at once — a kind of girl-next-door casually swinging a sledgehammer at rock ’n’ roll as we knew it, singing about sex, love and power in a direct, unmediated way that few women before her had. Part of her punch came from the tension between her clean-cut Midwestern look and her explicit exploration of desire and death. Guyville catapulted her — 25, unemployed and smoking a lot of pot in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago — to the cover of Rolling Stone, under the proclamation, ‘A Rock & Roll Star is Born’…
Liz Phair interview on MTV’s 120 Minutes in 1994:
“… if ever there was a time to revisit Guyville, it is now — in a moment when its walls seem to be tumbling. Matador rereleases the album this month, along with songs from three cassettes Ms. Phair put out under the name ‘Girly-Sound’ in 1991. Those young women who were touched by it 25 years ago are now marching, running for office, proclaiming #MeToo.”
Bill Wyman in The New Yorker, 2013:
Guyville is many things. It’s an 18-song record of what used to be called indie rock, arguably the quintessential example of the form… part coming-of-age story and part systematic inquiry into the fractured psyche of American nineties womanhood. At the time, it was a landmark of foul-mouthed, compromised intimacy, a tortured confessional, a workout in female braggadocio, and a wellspring of penetrating self-analysis and audacity. Phair was as lyrical as Joni Mitchell but played as tough as Chrissie Hynde; she was as smart as Courtney Love and as comfortable toying with sexual imagery as Madonna…
“Phair used language trenchantly and precisely, yet still revelled in the ambiguities. Fucking and running, the subject of another song, was about just that, but the desire expressed in “Flower,” to “be your blow-job queen” was, by contrast, hot, soul-freeing, and (as Phair well understood) just the sort of distraction that gets guys seeing double and puts women in a position of power.
Exile in Guyville 15th Anniversary Trailer, 2008
Hazel Cills in Jezebel, this past Monday, April 30:
“Ever since she released her debut, Exile in Guyville, in 1993, much of the songs pulled and re-worked from the Girly-Sound tapes, young women have heard their personal lives, so often considered mundane by the canonical rock circles that came before it, articulated in its frustrated, unwaveringly blunt lyrics. And in an era in which indie music is dominated by young women like Mitski, Soccer Mommy, Snail Mail, and more writing equally gutsy, soul-bearing rock music, the energy of a record like Exile in Guyville plays as if it were a prophecy.
Liz Phair interview with Amanda Petrusich for Pitchfork in 2008:
Amanda Petrusich in Pitchfork, Wednesday, May 2, 2018:
“If you, like me, were a mopey and searching 13-year-old when Matador first released Exile in Guyville, then perhaps you, too, consider it the sacred text of your youth. Now, 25 years later, Exile remains a kind of sanctified codex for girls: the map that pointed us toward adulthood, or something like it… Phair possessed an uncommon frankness, and nerve to match. The indie ethos of the early ’90s was supposedly about candor and integrity, but it often manifested as its own kind of neurotic performance—an alienating mix of frigid indifference and unearned righteousness. Phair seemed, in her way, entirely allergic to its bullshit. She just said what she felt, without negotiation.
“Her bluntness on the chorus [of ‘Fuck and Run’]—’I want a boyfriend/I want all that stupid old shit/Like letters and sodas’—was so deeply revelatory to me as a teenager. I simply did not know that people could say this sort of stuff out loud. What a brave and wild thing, to be that honest about what you longed for! I still thought hunger itself was a sin. The women I admired—Kim Gordon, Kathleen Hanna, PJ Harvey—felt radical in part because they appeared so needless. Phair had desires, and some of them were embarrassing, and she sang about them anyway.
“…Listening to Exile in Guyville still feels… like someone is telling you that all the weird, uncomfortable things you think and worry about are, in fact, just ordinary fears. Those feelings, it turns out, are simply the fallout of being alive.”
“Rid Of Me”
Polly Jean Harvey to Spin Magazine in 2013:
“I remember starting to write in a flat I was living in, a horrible, horrible little flat that I was sharing in Tottenham. Tottenham is quite a rough area in London. We were living in a very damp flat with gas heaters, and I had a poky little room at the front of the house. In order to access any of the rest of the house you had to walk through my room. We were on the lower floor, so the people up above us would make noise. I remember starting to write the song ‘Rid of Me,’ sitting on my bed in my damp front room by the gas heater. When I’m writing towards a record, there’s often one song that emerges as the linchpin. At that time, I very much wanted to write songs that shocked. When I was at art college, all I wanted to do was shock with my artwork. When I wrote ‘Rid of Me,’ I shocked myself. I thought, ‘Well, if I’m shocked, other people might be shocked.’ The sound of the words was powerful, and the rhythm felt clean and simple to roll off the tongue. I knew that this was the type of song I was trying to write…
“I had just come out of my teens and at that time you really want to make your mark on the world. So I just wanted to say something that hadn’t been said in that way before. I was trying to cause a riot in one way or another.”
“Highway 61 Revisited”
Steve Albini (Rid of Me engineer) to Spin Magazine in 2013:
“Minor music-business functionaries having an opinion about how a singer should sing or how her band should sound — all those people can go fuck themselves. I reject the notion that I have very much responsibility for the ultimate success or failure of a record. I’ve worked on a lot of great records and I’ve worked on a lot of shitty records, and from my perspective, the work is equally demanding and equally satisfying on a terrible record as it is on a great record. The difference is the people making the music had a great record in them when they were doing the great record. And PJ Harvey had a great record in them when they did Rid of Me. I haven’t done any sort of Pepsi Challenge with other records of the era, but it’s hard for me to think of a better record that came out during that period.”
“Legs”
Paula Mejia in NPR’s Turning the Tables:
“The album was pulled together against all odds, and you can hear it in the stark recording: Done in isolation, while the band sparked with internal tensions and Harvey’s songwriting directly bristled against Steve Albini’s abrasive production. Yet from the opening chords of Rid Of Me‘s title track — in which Harvey crooned ‘Tie yourself to me / No one else, no / You’re not rid of me’ — she made it perfectly clear on this album that not only was she not intimidated by having all eyes on her, but also that she wasn’t going anywhere. Behind the thrum of guitars on ’50 Foot Queenie’ she delivered a series of declarations that have rightful places as anthems: ‘I’m number one / Second to no one … I’ll tell you my name / F-*-*-* / Fifty foot queenie / Force ten hurricane.’ On Rid Of Me, Harvey also proved that she wasn’t just capable of hanging with the boys; she had surpassed them entirely.”
“50 Ft. Queenie”
Lauren O’Neal in The Rumpus, 2013:
“It starts quiet and airless, with a single repeated guitar note and minimalist drums that repeat over and over…and over…and over. A few measures in, you expect the lyrics to start. A few measures after that, you expect them again. Nope. It isn’t until the 47-second mark that Harvey’s voice comes in, half whisper, half moan, as if she’s singing through clenched teeth: ‘Tie yourself to me, no one else / No, you’re not rid of me. / Mm, you’re not rid of me.’
“Shivers! Shivers up and down your spine! But there’s so much rage crushed into such a tiny vessel—how can that low little vibrato possibly contain it all? Oh, honey. Just wait until the chorus.
“The chorus is the part where I start desperately pawing for the volume knob on my stereo because things just went from murmur to full-on roar. With any other song, I’d be pissed I had to bother with dials, but with “Rid of Me,” Harvey captures the twin engines of muffled despair and murderous rage so flawlessly that it seems perfectly natural when the song explodes into noise.”
“Rub It Til It Bleeds”
John Freeman in The Quietus, 2013:
“At the time Nirvana dominated the new ‘alternative mainstream’ but, for me, the mighty Nevermind seemed global and distant—sullied by MTV. PJ Harvey, however, seemed accessible and more visceral—they were a band who demanded a piece of my soul… However, the back story to Rid Of Me revealed an artist in a state of mental exhaustion. Much of the album was written in Harvey’s home county of Dorset in October 1992. At the time, Polly was suffering from what she would describe as a ‘breakdown’… At that time, however hard bitten and well seasoned (and usually male and from Melody Maker) music journalists tried to force her into their neat pigeonholes, Harvey rejected being tagged as a feminist, and thus annoyed those who believed that any talented, independent female artist must, by definition, be outspoken on issues pertaining to women. ‘I don’t even think of myself as being female half the time,’ she would reveal in 1993, further complicating the matter. ‘When I’m writing songs I never write with gender in mind. I write about people’s relationships to each other.’
“And Harvey was true to her word, with regards to the subversion of gender roles within the album’s caustic lyrics. ‘Hey I’m the king of the world / You ought to hear my song / You come on and measure me / I’m 20 inches long,’ she roared, as her ’50 foot queenie / Force 10 hurricane’ went toe-to-toe with an over-sized male alter ego on ’50ft Queenie’.
“Man-Size”
“Even better, and perhaps the finest moment on Rid Of Me, was the seething pop of ‘Man-Size’ on which Harvey assigned herself a male façade and cried, ‘My babe looking cool and neat / I’m pretty sure good enough to eat / Man-size no need to shout / Let it all, let it all hang out.’ I was never convinced that either song was steeped in misandry – I interpreted them as highlighting the artist’s fascination with the more preposterous aspects of the male psyche.
“On a number of levels, Rid Of Me was an album rooted in carnal lust and sexual betrayal.”
Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone, today:
“On her second album, the 23-year-old lass from the English countryside seized the wide-open opportunities of early-Nineties rock and opened them even wider. She goes for shameless rock & roll bravado… reveling in her old-school guitar-hero moves even when she’s mocking them. Polly Jean Harvey spends these songs digging out her most twisted nightmares and setting them on fire…
“‘The air-guitar record of the decade,’ I called it in Rolling Stone, and that still feels right.
“…Even when she’s going to the darkest emotional depths, her music has that mischievous baby’s-on-fire edge. That’s why the album hasn’t dated – and why it sounds timelier than ever now…
“…Rid of Me – it’s like Exile on Main St. fan-fic where her voice is Keith and her guitar is Mick.
“…Rid of Me dropped the same summer as Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville – two albums that fans had always wanted to exist, and two albums that fans felt we’d been awaiting for years. (Just in time for Labor Day, we also got the Breeders’ Last Splash.) In the wake of grunge and riot grrrl, new freedoms had opened up for feminist weirdos to make noise. Harvey and Phair sounded nothing alike on the surface, but they shared the sense of a soft-spoken loner plugging in her guitar and finding her voice. This was something new. As critic Jen Fleissner wrote in the Village Voice, ‘In the movies, girls almost never get to be funny (vs. Jodie Foster/Meryl Streep serious) and occupy center stage. One of the biggest deals in music this year turned out to be women grabbing the limelight and acting not just pissed off, but funny, too. Even funny and scary at once: ‘Tarzan, stop your fucking screaming!’ or ‘I take full advantage of every man I meet.’
“…She’s gone on countless musical adventures ever since, but Rid of Me remains the core of her legend – the moment where Harvey rampaged through rock & roll history as if it all belonged to her, and proved that it did.”
PJ Harvey EPK 1993
