"Soap Star Joe" / Liz Phair / Exile in Guyville

Has any other "important" artist had such a sad, precipitous fall as my girl Liz Phair?

The quality of her music has just taken an absolute nosedive with each successive album. She went from indie pop brilliance in 1993


To mawkish, Adult Contemporary crap in 2005


I mean, I know a girl's got to provide for herself and sell some CDs, but as a dedicated fan, it's just sad to see her neuter herself over the years. And judging by her album sales, I'm not the only one that feels this way - she was dropped from Capital Records after the poor sales of Somebody's Miracle. I own all of her albums, as I've mentioned before I'm a loyal fan of artists I love, but damn she's making it hard to maintain hope.

But for now, let's remember some happier times. Exile in Guyville, her debut was a HUGE album back in the burgeoning alternative scene in the early 90's. Importantly, hers was the first important female voice to emerge, paving the way for the Lillith Fair scene (don't hold that against her, though). Exile in Guyville, if you believe the rumors, was written as a feminist song-by-song response to the Rolling Stone's masterpiece Exile on Main Street (which would make "Soap Star Joe" the response to "Torn and Frayed", my favorite non-hit Stones song).

Both songs begin with a simple strummed intro and have a nice, mid-tempo sway to them. "Torn and Frayed" is about a dude named Joe (!) that's in a band but is having some issues. His coat is "torn and frayed", he's a drifter and a "deadbeat", is addicted to codine, but apparently is a hell of a guitar player to "steal your heart away".

Phair's "Joe" is the personification of American manhood, the Marlboro man:

He's just a hero
In a long line of heroes
Looking for some lonely billboard to grace
They say he sprung from the skull of Athena
Think about your own head
And the headache he gave

(you have to like the mythological allusion and clever turn of phrase at the end, huh?) And as if you didn't divine the Joe-as-archetype through the lyrics, she ends with this line:

Check out America
You're looking at it babe

Uh, thanks...

So, yeah, a big difference between the Stones' Joe and Phair's: the former being a veritable bum that pulls it together in time for incredible shows, the latter being American, Western manhood incarnate, a "hero from a long line of heroes", wearing tight blue jeans, sporting "thinning hair" and driving a pickup.

The sound of Phair's song is sparse, like much of Guyville - mostly just her strumming the chords, accompanied only by her unique, quivering voice and a few brush strokes on a snare. What amounts to a chorus (at 1:28 and 2:03) offers an echoed, haunting change (is it really a chorus if it's the same music but not the same words?) with a telltale Stones-ish harmonica finishing out the song. Most of the Guyville songs follow this structure; Phair plays around with conventional song structures throughout, often eschewing choruses, bridges, and rhyming altogether. It's this loss of experimental spirit that has let so many fans down; "sellout" is an ugly, overused word in music, but it's sometimes applicable.

I believe Phair still has some great stuff left in her. It's been five years since her latest album, the 90's are beginning to have a nostalgic return (it happens in cycles of 20 years), and music fans LOVE a comeback. All she needs to do is hook up with the right producer (i.e, not The Matrix /shakes head/), find her edge again, and await the plaudits that will certainly be tossed her way. Come on, Liz...we're rooting for you!