John Deeth Blog

Exile gone mainstream

Anyone else heard the eponymous "Liz Phair" yet?

sigh... I remember how I felt the day I was at the college radio station, eagerly broke open "Cut The Crap" by the Clash... and then played it.

I waited five years for this?

Six weeks ago, I heard the lead cut "Extraordinary" on one of the WB teeny bopper shows. Unknowing, I asked my stepdaughter who it was - and she actually thought it was Avril Lavigne! Obviously The Matrix production team captured their sound again.

Somehow if I had imagined a Liz Phair song about underwear, it would have been a lot better than the one she actually wrote. And the best she can say about a fling with a younger guy is "rock me all night"? Did she consult the cliche dictionary? And she even throws in a self-referential lyric, eeew.

Oh, and here's the big insight on male-female relations: "it's a war, and nothin's gonna change." This from the woman who wrote "Fuck And Run"?

This is the funny part : she gets her first ever TipperSticker on this one. How Tipper and Joe Lieberman ever missed Exile In Guyville I'll never know. (Actually, I think I do: Liz is a cute white girl with an upscale college-rock demographic, and not a metal mutant or a gangsta rapper. Notice how she gets the Mark of Quality only when she makes the Big Grab For The Hearts And Minds Of The Mainstream?) The song in question, officially titled "H.W.C." (someone somewhere wimped out and didn't spell it out) is much, uh, breezier than one would have expected.

Conventional industry wisdom, June 2003: Exile was a fluke. Maybe Eponymous will be a big hit and some innocent kids will be forever corrupted by the lyrics to "Flower." That, and only that, gives me hope.

Off to play the "Girlysound" bootlegs it took me three months to download...

The good news is, like me, Liz is single again. If Nicole Kidman never calls, I have a backup plan... well, maybe not after this post. Wait, Liz, maybe it'll grow on me...