Life Still Feels like Exile in Guyville
Every Sunday, milk crate revisits an iconic piece of music history—artist, album, or otherwise—as a part of our weekly crate digging series.
Design by Katie Lew
By Mimi Newman
When the end credits of Thirteen (2003) start to roll and you’re left sitting in silence trying to process the horrors of teenage girlhood, it’s the voice of Liz Phair that soundtracks your downward spiral. Specifically, it’s “Explain it to Me,” the seventh track from her 1993 debut Exile in Guyville—stripped-back, acoustic, driven by meandering vocals and simple yet brilliant lyrics about hitting rock bottom. There couldn’t be a more appropriate film for Phair’s music to soundtrack; Exile in Guyville is about the women that the girls from Thirteen grew into, stuck between rock and a hard place: pushing back against the world’s bullshit, or putting on your big girl pants and resigning yourself to it. It’s too confessional to be a feminist masterpiece; Phair paints herself as an antihero, not a victim, but that guilty honesty only makes it hit closer to home.
On paper, Exile in Guyville is just another minimally-produced indie rock album—hardly difficult to come by in the early ’90s; 1993 also graced us with Yo La Tengo’s Painful, Dinosaur Jr.’s Where You Been, and the Juliana Hatfield Three’s Become What You Are, just to name a few. Exile was perhaps one of the most well-received, breaching the containment of the indie scene and eventually ending up at number 56 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. But the question as to why it became so renowned has, to me, an obvious answer: Exile in Guyville feels like a manifesto for unpleasant women in an unpleasant world. Musically it might fit in neatly with other classic indie rock albums of the time, but lyrically it’s a uniquely relentless barrage of punches to the gut that even Hole’s Live Through This (perhaps the quintessential ’90s weird girl album) cannot rival.
Exile in Guyville could be a sob story about shitty ex-boyfriends and childhood trauma and bad sex, but Phair doesn’t sing it like she wants your sympathy, or even like she’s particularly upset over the situation. It sounds like she’s resigned herself to it. It’s the tone of voice of a breakup that you’ve known is coming for months, the end of a relationship that you’ve already mourned the loss of by the time the conversation happens, the numbness that comes with deciding not to expect too much. Her vocals are devoid of any flourish or technical stylings, but are instead a monotone that sounds like she’s complaining to you over the phone. The deadpan quality of her voice only adds to the weight of her words; one point on the album where this works best is “Divorce Song,” the lyrics to which are written in such a conversational tone that listening to it feels like eavesdropping on a breakup happening in real time. Better still (or maybe worse still) are the lyrics of “Fuck and Run” that haven’t left my head since the first time I heard them: “It’s fuck and run, fuck and run/ even even when I was seventeen. Fuck and run, fuck and run, even when I was twelve.” There’s a brutal simplicity to Phair repeating “I want a boyfriend” over and over again in the refrain, like in the middle of her scorning of men’s evildoings she’s rolling over and showing you her soft, lovesick underbelly. It’s been the soundtrack to every messy hookup and quasi-breakup I’ve ever had. Because it’s all well and good knowing that men treat you like shit and knowing you deserve more from love than what they can give you…but yeah, I do want a boyfriend. I do want all the stupid old shit.
I think part of the reason that Exile feels feminist is because it isn’t trying to be. Phair doesn’t set out with the intention of opening your eyes to the horrors of modern womanhood and turning you into a Radfem; she’s just got some things to get off of her chest. She’s trying to juggle the understanding that men suck with the bone-deep need to be loved by them. On “Help Me Mary” she even confronts the paradox head on; she confesses her willingness to “practice all [her] moves,” “memorize all their stupid rules,” and “show them just how far [she] can bend,” caving to what men want from her in spite of it all. There are probably whole essays to be written on the feminist or anti-feminist implications of her lyrics and the difficult position that man-loving women have always occupied within feminism, but that’s not the point of Exile in Guyville. That wasn’t what made it interesting to me when I was thirteen.
When I first saved “Fuck and Run” to my Spotify, I was right in the midst of experiencing the horrors of teenage girlhood: all of my clothes fit me wrong; I’d fried half of my hair off with bleach; the boy I had a crush on kept making me playlists full of Radiohead songs; I couldn’t work out if I was gay or not. Then Liz Phair appeared to me like a magical, man-hating beacon of light in the darkness. Hearing Exile in Guyville for the first time was like hearing in words everything that I knew was wrong with the world but I didn’t know how to explain. Like finally learning the name of the disease. It was a reassurance that even if I couldn’t describe what I was feeling, at least someone thirty years ago had felt the exact same way. The male-dominated indie rock scene that Phair sings about felt like a microcosm of my whole world. Now, nearly a full decade later, I listen to it against the backdrop of a whole lot more life experience and way more reasons to be mad at the world (and a far better understanding of Radfem literature), but the message is received just the same. Life still feels like it did in the male-dominated indie scene that spawned Exile in Guyville—like a boy’s club where you are forced to play along.