Liz Phair
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Liz Phair is one of the most prominent victims of this phenomenon. Her short career has been successful (she’s made the cover of Rolling Stone and her first album, Exile in Guyville, topped the 1993 Village Voice poll), but Phair doesn’t play by the rules. She sings candidly about sex and has a self-designed public persona, which, coupled with her legendary stage fright (her private persona?) and her desire for control, makes her an easy indie-rock target.
“Rock is a pedestal sport,” writes Mike Brake in The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures, “as in being a monarch–whenever possible a boy inherits the throne–females are not thought to be the stuff [of] idols….Girls are expected to grovel in the mezzanine while the stud struts his stuff up there….A girl with the audacity to go onstage is always jeered, sneered and leered up to….A guitar in the hands of a man boasts ‘cock’–the same instrument in female hands therefore (to a warped male mind) screams ‘castration.’”
The audience did leer and jeer–mostly the men–during Phair’s more scatological offerings (“I want to be your blow job queen” brought frat-boy cheers). The women, on the other hand, appeared to be singing right along. Phair alternated upbeat and slower songs the way a good film punches up the plot with comic relief just before the audience starts sobbing. Indeed, the slower songs, like “Chopsticks” and “Canary,” lent themselves to the solo format. Phair’s guitar alternated between crisp and distorted, and while she looked at the neck of her guitar a lot, she played with confidence (and even thanked her guitar tech for tuning her guitar). She eventually slowed down to tell a stupid joke over the course of several breaks and developed a sort of loose rapport with the audience. And while sometimes the mammoth set of songs seemed too repetitious, the audience sat there enraptured. Phair, who was poised and well enunciated, had woven a spell–one that had been worked out in several cities prior to this homecoming appearance.
