Pick a Day

Liz Phair Is Born

Liz Phair is born in New Haven, Connecticut; she is raised by her adoptive parents in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Winnetka, Illinois. She becomes a '90s indie-rock icon with her debut album, Exile In Guyville, a feminist treatment of the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main St.

Phair attends Oberlin College, a prestigious liberal arts school in Ohio, as an Art History major but soon begins writing songs in her spare time. She's shy about performing in front of others, so she crafts her tunes on an unplugged electric guitar, bending her head close to the instrument to hear the strings. She credits her unusual chords and off-beat playing style to her self-conscious strumming at Oberlin. Back home in Chicago, she's more interested in selling paintings than making music, but still manages to record a handful of pop songs that pair girlish vocals with shocking lyrics. The Girly Sound tapes are a precursor to her debut album, Exile In Guyville, an unflinching look at sex and love from a female perspective. Phair envisions the project as a response to the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main St., but the songs are inspired by a specific breed of male found in small-town music scenes, "a mafia of music lovers who were representing 'alternative' but I found them to be oppressive," she tells NPR. She uses the Stones as a sounding board for her frustration, whether it's confronting a cheating lover in "6'1," her answer to "Rocks Off," trying to satisfy her urges in "Flower," a jab at "Let It Loose" that has her proclaiming, "I want to be your blowjob queen," or rising above all the drama in "Stratford-On-Guy," a loose take on "Shine A Light." When Exile In Guyville is released through the indie label Matador Records, it causes a stir with its frank expression of female sexuality, made especially jarring when its songstress looks like a normal pretty girl from the suburbs. "Thirty years ago, that's not what people expected women to say," Phair recalls to The Independent in 2018. "If I was going to say that stuff, I ought to have tons of piercings and be really pissed off. It was like your neighbor: the girl next door who you wave to on the school bus broke out with this inner life that was turbulent and simmering with resentment and loneliness. It was like seeing the girl next door go nuclear." Phair releases a couple more albums in the vein of Guyville, with Whip-Smart and Whitechocolatespaceegg solidifying her reputation as a feminist rock icon. But she courts a different kind of controversy with her major label release, Liz Phair, in 2003. The album is a slick pop effort designed to propel her into the mainstream and pairs her with the production team The Matrix, the creators of teen pop fare from the likes of Britney Spears and Hilary Duff. The breezy single "Extraordinary" indeed introduces Phair to a new fanbase, but largely alienates the old one, who slam her for selling out. Critics are equally unkind and brand their former indie-rock darling a failure. As for Phair, she says the self-titled release, like Guyville, is just one of many facets to her personality and she's not afraid to explore any of them. Besides, she wouldn't be Liz Phair without a bit of controversy. "This is so me, you know?" she told Yahoo! Music. "Getting in trouble. Always getting in trouble." Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg

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