Liz Phair held out a long time before selling out, but herrecently released self-titled fourth album has the prepackaged feelthat Phair had always managed to avoid.
Previously under Matador records, Phair was tired of not gettingradio play and signed on Capitol Records. They took thisaccomplished artist and forced her to work with the same idiots whowrote Avril Lavigne's songs and consequently killed everything Iloved about her music.
Phair started out a girl and her guitar taking on issues thatrock doesn't often cover. Her voice has an amazing range, and to meher greatest strength has always been her ability to use that rangeand her spontaneity with her music to better get across herthought.
Her songs were anything but predictable. In "I'll Get You High,"she breakings into the Flintstone's theme song melody with herlyrics replacing the real words with her lyrics -- "Bimbo, meet thebimbo..." It's a song about returning home, and the feeling of yourhometown.
Her song "Canary" is about a girl growing up. She covers sexualdesire more explicitly than I've ever heard, but also the morningafter and the timidity of actual emotion. She talks about the slowdeath of love, divorce, the division of personal belongings, allwith whip-smart lyrics and a different sound. No two of herself-produced songs sounded the same, and none sounded like aradio-rehash.
But now that Capitol Records has gotten a hold of her, everysong their producers touched feels cookie-cutter. Without evenlooking at the liner notes I could tell which were the five songsLauren Christy, Scott Spock, Graham Edward and Gary Clark "helped"on, and which were just Phair's. Their produced songs were soformulated -- sentence, echo, sentence, echo, guitars, chorus, moresentence-echo, chorus, chorus -- that it might as well be Avrilsinging.
The song "It's Sweet," is one of the few examples of Phair'ssimple and beautiful storytelling in this new album. "LittleDigger," about her son seeing his mother with another man, isanother highlight. These show the complexity that Phair has shownin previous songs about the difficulty of a relationship with a manwho has a child and the pull of everyday details of a man in"Gun-shy". Unfortunately, where that had been expected in everysong of Phair's, it is now a surprise.
And then there is the matter of the record industry's efforts toincorporate file sharing into their marketing strategy. Phair's CD,when put into a personal computer, brings up a site to downloadfour more Phair songs. Unfortunately, it will only go onto oneprogram that I spent a lot of time trying to download onto myrelatively new computer. Then a website keeps popping up andtelling me that I am authorized to listen to the download (althoughI can't).
In general I was disgusted with the entire machine that controlsradio time, buys out talent and makes them mediocre, and takes mymoney and doesn't allow me access to the rest of the CD.
I agree that file sharing is wrong in principle, but I have hadno qualms doing it in the past. Everyone says, "you're taking moneyfrom the artist," but most artists only make money from touringanyway, and the record company used their profits on theiroverpriced CDs to create their own jobs and spend lots of moneyproducing an image for scores of prepackaged up-and-comings, mostof which never get off the ground.
I wrote Capitol Records and explained my difficulties in gettingthe rest of the CD, and I promised them I would never buy anotherCD from them.
But after all the frustration of wanting to throw my computeroff the desk all I really feel is sad about losing a good artist tomoney.
In a May 20, 2003 interview with Filter Magazine, Phairunabashedly owned up to her movement away from indie intomainstream.
"I'm trying to become a washed-up version of my own self andrake it in," Phair said.
When asked what she thought of her fan base being upset, shesaid the old fans have every right to be upset.
"I'm leaving them to seek new fans," Phair said.
I wish her the best of luck with raking in the money and findingthose new fans with the disposable income and a discerning tastefor familiar studio sounds.
As one of my music-savvy friends pointed out, you can't expectan artist to make their first album over and over again. Iunderstand an artist must change, I guess I just don't like the wayshe is changing. As for me, I will keep my promise to CapitolRecords and cherish my old Phair records.
