Exile in Guyville

33⅓ Main Series #96

by Gina Arnold

Although Exile in Guyville was celebrated as one of the year's top records by Spin and the New York Times, it was also, to some, an abomination: a mockery of the Rolling Stones' most revered record and a rare glimpse into the psyche of a shrewd, independent, strong young woman. For these crimes, Liz Phair was run out of her hometown of Chicago, enduring a flame war perpetrated by writers who accused her of being boring, inauthentic, and even a poor musician.

With Exile in Guyville, Phair spoke for all the girls who loved the world of indie rock but felt deeply unwelcome there. Like all great works of art, Exile was a harbinger of the shape of things to come: Phair may have undermined the male ego, but she also unleashed a new female one. For the sake of all the female artists who have benefited from her work�from Sleater-Kinney to Lana Del Rey and back again�it's high time we go back to Guyville.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Biography, The United States Of America, Ebooks, Musicals

113 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 22, 2014

Reviews

[sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Man. I *really wanted* to be able to say good things about this book. I love Liz Phair. I'm a feminist. I'm a critical thinker. This book, which is less a making-of retrospective than an argument focused on the inherent patriarchy of the 90s indie rock scene, seen through Phair's role and refutation of said patriarchy, seemed tailor made for me. So what's the problem?

Where to start? The copy editing is ghastly, but not Arnold's fault (you can do better Bloomsbury!). Arnold spends upward of twenty pages discussing the homogeneity of Starbucks in Korea, likening it to Phair's mythical Guyville, which I find to be more than a stretch. She makes arguably false statements, claiming that interest in vinyl is on the wane, when countless articles have been published lauding the comeback of the LP. She apparently thinks Mercury Rev is a British band. She claims that Kim Gordon "showed no interest in her appearance," ignoring the fact that Gordon founded a fashion label (X-Girl). She completely ignores the existence of college radio. Her claim that Exile in Guyville suffered low sales due to Phair's inexperience playing live is one I've heard before, but she offers no concrete proof to back it up. She feels compelled to define the term "A&R" but has no trouble tossing out theoretical jargon like doxa with no explanation. She spends another 10 pages explaining why she, personally, hates the Rolling Stones, yet only uses a handful of quotes from Phair, WHO MADE THE ALBUM, and the quotes come from a scanty 3-4 interview sources at that.

Her entire book is a feminist discourse on the heteronormative, conservative reality behind the well-meaning, DIY "alternative" to grossly chauvinist hair metal that was (is?) the indie-rock scene, but she completely neglects mentioning the existence/reception of contemporary (albeit controversial) indie feminist figureheads like Lisa Carver of Rollerderby, Kathleen Hanna, and Courtney Love. I think Arnold's argument is incredibly interesting, but in reading this volume, I feel like she ultimately took the easy way out and made it more about herself than her experience listening to the album, or any collective audience listening to the album, or, simply, the album. That, coupled with her insistence on either completely eliding, misrepresenting, and/or shoehorning facts into her argument, willy-nilly, as she sees fit, makes me distrustful of her as a critic, and disappointed in the book as a whole.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not the book on Liz Phair you've been waiting for. I was hoping for more. I loved Arnold's early book Route 666 and saw how weak her subsequent tome was (Kiss This). I'm been rooting for her to make a triumphant return to rock writing, but . . . this ain't it.

Arnold's book puzzles over the fact that the mainstream had nothing for Liz Phair despite the obvious merits of the album. She interrogates the way the male critics of the early 1990s exhibited various forms of misogyny in their reviews. Fair enough (though this is shooting fish in a barrel).

But she has no (zero) sensitivity to all of the men who just loved Exile in Guyville from the first moment they heard it. This is important, because just as Liz Phair's album didn't get its due, her male audience never got its due. There has always been a cadre of male listeners who always loved the Au Pairs, Pylon, and countless other bands that twisted and distorted the normative narratives of sex, gender, and rock and roll. The problem with Gina Arnold is that she implies that "Exile in Guyville" is somehow comparable to "Exile on Main Street" (like this is all the same game, the same rock culture). Arnold is a person who actually went to see the Rolling Stones live in the 90s. By a certain standard, she's already compromised, and making an argument that is, at the start, untenable and boring.

Meanwhile, the book is littered with little problems that undermine her message. She refers to Urge Overkill as The Urge Overkill (what?); she talks about the male/female vocal games of certain 90s bands and includes the Chills (really?); she calls the Replacements a 90s band (they broke up in 1991). She refers to the critic Allan Bloom as "Allen" Bloom. Most disconcerting, she seems to take at face value the idea that somehow "Exile in Guyville" really is a reply album to "Exile on Main Street." By trying out this critical strategy, she shows that she can't recognize Liz Phair's wit and irony. There is some kind of entanglement between the albums, but it isn't song by song -- it's more of a clash of world views, distributed unevenly across 36 songs.

Arnold now has a PhD from Stanford, but her theoretical armature doesn't get much past the 90s. Can't we get past the quotations from, say, Teresa DeLauretis (misspelled on p. 28).

Having said all that, there are some good bits: She's good on the gentrification of neighborhoods like Wicker Park . . . She makes some good connections around certain songs (like "Dance of the Seven Veils").

But in the end, I don't think there's much here.

Someday there is going to be a great book about Liz Phair. Here are some of the things it's going to do:

It's going to be historical, i.e., stories about the 90s.
It's going to be loaded with interviews (w/ Liz, w/ Albini, w/ the Smashing Pumpkins, Urge Overkill, people who knew Material Issue) . . .
It's going to be very good on the differences between the 80s/90s, and the 90s/2000s. In other words, it's not going to just use our present to talk about a certain past.
It's going to have some things to say about Liz's later albums.
And, above all, it's going to drop the pretense of generalization, and start from the concrete experience of everyone who knew at the time that Liz Phair had emitted a great album.

[Charles · Rating 1 out of 5]

When I learned Bloomsbury had signed Gina Arnold, a notorious indie-rock puritan (and lackluster scribe), to write the 33 1/3 on Guyville, I shuddered. But after laudatory early reviews, and in light of my longstanding Guyville fandom, I decided to give Arnold a chance. Perhaps she had grown or matured since her judgmental and clueless early 90's writings. No such luck. Instead, she writes like someone who took a couple rote Cultural Studies courses, and swallowed those doctrines wholesale. Thus, she celebrates Phair's subversive achievement by quoting such rigid reactionaries as Nietzche, Laura Mulvey, and Allan Bloom. She projects her own anti-Stones invective onto Phair, searching for middle fingers but finding only thumbs, as she rushes through an unconvincing (and sometimes hilariously forced) side-by-side comparison of Exile in Guyville and Exile on Main Street. Perhaps, worst of all, she overstates the Internet's role in undermining the Guyville state of mind (has she even viewed any indie rock message boards in the past decade, to say nothing of non-music spaces like comics and sci fi?), while dismissing post-Britney female pop's role in doing the same. Add to that the grammatical, factual, and chronological (how in the hell could Phair cover "No More Drama" or a Miseducation cut in 1993?!?!?) errors that have plagued too many recent 33 1/3's (we miss you, David Barker), and this adds up to a shoddy, inept study of a brilliant work --- a B- Intro to Popular Culture paper, a D- book. Arnold managed to dash even my very low expectations.

[Susanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, people are harsh on this book, and most of these readers seem to focus on two things: (1) The atrocious copyediting [which drove me crazy, too!] and (2) It wasn't about the making of the album. I have had this book on my nightstand for years and finally read it this week. I enjoyed it a lot, especially the review from 20 years on of the male-dominated world that Exile in Guyville released into. I'm biased by sharing many of Arnold's views about this album and the Stones, but I appreciated being reminded of who I was when I got this album and what it meant to me vs. what happened to the record as time passed.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️

This is not what I expected from a 33 1/3 book… and yet it’s (probably) what is needed to discuss Exile in Guyville - an anthropological examination of: Exile on Main Street & The Rolling Stones; the male-dominated world of indie rock fandom; and a comparison of Guyville to Main Street.

First - there are some stupid copy editing errors that take you out of reading this. Shame.

Second - there are some sweeping statements made here, that are either just outdated or not fully articulated. It’s meant to be a short work, so I’ll forgive them. But it’s fair to criticize them, so I’ll note them.

Moving on…

Exile in Guyville was the best $10 I ever spent. It was also the best album I ever took a chance on after 1 single. I still have the cassette kicking around somewhere. When my 3 year-old nephew found it (as 3 year-olds are wont to do) and asked, “What’s this?” (as they are even more wont to do), my brother wise-cracked, “That’s an artifact!”
He wasn’t wrong.
And calling it such just increased its value, to me and future generations.

Liz Phair became the cool older sister I needed to give me a hint of what was on the horizon of my upcoming 20s. A year or two later, when my girl friends were being given permission to be angry by Alanis, I was over it already, and beckoned them to move past all that with Liz. Like Liz.

Liz offered freedom - freedom in being enough. Nah, she wasn’t the BEST vocalist, guitarist, live act. She was good enough, though, and more interesting than many of the male-fronted acts being sold to me by Guys - Guys who didn’t know more than I did, and certainly didn’t know all that I wanted from my music, but who spoke with the authority of All Guys as they tried to confine the space Liz Phair should take up.

Nuh uh.

If Good Enough was enough to justify cramming Urge Overkill & Smashing Pumpkins into my ears, then Liz Phair definitely deserved some of that space.

Because I understood then what Liz has always said - she’s an artist. Not a rock star, or even first a musician. She’s an artist, and Exile in Guyville was her work, her statement on the place and time she found herself. So she didn’t have to write the BEST album ever. Just one good enough to make her points.

And she did.

Arnold takes a much more circuitous route to get there, but that’s what she’s saying here. It may help that I’m reading this in 2023, instead of almost a decade ago as some other reviewers. It means more to me post-pandemic and post-Jan 6 and post-Trump that one of the founders of VICE also founded the Proud Boys; that the Internet is filled with angry men of all ages expecting to be respected for whatever spills out of their mouths. That Arnold takes some time to connect these dots to the paracosm of Guyville seems prescient now - in 2014 it may have seemed disconnected.

I also appreciate Arnold’s side-by-side comparison of the two works. I’ve listened to both albums for decades, and never quite got all the connections. While some are tenuous, I think she has at least made them. It’s fair to criticize Guyville’s weaker connections. But that doesn’t mean Arnold’s understanding of each connection here is wrong.

Because of its anthropological take, this is more of a slog than its 116 pages imply. I’ve read other 33 1/3 books in an hour - Debaser took me about as long as a listen to the album itself. But I’m glad for this book and its seeming detours.

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was eager to read this 33 1/3 offering on one of my favorite albums of the 90s, but I was sadly disappointed. When you're writing a book geared primarily toward music nerds, getting your facts right is a baseline expectation. So from the moments in the intro when Arnold referred to "The" Urge Overkill (twice!") and "Twintones" Records, things went downhill. At least be sure to get lyrics (and song titles) right if you're going to quote them - you have the internet, after all (the song Mesmerizing is called Mesmerized, opening lines of 6'1 are quoted as, "...beautiful girls who are shyly brave, and you sell yourself as a fantasy," rather than the real lyric that actually fits the rhyme scheme: "...you sell yourself as *a man to save*"). Beyond music-related facts, Arnold has a bad habit of misusing words (e.g. saying Phair's song, Glory, "recoups" the Stones attempt to find authenticity by covering Slim Harpo). As for the actual analysis included in the book, exploring the notion of "Guyville" and whether it still exists in 21st century indie rock was an interesting idea, but I just don't buy much of anything Arnold is selling -- for instance, the notion that being in a band has lost cachet and earning power as more women have entered the field, like other previously male-dominated professions (indie rock is the new book-keeping?). And the point where the writer actually attempts the song-by-song comparison of the two Exiles reads like a bad Comp 101 assignment where our intrepid undergrad didn't have time to make it to the library, and so hit up her record collection for comparative essay fodder on the midnight before the due date. Ugh.

[Aengus · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a reason she was known as Gina "I'm Writing as Bad asI Can" Arnold. While she makes some valid points ("Indie rock guys are sexist!!" ), most of the book reads like Greil Marcus lite., or a grad student's rhetoric paper. There are lots of quotes from obscure Marxist scholars, and references to "the Gaze" (a sure sign someone doesn't know what the fuck he or she is talking about). "Exile in Guyville" starts with a long winded story about coffee shops in Seoul, degenaerates into the aforementioned dissertation, and almost recovers in the last 30 pages of the book, when she finally analyzes the record. As an extra bonus, Ms . Arnold misuses the word "literally" twice. Literally. Vies with John Darnielle's "Master of Reality" as the worst book in the 33 1/3 series.

[Ken · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is not a book about Liz Phair or Exile in Guyville.

[Ross Maclean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gina Arnold’s central thesis is totally sound: explore the album by exploring what “Guyville” was and what it represented. It’s clearly an album which is going to benefit from an analysis that encompasses gender, and Arnold definitely delivers there. But spread unevenly over 116 pages, it devotes overall far-too-much to the scene and nowhere near enough to Liz Phair or the album. When it does reach its analysis of the album in the final third of the book it’s almost entirely through the prism of the album’s relationship to The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St., which probably warrants a far more cursory mention. There were certainly enough spiky points to consider—and I’m generally a fan of writers injecting some personality and their circumstances into their work—but the balance of personal reflection versus focus on the work struck me as way off here, considering the length of the tome. It’s let down by occasionally glaringly bad copy editing, factual errors and pretty consistent repetition of the same (or very similar) points, none of which particularly illuminate the work in question. I think there’s definitely enough to chew on but it’s too driven by marking the inescapable passage of time and stops short of giving an astonishing album the analysis it deserves.

[Elliot Chalom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclaimer: This is a review of an Advanced Readers Copy of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold.

In her volume on Liz Phair’s controversial 1993 debut album Exile in Guyville, Gina Arnold takes the 33-1/3 series in a direction I haven’t seen before. She is a super-fan for sure, but her analysis of the album comes from a place of intellectual curiosity, rather than mere music appreciation. It is an academic piece about a record that didn’t sell very well but whose cultural impact was significant. In taking on that daunting task I think that Arnold did a fantastic job.

First, it’s important to say what Exile in Guyville (the book) isn’t about. Though Arnold defends Phair’s musicianship, she doesn’t make the argument that this is the greatest piece of music of the ‘90s or anything like that. Though she acknowledges the changing of the way that strong female musicians are currently received, she doesn’t go out of her way to lionize Phair as a trailblazer, someone in whose footsteps today’s female acts followed. Nor does she take us through the nuts and bolts of Guyville, deconstructing each song line by line, chord by chord, as many of the 33-1/3 books (pleasantly) do. Other than brief comparisons of each song on Guyville to its companion song on the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St., the songs themselves are mainly ignored. Arnold discusses the record in great detail without ever really getting into the music.

And this actually makes a lot of sense. As the oft-repeated quote goes, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Or, as Arnold says very early in the book, setting up the reader for what’s to come: “I recall a sage warning my [former] editor gave to me. ‘People like to do drugs, not read about doing drugs. … And the same thing goes for music.’” “So,” she shortly thereafter adds, “herein I take up my pen in a different spirit altogether. Rather than address the brilliance of a particular song or chord sequence, rather than argue for the genius of singer and songwriter Liz Phair, I want to address the milieu that her work came from – the titular Guyville, the people who lived there, their values, their hopes … and the culture of the twentieth century. I want to consider all the ways that the past was a different country, and the way that, back in that strange nation, we record buyers and music lovers were shaped and changed by a particular moment in history, a moment that the double album Exile in Guyville responded to so eloquently.”

This is what Gina Arnold’s Exile in Guyville is all about. It’s obvious that the impact of teh record wasn’t really a musical one; by that token, anyone (including Arnold herself) would agree that Exile on Main St., not to mention countless other albums, dwarf Guyville. No, the impact was a cultural one, one that did for women in indie rock what an album like Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet did for race relations in New York City in the early 1990s. Neither Guyville nor Fear of a Black Planet is the defining last word in the conversation – instead each brought the conversation that was brewing underneath to a head. These were statement records. But to be a statement you can’t just say something controversial – you also have to be a damn good record. Arnold makes this point eloquently, then lets it stand on its own merit. You either believe her that Guyville is a great record worth discussing or you don’t.

The thing about writing an academic piece is that it’s a much tougher task than writing a piece of music criticism. It’s easy to say why you love [insert your favorite album here]. I happen to think that the many of the authors of the 33-1/3 books do a particularly good job of it, but at the end of the day these are mostly opinion pieces, where it’s hard to be too far off. Not so when taking the approach that Arnold did with her book. Writing at length about two themes – “third-wave feminism” and the changing nature of indie music over the past twenty years - requires laborious research, cogent arguments, and logical grounding from start to finish. Doing so in the context of one record makes the task even more difficult. I can say, having reviewed many scholarly articles in my time, that Arnold passes the test with flying colors. The book is well cited, filled (but not overwrought) with pertinent facts, and her points are structured in a way that just make sense. In a word, the book is smart.

Before I read Exile in Guyville I really liked this record. I had a sense for the importance of it – no indie fan who was around in the ‘90s couldn’t – but I couldn’t have put all of the pieces together the way Arnold did. I’m not sure that it achieved the goal that the best of these books do for me – that is, make me like the album more – but it does something more important than that. Arnold contends that “this record rivals its forebear Exile on Main St. in the beauty of its sonics and the perfect articulation of its artistic vision.” She then proves this convincingly in her book. Guyville (the book) had me thinking critically about Exile in Guyville as a piece of art. As a thinking man’s music fan, with a special place in my heart for the alternative ‘90s, I couldn’t ask for more.

Read my (even more detailed) review and others at http://www.2bitmonkey.com

[Geoff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted this to be a good book.

I know the 33 1/3 books are all very idiosyncratic examinations of albums, but I listened to at least one song off of Exile in Guyville every day my senior year of high school. This album mattered and still matters to me. And the book didn't do it justice.

While the discussion of the "Guyville" Wicker Park Chicago music scene was interesting, and I liked the attempt to place Liz Phair and her subsequent career in context, the bulk of the book's compare and contrast analysis between Exile in Guyville and the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street was simplistic when it wasn't a huge stretch. A big let down.

[Christopher · Rating 1 out of 5]

So it is saved for posterity: on page 38 of my ARC, after continuous noodling (to call any of the discursive, jumbled and oft-nonsensical word salad in this book "riffing" is a grave insult, doubly so in a book and series about rock music) on the theme of Phair's threatening the nu-boys club of early nineties indie rock, Arnold makes one of the all-time worst analogies I have ever read:

"In short, Phair was the indie rock equivalent of Frantz Fanon, exposing the state of a colonized people living under the subjugation of an outdated and tendentious ideology. By making her record a cheeky mockery of the Rolling Stones' worshiped LP, she managed to dismantle the master's house by using the master's tools."

I have to hand it to her; if I wanted to insult Frantz Fanon, Algerians, colonized populations, radical feminists, anyone who ever had to deal with being slighted or harassed for being a woman who dared to pick up a guitar, anyone who has ever been expected to be attractive window dressing/jism-jars for the men in the indie-rock scene, and finally, Liz Phair herself, then I can think of nothing better than these two sentences. If only it insulted the Rolling Stones as harshly as she thought it would. (The Rolling Stones who, of late, have grossed $120 million on their current world tour fifty years after their founding. You know: dismantled.)

I'd like to make extremely clear to what I'm objecting. It is not the the notion that the indie-rock world was male-dominated and hostile to women who wanted to use the subject of their femininity in song. It was. It is not the notion that women, even in the wealthiest country in the world, even those in such a bourgeois thing as indie rock, are subjects of oppression. They are. It is not the notion, which Arnold fails to adequately convey despite ample evidence, that Phair was able to make clever, trenchant, and even deconstructionist commentary about said boys' club and living as a targeted minority despite making 51% of the population. (This album rules, and was a serious and dare-I-say IMPORTANT high school favorite of mine, which explains why this misfire has me reaching for my dusty rock-critic soap box.)

I object, obviously, to the moral equivalency of the Steve Albini/Touch-and-Go scene and fucking Western colonialism, which, for one thing, has a large body count. Something else that strikes me, though, is Arnold's contention, 20+ years after Nevermind, that "we won." That the master's house was at all dented, much less destroyed. Whether this is about the male-centric indie scene or major label omniscience, this is plainly false. Examples of Arnold's misjudgment abound; freshest in my mind is when, toward the end of the book, she posits that Lana Del Rey's commercial success is a triumph of art over misplaced critical backlash - this after the catastrophe of her SNL debut, of which she enthuses that "[LDR was] clad in a skintight white gown that would make ninety-nine percent of the female population of the planet look chubby (Christopher's note: cool insight.}" That LDR had the entire Interscope machine behind her goes unmentioned, probably because it clashes with this notion, like The Oatmeal with a Ph.D, that the dinosaur bleeding out has lead to more opportunities for smaller bands, rather than an unholy consolidation of power in the major labels and savvy tech-companies leading to more artists fighting for smaller pieces of a dwindling pie. She argues, with a straight face, "in the 20th century, what was popular was decided by a handful of humans [...] going about seeing that the music was marketed and distributed." As opposed to now.

Fuck, this book pisses me off. Listen, I have a Spotify account. It's a service I pay for and enjoy. I also pay for and enjoy the $1 cookies at the Wal-Greens down the street, but I'm not fucking suggesting we're ten seconds away from solving world hunger.

This baffling critical theory is balanced by many easily-checked factual errors. I'm still not entirely convinced these were thrown in as evidence of her carelessness or done to fuck with me, white dude who knows too much about music ("actually, there's no 'The,' it's just 'Urge Overkill,'") but one instance amused me no end. Page 86:

"If (she) had been really scrupulous about her project's supposed use of Exile on Main St, then it would have had (two) faithful cover(s), preferably of something fairly contemporary, African American and 'authentic;' (Christopher's note: I understand this is mocking the Stones for their self-conscious authentic cache, rather than suggesting it as a good idea. Don't worry, the whopper is coming) maybe something by NWA or the Wu-Tang Clan; maybe something from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, or Mary J. Blige's 'No More Drama.'"

Exile in Guyville would surely have had a much bigger impact if it contained any of those, besides NWA. Enter the 36 Chambers was still five months away from release; Lauryn Hill's album was six years away from conception and completion, before which she would have to release two albums with The motherfucking Fugees; most impressively, "No More Drama" was a whole other millennium away in 2001. If Phair's record had contained these songs, we would have exploited her time-travelling abilities to stop World War II and build plutonium icons of her in our hover-booties. It would be a fucking achievement a year after the Girlysound tapes (a subject not addressed at any length in this volume).

Man alive. You know, stream-of-conscience writing is actually very easy; it's turning those thoughts into a book you want to read that's the hard part. Arnold is too credulous to declare that "Guyville," the mental geography that was Phair's shorthand for the tackier side of the Daydream Nation of the early nineties, is dead. But as her memories make clear (as nothing else is in this volume), she is less referring to Wicker Park/Chicago c.1993, but her own youth. The books's final sentences would have us believe that she's bidding adieu to that part of her life and psyche. But wishing for something, no matter how fervently, is not enough to make it true, from shaking your past (or recapturing it) to Lana Del Rey's sales being evidence that the machine is dying. I'm a fan of the series and was thrilled to receive this and other titles to review for my job at a book shop, but I can't, in good conscience, recommend this title at all, and I don't look forward to talking to my rep about it.

[Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Other reviewers do a much better job outlining the issues with this piece of writing, so I'll just pettily add the things that pissed me off without worrying too much about making it sound smart:

*For someone who so heavily virtue signals her own coolness (which is, ha, very debatable), it is desperately ~uncool~ the way Gina Arnold waxes romantically about Starbucks in the 90s and the Starbucks in Seoul where she wrote the first section of this book in 2011

*The copy editing is absolutely atrocious. Misspellings, grammatical errors, and even wrong lyrics. Terrible.

*The book is supposed to be about Exile in Guyville. Yes, Liz Phair has intrinsically tied her album to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street by calling it a song-by-song response. While that deserves a mention and some exploration, I really did not enjoy the way Gina Arnold's self-professed hatred of the Rolling Stones got in the way of discussing Guyville. She rips on the Stones for pages upon pages -- boring and also unfair to the Phair's album to let so much textual real estate be taken up by the Stones.

*Is Gina Arnold a feminist? I could tell she wants me to think she is. But that line about popular female pop artists of 2012 (Rihanna, Ke$ha, Katy Perry, etc) putting out "auto tuned orgasms" tells me otherwise.

*Why not quote Phair more? It's her masterpiece; she's been interviewed about it many times.

[J.J. Lair · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wondered if the author listened to the album while reading the beginning of the book. It seemed like she had these essays on music and how musicians images are made. Then she retro-fitted the album into her thesis. She sprinkles in how the album was not favorably reviewed. It actually made me dislike the album. By around 50% of the book, the tone changes. She examines the album song by song to it’s often compared partner “Exile on Main Street” by the Rolling Stones. The review is very well done. The book closes with an examination on how modern woman are presented and how we look for tastemakers in music. The last half of the book makes the purchase worthwhile.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found myself wishing this was more directly about the album itself, and Liz Phair herself, instead of what it is. What it is though is a very thorough description of the critical response, the relationship to the Stones album, and the scene in Guyville (turns out that's a district in Chicago) then and now. And it's all excellent as that. Some of the reports of the death of vinyl are premature and really date the book, but I can't say it didn't look like that then, or maybe a few years earlier than publication when this was probably written. I like the Stones (and Exile on Main Street) more than the author does too, even though I'm not qualified (or maybe even willing) to argue against her points there.

Great background on a storied album, and a great book about music criticism and business in this century and the decade just before. Definitely not the last word though. (nor is it trying to be, to be fair.)

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first time reading a book from this series. I think it does embody the quote that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but I really enjoy both. The writing veers off into some interesting intellectual tangents at points, but when it's focused on the analysis of the album, its parallels with The Rolling Stone's Exile on Main Street, and what it meant and means to the women who love it and have spent time in Guyville, it's spot on.

[J M-B · Rating 3 out of 5]

The weakest part of this book is the track by track comparison of Exile in Guyville with Exile on Main Street - and I say that while also confessing to have never (knowingly) listened to Exile on Main Street; the arguments are simply too forced to be either convincing or, i'm afraid, interesting. Whatever the relationship between Liz Phair's brilliantly developed project and the Rolling Stones album it is clearly not a commentary on each track and to treat it as such is to attribute to Liz Phair a cleverness she is far too clever to have bothered with. It is easy to see why the track by track comparison might be tempting but - once written - it should have been cut as a failed experiment. That said, I found Gina Arnold's device of locating her writing of the book in the Gangnam neighbourhood Starbucks to be a very effective reminder that the 90s was pre-internet and pre-a-lot-of-the-things-it-is-easy-to-forget-about-the-music-industry-post-internet. Principally, that means downloading and the way that has altered the income streams that flow from recorded music versus live performances. It is in this conjuncture that she has much of interest to say in contrasting the Stones (apparently very popular for their live performances, if you go for that sort of thing) and Liz Phair's outsider subversion of rock bombast. It is a great reminder of how cheeky and how powerful was Liz Phair's intervention.

[Marian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bad. So, so, so bad. I have a handful of pages left, which I will probably read but, Oh. Badly written, badly edited, badly copyedited, and badly proofed (if at all). Every now and then there's a glimmer of an interesting idea but. Holy shit. This reads often like a clunky grad school paper--and then, in the final long chapter, it shifts to sounding like a mediocre ungrad paper. (The fourth song on Exile on Main Street is "X" and it's about "Y," featuring "Z." By contrast, the fourth song on "Guyville" is "A" and it takes a woman's perspective on "X". Blah blah blah blah.)

Overall, it's an unappetizing mashup of gee-I-just-discovered Marxist theory and cultural studies! and . . . I just can't go on. It sucks. Even for rabid fans of the album in question (such as me) . . . it's not really worth it.

I feel like my mother did after seeing the Broadway juggernaut "Cats." "It makes me embarrassed for cats," she said. Poor Liz Phair.

This is the first 33 1/3 book I've read, though I have two others I've not gotten to yet. One is by a friend, so I'm sure It's not rubbish. But this book makes me leery of the series as a whole. And embarrassed for cats.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

To set this up much like the author does, this was one of those albums that was with me in college, dubbed for me by a friend onto cassette. It is one that I listened to hundreds of times during a few year in college / mid 90's. I was interested in seeing what kind of place Exile in Guyville had earned itself over the decades and take a nostalgic trip down memory lane.

What I got was a ton of context for the album, much of which I found very interesting looking back from higher ground. Some of it I understood at the time, some of it makes more sense looking back with more life experience and a wider interest in the machinations of culture. Some of the book takes on an academic intensity which was a bit much for me, but others may enjoy.

When the book finally got to the actual content of the album, it fell a little flat. I was hoping for a bit more insight on some of the songs, but maybe its better this way. My original impressions are left largely undisturbed. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who encountered this album in the 90's or who has interest in the music industry at that time.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can get where negative reviews are coming from - most saying the album itself isn't front and center but I tend to disagree. Arnold makes a clear case for how her contextualization of the record is key to understanding it. She sees it as of it's time and setting and she makes a strong argument.

She also sets aside a chapter giving context to the rhyming of Guyville to it's implied and evoked mirror 'Exile on Main Street' and that chapter was, more than anything, what I was wanting and looking for.

That said, that she invokes Althusser, abbrasive Steve Albini quotes and interesting sociological research about music consumption helps to make her points clearer, as well.

In a real way, this book is more about the album than many in the series, which might read more like a travelogue of the recording sessions. It tries to get it's finger on what the record means. If it is dancing about architecture, as the old saw goes about music journalism, then it's if nothing else rhythmic and compelling.

[John Marr · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a long standing hater of Gina Arnold's drivellings, I was fully prepared to give this one zero stars. But surprise, surprise, grad school has been good to Ms. Arnold. While it has resulted in her lacing this tome with plenty of heavy duty theoretical critiques that I am not qualified to judge, it has also reduced (but sadly, not eliminated) her self adsorption and even given her enough insight to realize that much of her earlier writing was in fact junk. Not just baby steps!

The results: a pretty readable book. As a non-resident of Guyville who has never owned "Exile On Main Street" or "...From Guyville" I'll also take a mulligan on bitching about the music stuff. Her stuff on the zine scene was pretty good, and while I disagree with many of her takes on gender and sexism in the "scene," overall this one fails as a hate read.

[Jodi · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is impossible for me to overstate the importance of Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville” to me. The music on that album is as much a part of me as my rib cage or my memories of junior high. It is a piece of art I have used to be build the very foundation of who I think I am. When people don’t like or don’t understand or just never heard of “Exile in Guyville” what I actually hear form them is “I don’t like your elbow.” Or “I’ve never heard of your pancreas.” I’ve heard something that sounds to my ears like “Your collarbones are overrated” more times than I can count. read more

[CS · Rating 2 out of 5]

This read like a senior thesis on feminism. I wish the author had spent more time on Liz Phair and the album instead of self-indulging in her long-winded musings on feminism and pop culture.

[Colton · Rating 2 out of 5]

You know, despite the horrendous editing mishaps and other embarrassing technical or factual errors, I was gonna say I liked this book up until the part where she randomly just started talking shit about the Rolling Stones (which she just ended up backpedaling on in the chapter's last paragraph anyway).

I know nobody cares, but let me list off a few rebuttals to her gripes for my own sanity.
1) Disparaging the Rolling Stones' music for their lyrical content is missing the point — the Stones are a garage rock band and Liz Phair is a singer/songwriter. Obviously there is gonna be different standards for different styles. The Stones made their music to have cathartic spontaneous fun and Phair wrote meditative ballads. Just because one is more introspective than the other doesn't immediately make it better, it just means it was made for a different purpose.
2) The argument that Exile On Main Street was about Rock music while Exile On Guyville was about "life" is not only pretentious, but also reductive as to what Rock music means to people like the Stones. As I saw in how she described the Stones' music, she sees no reality in living as a common man yearning for the simple pleasures of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. She says the content is stale, and yes, maybe that content isn't what everyone likes in music, but what immortalized the Stones' impact on modern culture is their embodiment of that mindset; and I would think that a long-time music journalist like Arnold would see how legitimate that culture is regardless of her personal taste. For many working men, "sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll" is the dream, and whatever they can get of that lifestyle is the glory of their life, and fans who understand the Stones know that it doesn't matter how degenerate those yearnings sound to well-adjusted people: sometimes it just feels good to admit that simple pleasures like that are all we want, and the Stones celebrate that while Liz Phair celebrates something else. Neither are wrong for voicing their side of things. They just have different perspectives with different intents on their expression.
3) Calling the Rolling Stones "the epitome of corporate Rock" is extremely problematic considering that the band Weezer exists.

But anyway, there's a lot I liked about Arnold's work here that I want to mention alongside my butthurt rebuttals.
I love how in-depth she tackles the disparity of women in popular music, sort of like a miniature gender study exclusively on Rock consumer culture. A lot of reviews on here seem annoyed by her elaboration on this, but for me, it highlighted how special and brave Liz Phair really was. I was also intrigued by how hated Phair was in the Chicago scene — after reading Steve Albini's words on the record, I doubt that I'll ever respect him as much as I did before. I also want to say (as a fan of some underground music myself) that I was pleasantly surprised to see such names as Mercury Rev, Royal Trux, and the Cows mentioned throughout the book.

I wish there was a way to rate this 2.5 stars instead of 2 or 3, because there's stuff I liked reading in this, but there's also stuff that bugged me. Oh well. I'd suggest to those who are curious to pick it up and see for themselves. The beginning where she goes a little too in-detail about this coffee shop in which she's writing does make the book start off slow, but it gets better once she gets to the heart of things. Then she shits on the Rolling Stones, then she abruptly cuts back to the coffee shop, and BAM! it's over. Could it have been a better book? Yes, but it's definitely still better than some of the other 33 1/3s.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE MILIEU

Do you wanna play rock and roll?

"We can see the decrepit basement, the damp on the walls. The summer heat is palpable in the shots of shirtless and barefoot musicians as they collaborate, guitars in hand, sitting at a piano, lying down on the floor with headphones on, listening to other musicians record parts right in front of them. We are with them sitting at the dining room table littered with the remnants of a meal, ashtrays full, Campari and wine bottles empty, strumming cover songs with guests like Gram Parsons and John Lennon. We see dogs, rabbits, kids, records, motorcycles, boats, chandeliers and guitars, lots of guitars."
- Bill Janovitz, Exile on Main Street

"I am completely overcome with nostalgia for those days, whether in San Francisco or Chicago - for walking down Valencia Street on a hot summer night, or heading for the El for a late-night cab ride through the snow, half-drunk, with my ears ringing, for getting all dresssed up with my girlfriends to go to a gig, for the sense we had, always, of owning this town."
- Gina Arnold, Exile in Guyville

I'm only now realizing how much privilege I have enjoyed as a white man, but I've never once felt like I owned any town or even belonged to any scene. I certainly purchased a lot of records and I can be as pedantic as the next know-it-all, but I was never a Guyville* guy. I didn't have the self-assurance. I've thought a lot about rock and roll cool for my whole life, but I've never had a shred of it. For a couple of years now, I've been obsessed with music, mostly rock, like I haven't been since I was a teenager. I'm trying to learn to play a little, which I was too lazy to do then, but it's also something of a retreat into fantasy space from a world that I daily find more terrifying. This fixated meditation on my musical heroes, mostly entitled white men with plenty of troubling views and behavior, has forced me to weigh a very real and very teen-aged allegiance to "cool" and all that represents against my countervailing wish to be a bit more of a kind, responsible adult. What do I do with the Rolling Stones, who defined so much of rock and roll cool, but who have been very bad men in some significant ways, men whom, as Gina Arnold says, "no one in their right mind would want to worship, because it would be like rooting for Caligula."

When I was in high school, I owned LPs of the Rolling Stones hits collections Hot Rocks and Made in the Shade and I was an enthusiastic if casual fan until I saw them play the San Diego Stadium on their Tattoo You tour, which show was bloated and awful and kinda made me lose interest in the band for a long, long time, even though I would've told you that I was still on board. As a result, I never really spent time with Exile on Main Street - neither the record nor the widely cherished fantasy of its making - until this year. Both Janovitz and Arnold write a great deal about what she calls the "milieu" of this record, which is, for me, the biggest part of its appeal. Sticky Fingers is a much better record, but it lacks the mystique . I'm not alone. People love to dream about this mythical recording session. There is, to give a particularly absurd example, a fragrance branded "Nellcote," "dedicated to the memory of a significant summer of debauchery and decadence." Janowitz says that the Dominique Tarle photos of that summer determined his choice of career, rather in the manner of the Beatles' Ed Sullivan appearance for musicians of an earlier generation.

I've been super judgy about recent dealbreakers by some of my heroes, but other heroes, it would appear, can get away with anything as far as I'm concerned. Maybe there's something of a statute of limitations and I feel like I can enjoy thinking about the historical misdeeds of these old-timey reprobates in the way that I enjoy, from a safe distance, the misdeeds of historical villains like Sulla or Henry VIII. Or maybe it's the superiority of still images - for dreaming purposes - to video. I rewatched the Brian Jonestown Massacre/Dandy Warhols movie Dig recently and it reminded me that, in the real world, heroin is anything but chic, as do the whiny junkies at my public library job. Or maybe, in this particular instance, it's because a sort of moral vacuum has always been self-consciously at the center of the Rolling Stones' brand.

I can't defend my attraction, but I don't need to any more than Liz Phair needs to defend her attraction to the condescending pricks of Guyvile. Or her own keen taste for the Rolling Stones brand . Bill Janovitz, himself an indie rock guitarist identified in Arnold's book as an erstwhile denizen of Guyville, is a good writer when he has something to say, which is in the parts of his 33 1/3 volume devoted to the milieu. He is less good on what the music podcasts call "track-by-track," which may not be an actual requirement for this series, but inevitably comprises the most tiresome part of most of these books. Arnold quotes an editor who told her, "People like to do drugs, not read about doing drugs...and the same thing goes for music." Janovitz scrupulously describes the musical structure of each song and, while that's way better than non-musicians trying to describe the sensual experience of listening, it's still a lot of blah blah blah that doesn't really tell me how the music sounds. As Arnold goes on to say, no one is good at that sort of writing because it's kinda impossible.

I've been a Liz Phair fan since the 90s, and while I hold the minority opinion that Whitechocolatespaceegg is her masterpiece, I've listened to Exile in Guyville a lot. I've been a Gina Arnold fan even longer. She wrote a column for the East Bay free weekly when I lived in Berkeley after college and my friend Casey and I were such enthusiasts for her writing that he got me a mailed subscription to the paper when I moved to Virginia for a spell. I didn't share Arnold's taste at all- e.g. she was a rabid Replacements fan at that time and I don't enjoy that band even now, but I delighted in her prose. I still do. Exile in Guyville is an actual really good book and not just "pretty good for a 33 1/3 title." A lot of it is a meditation on Arnold's own erstwhile, rockin' milieu, the "indie" rock scene in the 90s, and how utterly things in the music industry have changed since she transformed from a scenester to a college professor. I read Chuck Klosterman's book about the 90s last year, so I'd already been thinking about the cultural transformation a lot. Before the Internet, we were all utterly dependent on hipper-than-thou tastemakers like, oh, I don't know, Gina Arnold of the East Bay Express, people about whom, as she says of the Guyville guys, "it will turn out, eventually, that they know more about something than you do." I get the feeling though, that those dudes weren't half as charming.

*Until I read this book, I had no idea that "Guyville" describes an actual neighborhood in Chicago and not just patriarchy in hipster form.

[Ryan Fohl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contains a track by track comparison with Exile on Main Street, which is what I was looking for. Also contains a personal and historical look at the early nineties indie rock scene. Including an exploration of music criticism and how it became pointless after technological changes in the music industry.

I never realized how much my conception of music were shaped by early alternative scene, and how the scene was already over by the time I came of age. I was hugely influenced by this album. An album that I was exposed to almost by accident, and at the perfect time. Besides one snide comment by an older friend from Chicago, I had no idea how controversial this album was. This book explores all that controversy and has helped me to see the line that separates me from generation X. I learned more about myself and the world than I expected. Plus I have new levels of appreciation for these great songs.

What I learned: “Guyville” was an actual neighborhood in Chicago. Can any mass produced art really be “authentic?” And why do we care that the artist is “authentic?” Cultural snobbery can be a way of defending one’s social capital.
“All criticism is a form of autobiography” - Oscar Wilde
Nietzsche’s division of historians into: monumental, antiquarian, and critical. He said “every past is worth condemning.”
So in that vein, allow me to say, The Rolling Stones are gross, bad people who probably smelled awful.
Rock has become a less male dominated field partially because the money left.

Scopophiliac is a fancy way to say “I like to watch...”

Paracosm: a detailed imaginary world.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

By the time the 33 1/3 series got to Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair’s debut had already been canonised to death: greatest-albums lists, anniversary think pieces, oral histories, all of that stuff. The risk for Gina Arnold was obvious – either add one more hyper-reverential footnote, or try to say something bigger and risk losing the record itself in the process. What’s impressive is that she does indeed go for the bigger canvas but she also manages to keep the album firmly at the centre. This isn’t a book about Liz Phair as an excuse to talk theory; it’s a book where theory keeps circling back to a very specific, very stubborn 18-song double LP from 1993. When it came out, much was made of Phair saying it was a sone-by-song riposte to the Stones' album, something later viewed as pure marketing. Arnold takes Phair at her word and actually spins put a song-by-song comparison, with some very interesting - if sometimes tenuous - points of comparison. Some of the best writing comes when she takes flight on these juxtapositions.

Arnold is not just a fan; she’s a former rock critic who is now a visiting professor, which means she has one foot in the live-review trenches and one in the seminar room. The result is one of the series’ most “professional” volumes in the best sense: structurally thought-through, historically grounded, and written with a critic’s nose for where the real argument is.

The argument, very broadly, is that Exile in Guyville wasn’t just a strong indie record that happened to be made by a woman; it was an intervention in a culture that liked to imagine itself egalitarian while being actually hamstringing and handcuffing the women inside it. Arnold uses Phair’s album as a prism through which to examine the indie-rock ecosystem of late-80s/early-90s Chicago – Wicker Park, labels like Matador, fanzines and club politics – and shows how much of that supposedly “alternative” world was still structured around male taste, male gatekeeping and male ideas of cool.

One of the book’s smartest moves is to take the “Exile” part of the title seriously. Rather than treating the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. as a marketing hook, she sets Phair’s record against it, largely on the level of lyrics. There is a view that she comes down too hard on the Stones – and she certainly does give you a visceral view of the moment she made a 180 degree turn on that band – but the point of the exercise isn’t to declare a winner between the albums. It’s to show how radically different it is when a woman turns the same themes (sex, boredom, self-mythology, bad behaviour) back on the scene that usually narrates them.

Arnold is very good at capturing the shock provoked by that turning of the mirror. She stresses how Exile in Guyville arrived as both a critics’ darling and a kind of heresy: voted one of the year’s top records by Spin and in the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop poll, yet also denounced in some quarters as mere mockery and an affront to indie authenticity. The backlash in Chicago – the “flame war” that painted Phair as boring, inauthentic, a poor musician – becomes one of the book’s recurring motifs, a case study in how ferociously whole scenes can police those women who step out of line.

Where a weaker critic might simply cheer Phair on from the sidelines, Arnold patiently builds the case for why Exile mattered. She traces how the album spoke “for all the girls who loved the world of indie rock but felt deeply unwelcome there”, not by issuing riot-grrrl manifestos but by singing, in a dry, unpretty voice, about roommates, bad sex, housework and the queasy politics of being the only woman in the room. Dwight Garner’s description in the New York Times of her focus on Phair’s “grainy details, quotidian observations” could double as a description of Arnold’s own method.

Crucially, the feminism here isn’t an add-on. It’s the organising principle. A large section of the book zooms out from Phair to offer a feminist critique of 80s and 90s indie culture more generally – the club dynamics, the record-store hierarchies, the way “good taste” is defined and policed – but Arnold keeps tethering these points back to specific moments on the album: a line in “Fuck and Run”, a power shift in “Divorce Song”, the unnerving stillness of “Canary”. One reviewer joked that this middle third “made me shoot rainbows from my eyes” because, finally, here was a woman writing explicitly about how hard it is to love rock & roll when the whole apparatus is calibrated against you.

It helps that Arnold isn’t shy about stating what Exile in Guyville unlocked. She positions Phair, memorably, as the “patron saint of f**k you” – an artist who both undermined the male ego and helped unleash a new female one. From this vantage point, the line from Guyville to later artists – Sleater-Kinney, Lana Del Rey, and further out – looks less like influence and more like a set of doors blown off their hinges. A real before-and-after, in ways that Patti Smith, for example, had not really managed in her moment, for all the lionising of Horses and Easter.

All of this could easily have swamped the record itself, but Arnold takes care to keep returning to the songs. There are sharp little readings of individual tracks, and she doesn’t ignore the album’s contradictions: how the lo-fi sound complicates notions of polish and “seriousness”; how Phair’s persona veers between swagger and real vulnerability; how some lyrics undercut their own bravado almost immediately. The book never quite turns into a straightforward track-by-track, but you do come away hearing “6’1"” or “Stratford-On-Guy” with a slightly altered pair of ears.

If there’s a through-line in the outside reviews that praised the book it’s that Arnold manages to hijack the album in order to talk about the death of a particular indie sensibility and the evolution of third-wave feminism, without losing sight of Phair’s own achievement. That’s exactly how the book feels: generous to the record, unsparing to the culture around it, and clear-eyed about how both have aged.

As a piece of writing, it’s brisk, argumentative and sometimes pretty damn angry – but there’s also a kind of battered affection running through it, for Phair, for the scene that both nurtured and punished her, and for all the women who heard Exile in Guyville and suddenly realised why they’d felt out of place in their own record collections. If you went in wanting a solid close reading of a classic album and got, instead, a broader feminist excavation of indie rock’s “Guyville” mentality that still honours how good the songs are… well, that’s not such a bad bait-and-switch at all.

[big book McBride · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed learning some stuff about Liz Phair and the indie rock scene at the time. In fact, I had no idea the album was a response to a Rolling Stone’s Album. The best part of the book was the second half, where the author goes through each song from each album and compares them, thought maybe she could have spent more time on just the Guyville tracks since that’s what the book’s supposed to be about? The first half felt kind of just boring and unfocused and I even found some typos.

I think I experience writing about gender differently than it’s intended here, probably because it wasn’t intended for me at all. The writing is so binary it’s crazy. I love the album because yes I do love women and I probably connect with Liz Phair’s gender troubles but the way its written about here made me feel there was no place for me. I feel like there must be a way to write about gender and gendered taste/behavior/whatever while also being mindful that gender is a construct and you are probably over-generalizing. Odds are the writer doesn’t care though and would think I am a snowflake so fuck me I guess. It was an okay book.

[V · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting read, even when it was one that I disagreed with. Firstly, I should say this is mostly not about Exile in Guyville so much as the era in which it was created and the many changes in the recording industry that would occur almost immediately after its release, purely by coincidence; the author says as much in the introduction. And the author's greatest insights are about that era and that shift in the structure and economy of the music industry. The book contextualizes indie rock as a phenomenon well.

Having said all that, the author's supposed insights about gender and power are reductive, seemingly too dated to have been published less than ten years ago, and honestly pretty cringe-inducing. The texts she cites and the conclusions she draws about gender are entirely wrapped up in the idea of gendered difference (also frequently equated with sexual difference), and based on assumptions of whiteness and heteronormativity. This is justified by calling the work a "single subject study" even as the author attempts to draw much broader conclusions about gender in music in general, including establishing the primacy of a "gendered listening" experience as a framework for musical analysis.

Additionally, the third chapter, a song-by-song reading of Exile in Guyville against The Rolling Stones' album it responds to, often fails to account for the nuance of Phair's Girlysound tapes (from which Exile in Guyville is essentially a selected works), barely mentioning these songs' provenance. The musical analysis is often shallowly textual, lacking engagement with sonic qualities. Ultimately, what this third chapter does well is offer a close reading of the lyrics on Guyville vs. Main Street that is interesting, but often only tangentially relevant to the ideas she has about the music industry.

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fantastic read.

So well written, both well researched and fully emotionally invested. It really made me wonder how different my Liz Phair fandom might have been had I lived in Chicago when this album was released—when Chicago turned on Phair. (Suffice it to say, I LOVE Phair’s music and always have. At the time I was in NYC, had just finished my first Master’s. I saw Phair live at Roseland once—it was a dream of an evening, and she even performed Flower live which is a real rarity! She was a much more polished and comfortable stage performer at that point than when Guyville came out!) Reading this while listening to the album is an experience I 100% recommend. Purchased at the lovely Exile in Bookville in Chicago on Independent Bookstore Day.