CanonBall: Liz Phair, Post-Guyville

CanonBall is a feature that highlights left-field items in my individual music canon.

On today's playlist...
Whip-Smart (1994)
whitechocolatespaceegg (1998)

Maybe it's a generational thing, or maybe it's a male rock critic thing, but I've never met an actual Liz Phair fan who makes a particularly major distinction between her debut and its two follow-ups, Whip-Smart and whitechocolatespaceegg. Now that Exile in Guyville is back on everyone's radar thanks to a new 15-year-anniversary deluxe edition, I hope people will reconsider her two differently styled but nonetheless impressive pre-eponymous follow-ups.

I recently saw Whip-Smart being sold for $2.99 at at second-hand record store--$2.39 on their website--and I'd really like to think that it has more to do with the state of compact discs than it does with qualitative judgments. Coming a mere year after Exile in Guyville's release, Whip-Smart is that album's sunnier counterpart, featuring all of the wit and skill that made that album so impressive but eschewing the heavy ambitions, clocking in at a relatively brisk 41 minutes. It really is a perfect follow-up, even if the critical consensus was too caught up in analyzing what Liz Phair was supposed to represent to recognize it.
Like Guyville, there's nothing that isn't great to be had here. Of course, as with any Liz album, a good deal of the material is not entirely new at all. Opener "Chopsticks" is a filled-in Girlysound track, a one-liner-fest that has Phair giving the people what she assumed they wanted, given the ever-present focus on her sexuality. In terms of the other Girlysound material: "Whip-Smart" adds flair and animal noises, "Shane" gets rearranged with a haunting new ending, the semi-new "Jealousy" borrows some lines from "Thrax", and Phair merely cleans up "Go West"--one of her best tracks, period. However, fun as all of these are, it's the new material that reveals what an excellent direction this album was for Phair, if only she'd been encouraged to follow it.
Every new track here displays vitality, growth, and experimentation, both in songwriting and in production. "Supernova" is the lead single, a top-40 push that seems both better considered and more effortless than anything on her heavy-handed pop makeover. Closer "May Queen" might also have been a hit, an instantly catchy builder that calls out her "rock and roll Ken doll," womanizing ex as a homosexual--though not in so many words. Radio would be a less depressing world today if young women were smiling about lovers who "fuck like a volcano" over bright riffs rather than fiercely defending their decisions to kiss girls and bluntly comandeering the term "gay" for cheap name-calling over recycled studio noise.
The two-minute "X-Ray Man" revels in its effortlessness, a track that has Phair seething over a distractable boyfriend in her lower vocal registry; and "Support System" only appears effortless, an adamently lo-fi track that layers itself to heaven over an unusual structure. "Nashville" is a hugely successful leap into balladry with all the bells and whistles--although after a few listens, it turns out that the song is actually about her own image. "Cinco De Mayo" features Phair rocking her most exciting riff to date, and "Alice Springs" carries off the feat of sounding spontaneous, tight, and haunting all at the same time--and she gets major props for performing it on Good Morning America:
Individually all the tracks are great, but most importantly, it all adds up to a really fun time, a perfect album to pop on when summer rolls around. There's a reason it's still her highest seller.

Perhaps more controversial than Guyville sequel Whip-Smart is the glossed-up follow-up she waited four more years to record. Given the lengthy recording process and the many changes Phair's life underwent over that time--she got married and had a baby--it's not a huge surprise to find that the 16-track whitechocolatespaceegg features the artist in a lot of different modes.
On the one hand, we have a collection of vignettes, several of which have Phair adopting a male perspective. "Uncle Alvarez" is an exploration of empty executive existence over a simple, irresistible pop hook, and "Only Son" is a rare Phair epic, an impressive track that tackles parental expectations. Of course, Phair is more at home in female form, as she displays on "Perfect World" and "Polyester Bride", intensely female and almost uncomfortably personal songs that, yet, aren't necessarily about Phair at all. "Perfect World" sets its hook to a laundry list of qualities Phair wishes she could own to get the guy of her dreams, while "Polyester Bride" relates an exchange about love, marriage, and disillusionment between a young Ally McBeal-type and her local bartender. "Polyester Bride" is, notably, actually a Girlysound track that's only surfaced in the past few years, and what's impressive here is both how little Phair actually changes and yet how exponentially more effective the glossed-up, lead-single version she made here is. Of course, Scott Litt's gentle-but-hi-fi production seems incredibly tame in comparison to the Matrix explosion that was to follow, but it was a major shift in sound for Phair, and "Polyester Bride" is the best evidence yet in her career that a little spit and polish is, sometimes, the best way for her to shine.
whitechocolatespaceegg also offers a lot of the Liz Phair we've come to know and love, the girl with all the frank sex songs and the acidic wit. "Johnny Sunshine" is all about the joys of rough sex, "Ride" turns a bedtime prayer into an ode to being a, uh, rider, and "Headache" has Liz suffering an electro-hangover to shockingly good results--a testament to what great form she's in on this album. The only weak spots here are the co-written moments: the Scott Litt contribution "Baby Got Going" is soundtrack fodder, while "Big Tall Man" offers some good lyrics and nice harmonies but never really turns into much. However, the "dust me off" title track does make the occasional collaboration worthwhile.

Phair's best mode, naturally, is the straightforwardly personal one, and the best tracks here are the ones that tackle life's major changes--namely, marriage and motherhood. "What Makes You Happy" relates the dialogue of Phair telling her mother about her fast engagement and her mother's concerned reaction, while "Love is Nothing" puts her disillusionment with married life on the table with a bouncy, c'est la vie! pop. "Go On Ahead", especially, kills with its seeming ease. A track that forthrightly chronicles the disintegration of her marriage under the stress of having a baby and her decision for a trial separation, it's one of the most powerful songs Phair has ever recorded.

Though one might've expected Phair to come out a little rusty from four years inexperience, whitechocolatespaceegg is a triumph, an album as intensely personal and thoughtfully crafted as Exile in Guyville but for a slightly older set of problems.

Whip-Smart: 10/10
whitechocolatespaceegg: 9/10