Liz Phair at the 9:30 Club, October 12, 2005

I saw Liz at the 9:30 Club last night, and it prompted a few thoughts about Liz, taste, and music critics.

First, I can unapologetically say that I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of the show, and I do not categorize Liz as a “guilty pleasure”. To me, a guilty pleasure is when I crank up Soft Cell or Modern English when I hear them on the radio. I am guilty of that, and you might as well know that about me.

Liz, on the other hand, is a serious talent, and has written serious music. That is not to say that she is always being “serious” with her music these days. She is not. She is simply doing her best to cash in on her particular shtick: to wit, her ability pose as a wholesome Midwestern suburban girl (now a mom) who happens to write and sing catchy songs, often with overt, graphically sexual themes. She says she is into the “high-low” aesthetic, although I’m not exactly sure what that means.

She began the show in a drab gray, zip-up sweatshirt that apparently came from the Target five-dollar bin. She made a few statements about how scared she is to watch ghost documentaries on TV, a fear that causes her to constantly change the channel during the scary parts. Well, I do that too and – wait a minute! – I have some tee shirts from that same bin at Target! With her acoustic guitar in hand, freshly bleached wisps of blond hair loosely draping half of her face, and an unplugged set ready to begin, her message was clear: I’m the girl/soccer mom next door and I’m going to play some nice, relaxing music.

And that persona, of course, was a pose. It was part of the joke that everyone was enjoying. You could almost hear the audience thinking, “When’s the sweatshirt coming off Liz?” The calls for “Fuck and Run” started quite early in the show – coming almost exclusively from the women in the audience - and continued until she played a rousing, heavy metal-tinged rendition of the song. She has clearly gotten over her stage fright problems that, according to legend, plagued her early career.

Once she plugged in and, predictably, shed the sweatshirt, the real Liz took over. She played the part of the sex-goddess-rock-star-next-door to the hilt. And I don’t have a problem with that. She did it with confidence, and to really piss off the critics, she was clearly enjoying every minute of it. She smiled throughout the whole show. A lot of people don’t have time and patience for the faux angst that seems to be a prerequisite for admission into the Indie/Alternative music scene. There is a time and place for everything, and it’s nice to see a performer actually be comfortable in her own skin and having a good time.

Liz Phair knows that the audience is paying to see her play music they are familiar with (Anything from Guyville, most songs from Whip Smart and WhiteChocolateSpaceEgg, and the hits from her most recent two albums), and are OK with hearing a tolerable number of new songs that maybe they have not been exposed to. That is what we wanted, and that is what we got. If, on top of that, she wants to shake her moneymaker – figuratively of course – that’s fine too. She is a very good looking woman.

Many of my good friends, who fashion themselves as music purists (and whom I thank for originally turning me on to Liz), seem to have soured on Liz Phair. I’m quite sure it is because she has gone “pop” on them and they are turned off by her album cover poses. I almost expect to hear her called her a “traitor” when I talk to them about her. In this respect, I am reminded of Pete Seeger running around backstage at Newport in 1966 with an ax in his hands, looking for cables to cut after Dylan went electric at the famous folk festival.

Dylan pissed off a lot of purists then too. I’m not necessarily saying that Liz is going to put out this decade’s “Like a Rolling Stone”. My point is simply that we should leave her alone, let her take her talent where it will, and if the best thing she will ever do is that first album, then that is better than 99 percent of the other acts out there. For that alone, she deserves our continuing respect.