Pitchfork Reviews 6/23/08

Liz Phair
Exile in Guyville (15th Anniversary)
[Liz Phair; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 9.6.

First of all, the above-linked review is one of the best and most heartfelt pieces I've ever read on Pitchfork, and I recommend reading through it.

Now if you'll permit me a little self-indulgent nostalgia of my own: I never got into this record. In fact, I always kind of hated it. More than anything else it seemed like the soundtrack to my near-complete inability to get laid (I could make out with the best of them, but often got picked off trying to stretch a triple) in high school. I was a 13 year-old 9th grader when Exile in Guyville came out, one of the youngest boys in a grade where the girls are light years beyond the boys in the maturity department.

I was full-on ensconced in the stomach-churning self-conscious teen angst (the fitting popular term) of bands like Nirvana, which was perfect for where my hormone-stuffed pipsqueak of a head was at. The girls I thought of as being on my wavelength and hence most wanted to make it with were onto stuff like The Lemonheads and Juliana Hatfield and Liz Phair. Liz Phair especially seemed unfair to me. Here are all these girls who won't give me the time of day because I don't have hair one on my little scrote, and I'm feeling weak and vulnerable but, you know, available, loving even: tender, and they're listening to this incredible over-it grown up tough girl who's singing about being a blow job queen, and in the same breath these 9th grade girls are complaining to ME about how some fucking douchebag junior won't even give THEM the time of day. UNPHAIR.

Of course I was being self-centered and idiotic like all teenagers, but at the time I really thought "What the fuck are these girls complaining about? What do they need to be tough for? They have it made. They could snap their fingers and I'd run through a plate glass window just for a kiss on the cheek, don't they get it? Fuck 'blow job queen,' I'll settle for just holding hands. I mean, what the fuck is going on?"

But being a girl in the 9th grade is no picnic either. I just didn't get it. And I didn't really want to. It took a couple of turns around the fucking girls over carousel when I was the douchebag junior until I started to get hip. That's the high school circle of life. Cruelty begets cruelty.

Listening to this now, it's giving me flashbacks, and it's showing me why I was crushing the hardest on the girls that were into this. It's a pretty amazing record to have float by when you're going through the 9th grade in 1993-94. Nobody was talking about this stuff. The girls I wasn't as into were pumping out Tori Amos and the Indigo Girls, which is totally flaccid compared to Exile in Guyville as far as reality-based female empowerment goes. But why pick nits, in 9th grade you should take all the empowerment you can lest you be separated to the wrong side of the self-esteem tracks. Liz Phair fans at least seemed open to the idea of fooling around, though. And they were sexy. They smoked cigarettes.

Plus Liz Phair was very non-PC at a time when political correctness was actually a social movement that people were embracing as the next way to be. If you wanted to get laid (and I mean anybody, not just high school) in the early 90's, you had to be prepared to spout an awful lot of rhetoric and be willing to listen to plenty of 4 Non Blondes while suffering through some extremely blue balls, or else you had to be a sufficiently bad enough boy to warrant the surrender of caution. There was a lot of caution in those days. Mountains of it. Liz Phair was somebody who had thrown it to the wind a few times and come out wiser in the bargain. God, I hated her for it. I was determined to follow the rhetoric and 4 Non Blondes strategy. I saw it as my only option, shrimp that I was. And here was Liz Phair, blowing that whole trip to smithereens.

I should have just joined. I essentially did, years later, but God do I ever have a heart full of hate for the 4 Non Blondes and the rest of their milquetoast feminism by rote set. I mean it's still hard to even laugh about how bad they are. I'm skipping the laughter and going straight to being upset just thinking about it. Yes really, over 4 Non Blondes. I don't know how else to put this, but they actually seemed REAL at the time, like they were 100% serious and not just a shitty band raking in money for a load of hot garbage. That's how polite everybody was being, like giving a shit about "What's Going On" was supposed to be a way of life. I should have just relaxed about the getting laid stuff and just actually listened to Liz Phair, even if I didn't like it, if only because A. it's not like I actually liked 4 Non Blondes anyway, and B. she was the real one. It would have done me wonders.

The more I think about this the more it's turning into time machine advice, heading into "if I ever have kids, I'm giving them Exile in Guyville on their 14th birthdays and telling them not to tell their mother so they'll think it's actually worth listening to" territory. It's the most honest, grown-up sex talk a kid could get: it's hard and it fucks you up, but of course it can be pretty hot too, and you're gonna have to learn about it sooner or later. No wonder those girls weren't interested in little wimpy me.

Anyway, I get reminded of all this stuff from listening to this album now. I still don't like it enough to actually want to listen to it, but I like it a lot more on a musical level than I did then, and as a statement both historical and timeless I appreciate the fuck out of it. It's just not for me, and probably never was. But it's one hell of a thing to have done anyway. Chris Dahlen is right. I admire it.


Ricardo Villalobos
Vasco EP Part 1
[Perlon; 2008]

Pitchfork gives it a 7.2.

Techno is not a valid form of music.


The Herbaliser
Same As It Never Was
[Studio !K7; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 6.5.

This sounds like the cutting edge of hip hop, 1996. Like I should be wearing Jnco Jeans, a fuzzy Kangol, and Gazelles right now.


Mike Patton
A Perfect Place OST
[Ipecac; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 5.9.

Oh man, they just decided that Exile in Guyville was enough, and then loaded the rest of this 5 pound day with 10 pounds of shit, didn't they?

Mike Patton is doing old timey and/or spooky music for a movie that I guarantee sucks, because the director was like "let's get Mike Patton, I love his work" when they were looking for somebody to do the original soundtrack. It probably has a ton of plot twists but you don't care about the characters, and it's probably loaded to the gills with style and technique without anything resembling substance, and all kinds of unnecessarily complicated edits and whiplash transitions, to the point where you can't follow the plot anymore, except instead of feeling challenged or interested, you're glad to be relieved of the burden of giving a shit, so you turn to whoever you're with and say "you wanna just go" and they're like "yes, THANK YOU" and then you have a lot of fun with the rest of your night making fun of how awful the movie was. Because that's Mike Patton's career if it was a movie. He's basically the Guy Ritchie of music.


Kidz in the Hall
The In Crowd
[Koch / Duck Down; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 5.5.

Nobody involved in this is Kanye, but they sound like they want to be, down to biting his exact cadence and "experimenting" with the same eurotrash influences in the beats. And I don't even like Kanye.