Chapter 241: Satisfied

Recently I did a blog post listing some of my favorite things in this world, including my favorite musical artists of all-time. I have also talked a lot about the music that I have been most excited about coming out this summer, with the main topics of that conversation being Kylie Minogue, my third favorite artist of all-time, and Scissor Sisters, my second favorite “recent” artist. Now that the Kylie Minogue album is out, I was thinking that the really exciting music for the summer had finished coming. Well, I found out today that I was completely wrong about this. I was wrong in a very big way, as a matter of fact. You see, I just found out today that yesterday my second favorite artist of all-time, Liz Phair, went fucking guerilla on the music industry and, without any advance warning at all, released a full-length album of brand new material for download on her official website. For $5.99 you get a full-length new album from Liz Phair. Like I said, it was posted on her website sometime yesterday without any promotion or advance warning or anything, it just suddenly appeared there. It is very exciting because I feel like this is a very classic Liz Phair way of doing it – no hoopla, no fuss and not a word spoken beforehand. I’m not sure the full story behind how exactly it was done this way but upon listening to the album you get a very clear depiction as to WHY: Liz Phair HATES the music industry.

Before going into details about the album, let me give a little bit of a history on Liz Phair as an artist. Liz Phair is 43 years old and was born in New Haven, CT, although she was adopted by a wealthy couple and raised in the Chicago area. After a brief, post-college stint in San Francisco trying to work as an artist, Liz moved back to Chicago around 1990 and began writing and recording, from home, her original demo tape, known amongst fans as the “Girly Sound Tapes.” She quickly made a name for herself in Chicago’s underground, alternative music scene and began working with a very small, independent label called Feel Good All Over, who tried to re-record the “Girly Sound Tapes” for release. Unfortunately, Liz and one of the heads of the label had various disagreements about the work and the entire project fell apart because of it. Just to add my own little two cents about the “Girly Sounds Tapes,” I have to say that they are absolutely brilliant. They are extremely raw recordings and have a very rough sound to them but the songs written for those tapes are amazing. They have an alternative pop sound and are all completely off-the-wall, including songs with titles like “Black Market White Baby Dealer,” “Willie, The Six-Dicked Pimp,” “Fuck Or Die,” and, one of Liz’s most famous songs, “Fuck & Run.” After this, Liz got in contact with the president of Matador Records, another indie label at the time, who signed her and, in 1993, released her debut album, “Exile In Guyville.” “Exile In Guyville” very quickly became acclaimed by critics and developed a pretty huge fan base for her. For me, personally, “Exile In Guyville” is one of the greatest albums of all-time. It is filled to the brim with extremely open, honest and often times blunt lyrics. The album was extremely sexual at many points but also extremely emotional, heartfelt and introspective. More often than not, it was emotional, heartfelt, introspective and extremely sexual at the very same time, which is really something rare to find in music even still. In 1994, in attempts to capitalize on the success of “Exile In Guyville,” her second album, “Whip Smart” was released with a pretty big media blitz, hoping to open her up to a more mainstream audience. She was on the cover of Rolling Stone and the video for the first single from the album, “Supernova,” was getting airplay on MTV and such. Still, the album didn’t perform as well as expected and left Liz in an odd place, career-wise, with the pressure on for a big hit follow-up album. During the time between the release of “Whip Smart” and her third album, “Whitechocolatespaceegg,” Liz got married to a film editor and had a child. These changes in her life were definitely reflected on the third album, which had a much more polished and mature sound. “Whitechocolatespaceegg” was released in 1998 after several delays, including the album being rejected by the label because it didn’t include anything radio-friendly enough. The first single from this album, “Polyester Bride,” received a fair bit of airplay but the album didn’t wind up selling any better than the previous record had. Still, Liz managed to play the main stage at Lilith Fair and even made a movie following the release of this album. It was five years before she released another record, after signing to Capitol Records, Liz began writing and recording what would eventually become her eponymous album, “Liz Phair.” The “Liz Phair” album is kind of where the proverbial “shit hit the fan,” in terms of her career. You see, much like with “Whitechocolatespaceegg,” this album was not received well at all by the record label. Having already exhausted her recording budget for the record, though, Liz came to an agreement with Capitol Records, that they would fund further recording for the album if she would do that recording with the extremely popular at the time production team, The Matrix. The Matrix were best known for producing major hits for artists like Avril Lavigne, Britney Spears and Hilary Duff. While these recording sessions only produced four songs, they kind of became the focal point of the album and became the catalyst for a shit storm from both critics and fans, accusing her of having sold out and being a hack. Obviously, this record didn’t sell very well, although the first and second singles from the album, “Why Can’t I?” and “Extraordinary,” both had a fair bit of success. For me, personally, I think this is one of her best records after “Exile In Guyville.” It is a VERY different sound from what she had done before, in many places, but still had a collection of songs that, while considerably more pop sounding and catchier, were still very classic Liz songs. Still, this album was completely panned by critics and fans and did not perform well at all. A couple years later, at the end of 2005, Liz released her fifth record, “Somebody’s Miracle.” “Somebody’s Miracle” is probably my favorite of her albums. It does a beautiful job of combining her harder rock sound from the earlier albums with the more mellow pop sound of the eponymous record. It is a great record through and through. Unfortunately, it was the least successful of all of her records. It was just days after this album was released in October of 2005, that I got the opportunity to see Liz in concert for the very first time, (twice,) and attend a meet and greet with her. Now, having listened to her music for most of my life, and her being my second favorite artist of all-time, this was an intense thrill for me and the only thing I could manage to say to her was “OH MY GOD.” It’s okay, though, because I said it several times… and I do mean SEVERAL times. After the failure of “Somebody’s Miracle,” Liz was dropped from Capitol Records and decided to make ends meet by composing scores for television shows, including “90210,” “The Beautiful Life: TBL,” “Swingtown” and “In Plain Sight.” It really began to appear, after a few years of no word out of her, that there weren’t any plans for another album out of her. In early 2008, there was a re-release of “Exile In Guyville,” which included an absolutely brilliant documentary on the making of the original record. Aside from that and a single song included on a compilation CD from Banana Republic, though, it seemed that there wasn’t anything being planned for moving forward with her own musical work.

This is why it was such a huge surprise to find that she had written and recorded an entire new album. It was a VERY pleasant surprise. This album, very aptly titled “Funstyle,” is extremely surprising. No, I don’t just mean that it’s random release was a surprise but the album itself is extremely surprising. Liz has once again given her musical style a complete makeover, while still remaining true to her own quirky, cracked out songwriting style. Now, I discovered the existence of this record from a link on Twitter from Liz herself, and when I arrived at her website to purchase the album, I found what you would call the first “single,” I suppose, called “Bollywood.” They kind of supplied this track as a lead-in or to give you a taste of the album before buying. Now, just the fact that the album existed was enough for me to buy it but I decided to give the song a listen, anyway. Now, as I mentioned before, this album makes it very clear that Liz HATES the music industry and it all began with this song. Liz does this really cute little sing-song rap/talking thing on this song and basically tells the story of the past several years of her life – providing all kinds of details about labels telling her how her work doesn’t work for them and how “this is how it works in the Hollywood.” The song has a really cool, Middle Eastern inspired sound and is, to put it frankly, completely insane sounding. It is also completely brilliant. There was never a question as to whether or not I would buy this album but this little teaser to the album got me really excited and I paid my $5.99 and downloaded the album immediately. The album’s first track, “Smoke” is also all about how fucked up Hollywood and the music industry are and also has a really experimental, electronic sound. The third track on the album is probably my favorite, called “You Should Know Me.” This song is much more like a classic Liz song, with it’s acoustic guitar and melancholy, frank lyrics and melody. It is gorgeous. It is basically a song about realizing that the person you are with doesn’t really know you as well as you may have thought they did or as well as they should. The fourth track also has the classic Liz, acoustic vibe to it. It is called “Miss September,” and it is a really nice little love song reflecting on having those moments in a relationship where you are questioning whether it is worth continuing on or not. The album consists mainly of more experimental type songs, including “My My,” “Bang! Bang!” “Beat Is Up,” “And He Slayed Her” and “U Hate It,” which closes out the record. “U Hate It” is a completely brilliant song, which is basically two record label executives arguing over which one hates her record more. It also ends with an adorable little segment of her accepting an award for the record and the two executives then changing their tune and arguing over who loves the record more and how much they loved the record from the start. This album, more than anything else, is a commentary on the greed of Hollywood and all of its money-hungry executives. I understand this type of thing isn’t something that everybody can relate to but, I assure you, this album is well worth the $5.99 it costs. In fact, it is worth so much more than that. One of my favorite tracks on the album is “Beat Is Up,” which basically consists of some sort of doctor, a psychologist or something, talking about people who are in denial about their lives, and Liz talking as one of those Hollywood bimbo types, saying all kinds of hilarious things that you would hear out of any of these women on any given day, like “I absolutely have to have my coffee. I need my energy. My life demands it,” while the doctor is saying things like, “Sometimes you imagine yourself being impaled by a giant spike hanging over your bed.” Another favorite track of mine on the album is “Oh, Bangladesh,” which is one of the more classic Liz sounding songs about living out a relationship in a fantasy and suddenly realizing that none of it is real. The last song I will mention is “Satisfied,” which also has a more classic Liz Phair acoustic sound but with a much more pop sound than anything else on this record. This song really hit a button in me and made me think a lot about life. It is basically a song about taking a look at your life and realizing that you aren’t satisfied. In spite of the fact that you have everything you need out of life and are doing just fine, it is just that feeling that there is something missing from your life. Anybody who follows this blog should know that this is definitely a concept that I can relate to. I definitely recommend everybody check out this album – it may take a couple of spins for some but I am pretty confident that if you give the album a genuine chance you will fall in love with it as much as I do. It is absolutely brilliant. You can pick up the album direct from Liz’s website here.

Anyway, it is now 11:54pm and I am getting pretty tired. I doubt if I’ll go to sleep just yet but I think I may watch a movie on Netflix or something until I fall asleep. Speaking of which, I watched a movie on Netflix earlier today that I wanted to take a moment to mention. This movie was called “Keith,” and it starred the adorable Jesse McCartney as a troubled, outsider type kid, (typical role for a pop star, I know,) who manages to weasel his way into the life of one of the more popular girls in school. The girl is completely type-A and is one of those students who is in AP everything and is depending on a tennis scholarship to get into an Ivy League college. When these two get together, though, this girl’s whole world begins to unravel because he makes her understand that there is more to life than the goals that she has always been working towards. It was a really good movie and I would definitely recommend checking it out. I really liked it. Anyway, I am going to go try to find something else to watch now and get myself ready for bed. Goodnight.