A Flying, Giant Friction Blast


Today's formative-album replay: Whip-Smart. Record store culture was different from direct-download culture in so many ways, and one of them is that I can usually remember where I bought certain records, who I was with, etc. In the case of Liz Phair's Whip-Smart it was in a small record store in a California beach town—it could have been Santa Monica—and I was with my wife and her sister. In those days I typically hit every record store in sight, and my habit was to head straight for the used and remainder bins, but in the pre-Amoeba early '90s, many of the used record stores I frequented (Aron's, Rockaway) began stocking eye-catching "new vinyl" sections, usually on an end cap, and I would sometimes treat myself to one shiny new LP in addition to the stack of dubious vinyl and CD gems. Matador, Liz Phair's indie label, put some muscle into their packaging, and one Sunday in the mid-'90s it paid off. I had heard but not succumbed to the fuss about Exile in Guyville (it made the cover of the LA Weekly), and I'd heard some of the backlash too. But there sat Whip-Smart, with its grabby, faux-found-art collage cover. I decided to give it a Phair shot.

It was not an immediate conversion experience, I'll admit—though once I cottoned to its sidelong charms and belatedly reckoned with the towering Exile, I was all in on the badass from Winnetka. Clearly, here was an original and fully formed rock voice, standing firmly in the tradition but stretching it, kicking against it, in much the way Elvis Costello and Patti Smith had done decades before, and folks like Jack White and Brittany Howard would in the future.

Whip-Smart, as I rediscovered on a recent relisten, is still a hard record to embrace. Indeed it's a kind of tribute to Phair's greatness that she won me over despite such an unprepossessing intro. The album starts with what I think I recognized even then as a kind of own-my-stereotypes fuck-you: Numbly recapping a bad-sex one-night stand over a childlike piano figure seemingly based on the tune of its title, "Chopsticks," she seems to be saying, "You think I can't sing and I'm obsessed with fucking, both the act and the word? Let's get this out of the way." Because then, of course, she pulls out the rug with one of her biggest, best, arena-rockingest blowouts, "Supernova," which I love not only for its massive hooks but for its unique combination of tenderness and aggression.

She doesn't sustain that momentum, spinning her wheels through a series of diffident, bleary mid-tempo songs ("Support System," "Shane," "Go West," "Crater Lake"), a few half-baked attempts at hooky rock and pop ("X-Ray Man" and "Nashville," respectively), and one that sounds like a good outtake from Exile (but still an outtake), "Alice Springs." There are some distinctive moments and lyrics that jump out—"dynamite stuffed in a mailbox," "cheap, unpleasant desires," "I won't decorate my love"—but much of the record feels like a run-on sentence that's running in place.

Protruding sharply from this jangly stew, though, are some highlights that rank among the best stuff she's done: the coiled-rattlesnake fever of "Jealousy," which manages to be both self aware and genuinely unhinged; the exuberant, offbeat cheer of "Cinco de Mayo"; the insistently sugary "here's your pop single" determination of "Whip-Smart," which somehow only enhances its charm; and possibly my favorite of all her songs, the loping waltz "Dogs of L.A.," which marries scratchy home-movie nostalgia to her signature guitar-cluster sound, a lo-fi heir to Joni's Hejira.

The album closes with "May Queen," clearly and self-consciously an ending song, though it could hardly manage to sum up this weird, ungainly record. Fittingly enough, it sounds both tentative and assertive, confident but confused. "Where have I been? Got any what?" she sings, and after wandering the disorienting wilderness of Whip-Smart, we know just what she means.

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