And Scene: Liz Phair's "What Makes You Happy"

I hadn't intended to go back to the subjects of either Liz Phair or motherhood so soon, but I happened to hear "What Makes You Happy," Phair's cheeky, self-deprecating banger from her last great record, whitechocolatespaceegg, on a road trip mix today. Its signature rug-pull effect (at :44 above) surprised and delighted me anew, and as I looked under the hood to see what she's up to musically, my delight only grew.

This isn't just a song, it's a scene, and a cuttingly satirical one at that. It opens with a character, presumably Liz's age (if not Liz herself), sitting with her mom and describing—a bit defensively—her tentative new relationship with a divorcee, over a strummy, slightly whiny mid-tempo jam around A-flat and D-flat major. After an intake of breath for a stage direction ("There's a silence, and she says"), the song veers gut-wrenchingly into a slamming F major chorus; the effect, harmonically and tempo-wise, is as jarring as a sideswipe crash at an intersection, and justly so, given what follows. The Mom character delivers a familiar parental affirmation, but with a vehemence and a passive-aggressive catch that belies its sunniness:

Listen here, young lady
All that matters is what makes you happy
But you leave this house knowing my opinion
Won't make you love me if you don't care to

I mean...wow. There's a lot of water under that bridge. The second verse snaps us back into the A-flat/D-flat, as the daughter describes yet another new relationship and sounds even more self-deluded: "I swear this one is going to last / And all those other bastards were only practice." Sure, sure. Then Phair does something interesting: She smooths the route to Mom's F major chorus with a kind of bridge/pre-chorus that travels through E-flat to B-flat as the younger woman sounds more vulnerable and lost than ever:

I feel the sun on my back
I smell the earth on my skin
I see the sky above me
Like a full recovery

Okay, we're not talking about men anymore, are we. It's a bit vicious, I guess, to suggest that the daughter is an unreliable narrator because she's in recovery. But it's nowhere near as mean as Phair's unsparing portrait of the whore and her pimp in the scalding "Dance of the Seven Veils," for example. And as the chorus enters less aggressively, thanks to that pre-chorus, Mom's F major exhortation dominates the remainder of the song. The result has the quality of a long, fierce, rocking hug. If we start out smiling at the daughter's folly and the mother's blast-furnace response, the song leaves us smiling with something closer to warm compassion.