An Indie Icon Goes Pop: Reflections on Liz Phair 20 Years Later

The idea that music critics would revolt at an indie-rock sensation “going pop” seems laughable in 2023. So many of the most beloved alternative bands at the moment, like Alvvays and Soccer Mommy, shamelessly take inspiration from pop music—specifically the sugar rush hooks and stadium-ready choruses. Listen, for instance, to Soccer Mommy’s “Out Worn” and make note of its equally euphoric and cathartic chorus—how it parallels the infectious melodies of Taylor Swift’s “Fearless” or “Fifteen” will be readily apparent.
Last year’s hottest indie sensation, Wet Leg, spent the year opening for Harry Styles, one of the biggest pop star’s of our time—while critics have greeted recent efforts from megastars like Beyoncé and Swift as warmly as they have albums from any underground artist. Yet when Liz Phair, whose lo-fi 1993 debut Exile In Guyville became an indie landmark, went pop in 2003, critics and fans alike reacted with revulsion—deeming Phair’s fourth LP as one of the worst albums of all time. Most famously, Pitchfork’s Matt LeMay’s gave Liz Phair a rare 0.0 score, deeming it an album “that may as well not even exist.”
LeMay’s review, which he apologized for in 2019, has since become infamous, and has been held up as a wider indication of music criticism’s worst traits in the early-2000’s—an utter disregard of pop music (“Liz Phair’s greatest asset has always been her inability to write a perfect pop song,” opined LeMay) and an inherent skepticism and aversion to female sexuality; especially from women over 30.
But that conclusion pales in comparison to that of other critics—many of whom took any sexist and ageist undertones in the original Pitchfork review and reconfigured them into cruder and more derogatory ideas. Jim Connelly, of Neumu, described the LP as “the aural equivalent of a boob job”—a criticism that you’d never catch being deployed against a man’s music. PopMatters’ Adrien Begrand side-stepped the “older women” euphemism employed by LeMay to describe the 36-year-old Phair, in favor of a more direct jab: “It’s something we’d rather hear an 17-year-old girl sing, instead of a 36-year-old woman.” Even the scant, positive reviewers couldn’t resist grossly objectifying language (“She’s still a messy troublemaker whose brain is as spicy as the rest of her body” was Blender’s uncomfortably worded affirmation of the LP).
But no criticism of Liz Phair has aged more poorly than that leveled at it by the Guardian’s Adam Sweeting. The short-and-not-sweet, two-paragraph review begins with a melodramatic denouncement of Phair’s new pop-stylings that was used in so many negative reviews of the LP (“Phair must have fallen under the influence of a Svengali armed with personality-warping drugs”) and dismissed Phair’s lyrics about sex and lust as “audio pornography”. Sweeting, however, saves his most damning criticism for last—commenting on the album sleeve that depicts an undressed Phair covered up only by her electric guitar. He opined “She pouts and poses like a superannuated Lolita. Not a pretty sight. Or sound.” It is one of countless criticisms of the album that says far more about the person writing the review than it does about the music being written about.
Listening to Liz Phair anew in 2023, you’re primarily struck by confusion at the idea that anyone could have reacted so viscerally to the music provided. Co-produced by The Matrix, it’s a polished, Top-40-ready pop album that has aged no better or worse than Avril Lavigne’s Let Go or Michelle Branch’s The Spirit Room. That is, of course, to say that Liz Phair is very much a product of its time—with production choices that haven’t uniformly stood the test of time, but the infectious hooks and nostalgic charm are enough to make the album worth revisiting 20 years later.
Production duties for Liz Phair were split between The Matrix, Michael Penn, R. Walt Vincent and Phair, herself. At the time of release, much of the blame for Liz Phair’s sound and lyrics was given to The Matrix, who were just one year removed from their 2002 breakthrough with Lavigne’s Let Go. While their footprint is evident in the blown-out, crunchy sound of “Extraordinary” and the peppy, rom-com-ready “Why Can’t I?”, the four songs they produced for the album (“Extraordinary”, “Why Can’t I?”, “Rock Me” and “Favorite”) are not startling departures from the three Phair-produced tracks (“Firewalker”, “Love/Hate” and “My Bionic Eyes”). Retrospectively, it seems as though The Matrix did not steer Liz Phair’s sound in the way they were accused of, but merely complied with Phair’s pre-existing, independent vision for the LP’s sound.
Phair has writing credits on all of Liz Phair’s 14 tracks—most of them solo—and, despite claims that her collaborators had betrayed her distinctive voice, the storytelling talent that made Exile In Guyville so beloved remained evident a decade later. Nowhere is this more obvious than on “Little Digger,” a mid-album meditation on dating as a single mother. The narrative alternates between the mother’s perspective and that of her son.