1994: Liz Phair, Whip Smart
By Kendra DeColo
I have not yet given a blowjob or jerked off a boy on a field trip to see The Crucible when I first hear the opening warbling notes of “Chopsticks” on my Panasonic boom box. Animal posters still hang on my walls and the only albums I own are Jimi Hendrix’ Are you Experienced and Sgt. Pepper’s. A boy who likes me calls me “Nitemare Hippy Girl” and I don’t understand the reference.
I am 11 and have somehow befriended the kids at school who know about Pavement and Sebadoh, whose older siblings take them to see J Mascis play at the Middle East. I am decidedly not cool, can barely ask the sales girls at Tower Records in their combat boots where I might find The Beatles, let alone the Beastie Boys, aware of my own humiliating lack of knowledge. Instead, I learn about music pawing through my parents’ neglected vinyl collection, feeling a trap-door drop when the opening notes of “The End” by The Doors crackle under the needle. I never ask why my mother bought Blue, if she listened to it alone smoking a cigarette out of her dorm window. Learning about music is stumbling toward belonging in an empty house, scavenging for my place in a lineage of folk singers and divas I hear on the radio— I don’t yet have anything to call my own. I don’t yet have a home.
It is a moment of holy dumb luck when someone slips Whip-Smart into my cd player’s lacquered mouth one Spring afternoon and the room fills with a somber and child-like hymn that I immediately recognize. Even though I don’t understand irony, I feel the tension in the singer’s voice between urgency and self-deprecation, innocence and jadedness. I can feel how the song is playing with voice and tone, not disaffected or blasé, but virtuosic, the singer sending her voice so deep into its bloodroot register that the notes become sentient, shaping the persona into its larger-than-life yet completely accessible form. It is like glimpsing into the diary of the older sister I never had and suddenly imagining what womanhood might look like beyond the sad and sweaty confines of pubescence. It is dark and horny and I love it.
In the early reviews of Liz Phair’s work you can see critics struggle to place her in the cannon of women performers, guffawing at the dissonance between her appearance and lyrics. (A woman writing about sexuality in such a straightforward way? Blow job queen??!) It is exhausting to see them grapple with Phair’s use of profanity while praising her midwestern “good girl” looks, and rare to find a review that doesn’t include the phrase “girl next door,” as if this lends virtue or credibility to what otherwise might be labeled as trashy, in the ways that artists like Kathleen Hannah and Courtney Love were consistently turned into punchlines. It’s almost as if Phair’s brand of confessionalism was accepted because her looks and personality were read as demure and uncontroversial, making me wish Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English had come out when she was a budding pop star, before being anointed with the status of “ruined woman.” There has rarely been space for a woman artist to exist in between.
Phair’s voice was a fucking revelation. But not because of her subjects or the fact that she was from the suburbs and wrote to place herself in the cannon of a male dominated alt-rock scene, how she knew she could write songs that would make sweaty dude groupies lose their goddamn minds, and so she did. Phair entered the scene like a viral flare-up precisely because she had the chops, and thanks to sexism, no one saw it coming. As Kim Gordon wrote, “The most heightened state of being female is watching people watch you.” Phair had internalized a lifetime of watching men watch women, and knew what a mindfuck it would be to turn that narrative on its head, knew that it would come like a sledgehammer because no one was ready.
When I’m 14 we all go see the Violent Femmes play at the Brandeis auditorium. We get there early and I pull out a thick paperback of Anais Nin’s Little Birds from my army green duffel bag. I sit on the ground and smoke a Camel and read about Bijou getting her glistening bush eaten out in the back of a cab. When the band comes on, I continue to read. I want to hear them play and I don’t. I want to be at the center of the chaos, numbed against the monster truck sized speakers, and also invisible, book clenched in my hands.
In interviews about Exile in Guyville, Phair has said, “All these people wanted me to be really big and I felt like this tiny pea in the center of all this chaos. I didn't want this success.” Looking back, it makes sense that Whip-Smart was my first connection to Phair for this exact reason. It was her way of reclaiming her power after getting lost in the machinery of celebrity and success that women are thrust into. She recorded it partly in the Bahamas to get away from the insular community of voices she felt herself trying to please. It reminds me of the way that my favorite poets like Terrance Hayes have talked about returning to the work after success—you have to trick yourself into not investing in what anyone else thinks through form and play.
Whip-Smart as a result was more concise and structured than its predecessor, rigorous and rich with the same themes but tighter and ebullient with pop melodies, maybe more optimistic. Her voice often sounds vulnerable and sincere as it reaches for the upper registers on songs like “Nashville” and “Dogs of LA,” whose use of repetition ascends to a mode that is almost ecstatic and holy. It’s an album to sing to yourself driving across the country to get away from your ex who asked you to pay his rent while sleeping with groupies. An album I’ve listened to on the cusp of starting over, stumbling out of the trash heap of mistakes to try again, promising to be better, to stop betraying myself.
The fact that Liz Phair never wanted to be in the spotlight is not an anomaly, but the way she orchestrates the tension between quiet and expressing one’s demons is something that has held me since the day I first listened to the whole album straight through. What does it mean to quietly express resistance? What does it look like to be fierce in one’s work and take up space when you are terrified of being seen?
All the girls who loved Bikini Kill in high school came from rich homes—checked out mothers and workaholic fathers who fell asleep with grainy porn flickering on television screens. Their houses were enormous and empty. My parents were loving but rarely there and often explosive, broken dishes, slamming doors, promises to leave and never return. Maybe this is why I never could truly fit into the Riot Girrrl scene. I didn’t want to be at the front. My rebellion was softness, disappearing. Whip-Smart was the first time I heard a voice that matched my introspective and volatile life. Without knowing anything about her story or Exile in Guyville (which I listened to much later) I could hear in her narrative and voice that she was an introverted and quiet person like me, fighting to take up space in the world.
A few years after hearing Whip-Smart, I nearly fail out of school and become enmeshed with a group of self-described burnouts. We all hang out in the demolished husk of a friend’s home whose father had fallen asleep while smoking a bowl and burned down half of their house, only a few rooms in the attic left habitable. I love the wilderness, the feeling of freedom, as if we are the degenerate Boxcar Children, the bones of the house visible, rooms concealed with tarps flapping open like Victorian drapes. I love The Pharcyde and Fugazi blasting from stereos. We scrounge for money, go into Boston to meet dealers, sell from the house, kids trip and fuck on bare mattresses in the smoke-gutted rooms. My friend who is only a few years older than me never lets me do hard drugs and asks to see how I’m doing in school. She hugs me like I’m her daughter, which in a way I have become. She yells at the twenty-something dropouts who try to hook up with me. She sees me the way I am not seen in my own home— as a kid who needs protection.
What I love most about Whip-Smart is that at its core, it is joyful. It is a generous album, even though she wrote it to impress no one but herself. Or maybe she wrote the songs for a someone who needed them as much as she needed to write them. The album’s iconic anthems like “Super Nova” and “Support System” feel like radio hits and have a joy in their architecture, in the guitar licks and catchy choruses erupting and begging to be sung. It is a gift to be able to chant along with “and you fuck like a volcano and you’re everything to me.” It is a gift to be spoken to like an adult, for someone to share their most embarrassing truth while looking you in the eye. And there is joy in how the album ends, “May Queen” slowly building and rising above Phair’s register into a glorious refrain of defiance and hope.
Recently I heard Diane Seuss, punk queen and high priestess of the poetry world, talk about writing difficult experiences. She said, “I find myself needing the sonnet more when I write about addiction… It kept me from falling off the page, it provides me with boundaries.” In this way, I think the gift and brilliance of Phair’s craft is providing vessels safe enough for her most vulnerable stories, vessels that we in turn feel held by, guarded and seen.
Whip-Smart throughout my life has been like returning to that incinerated mansion where I am feral and protected—the place from which I try to write. The album feels like it is mine, because it was there with me when I had to grow up and cross the sticky threshold into womanhood, when I’ve had to lean into my own wreck and burn it all down to start again. It gave me permission to be an introvert, nerd, and a fuck-up, and more than that, to write from my most glittering and obliterated sanctuary, dancing between the quiet and chaos. How one’s own burnt-out palace can become a place of safety, a home.
Kendra DeColo is the author of three poetry collections, including I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World (BOA Editions, 2021). She is also co-author of the chapbook Low Budget Movie (Diode, 2021), written with Tyler Mills. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College and performed her work in comedy clubs and music venues across the country including the Newport Folk Festival. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.