Liz Phair Showed Me the Kind of Woman I Wanted to Be

This is Everyone Is Gay, a column by Niko Stratis on gender and sexuality in nineties music—and how pop culture failed to talk about it at the time.

When I was young, I was first told I was a boy, which led to being a young man. As I understood it, the road continued on to adult manhood. I knew I didn’t want to be on this path, but with no understanding of a viable alternative, I sought guidance from the men around me who knew the route well. They would show me the way forward, be my guiding lights that revealed the terrain and pitfalls ahead.

At the grocery store where I worked as a teenager, I was surrounded by so many of these men. One of them was also dating my sister, a tie that bound us as he ingratiated himself into my family. He began to take on a mentoring role of sorts, like a sculptor remaking a block of concrete in his own craven image.

I looked up to him in the way you look up to anyone who asserts their dominance around you. Women loved him. He was just handsome enough that being disinterested in their emotions wasn’t an immediate turnoff. Although he was unreliable and distant—and, ostensibly, spoken for by my sister—he always seemed to have the interest of other women. He addressed people roughly, with an unearned authority, but never backed down from his convictions. When he spoke, it was as if he was transmitting the knowledge of decades of living and it was only right that I listened.

In the ’90s, especially in the Yukon, men didn’t seem terribly interested or engaged in feminism. The world of women was relegated to a separate space, far away from the complicated realm of masculinity. When women at work talked about the issues directly affecting them, my sister’s boyfriend would scoff and roll his eyes. He regularly showed disdain for music on the radio that featured women as the primary artists. I was keen to partake in both conversations—the one about certain regulars in the grocery store, always men, who were the worst to deal with, or talk about why “You Jerk” by Kim Stockwood was cheesy as fuck but still resonated so deeply. But with a simple “That’s chick bullshit,” he would wave away women discussing being women, keeping one eye trained on me to ensure I did the same.

The first time I experienced Liz Phair, I was bagging groceries at the checkout near the bakery department—the spot with a strong speaker that always played a little louder than the rest of the store’s sound system. I was focusing on putting heavy cans on bottom, soft bread on top, when I heard the pre-chorus line about a cherub’s bare wet ass, and my interest was piqued. Phair’s second album, 1994’s Whip-Smart, was on the radio in our small hometown, buoyed by the strength of “Supernova,” the big single from that record.

Liz Phair is a true forebearer of women writing unabashedly about their lives.

The catalog of Liz Phair is a sequence of bitingly clever, fiendishly catchy indie rock songs that orbit a deep understanding of pop music and an undeniable love of herself. Phair is a true forebearer of women writing unabashedly about their lives. When women like Alanis Morissette came on the scene in the wake of Phair’s success, they were pitted against one another, rather than the conversation that should have happened: how desperate we were to control the narrative of women, even their own storytelling.

“Supernova” is a song about being unabashedly in love, the object of her affection a human supernova, a solar superman. The radio edit cuts to a moment of silence where Phair says that this bright and shining star “fuck[s] like a volcano,” but it was easy for me to infer the intent. That song dropped from the speakers in the ceiling like a gift from heaven and lifted me in ways I was yet to understand, but my erstwhile masculine mentor was quick to remind me of its place in the chick-bullshit canon.

My sister had a copy of Exile in Guyville, Phair’s debut record, in the scattered pile of jewel cases on her floor that comprised her CD collection. It was forbidden fruit, in the way that music made “for women” felt for me at the time. The word transgender was not in the wider public consciousness, and I didn’t understand myself that way; I just knew that women spoke to me in a way that most men did not. I longed for that CD but I dared not steal it from her, lest I be caught and be questioned as to why I wanted it for myself.

Instead, I rode my bike downtown to the music store at the corner of Main and Third Avenue and brought a copy of Exile in Guyville to the counter in its translucent longbox, making sure not to let any other patrons see what I was purchasing. When I presented it to the clerk, he glanced at my haul, gave me a long look, and, with a roll of his eyes, rang me through. I could see the judgment behind his eyes. Didn’t I know this was chick bullshit?

In my room at home I had stacks of glossy music magazines I had obsessively collected for years; Spin and Rolling Stone and the occasional NME, when the bookstore brought in UK music magazines to satiate the few of us who wanted to read about bands like Pulp and Suede. I popped my new copy of Exile into my Discman, testing the headphones to make sure they were working but not terribly loud—I didn’t want anyone to know I was actively engaging in chick bullshit.

I wanted to learn the backstory on Phair. Leafing through my old copies of magazines, I found reviews and profiles that drew a lot of attention to the content of Phair’s lyrics—the ways in which she candidly spoke about love and lust and sex—but not nearly enough focus on the casual confidence she carried within herself. In her voice, I heard someone so enraptured with her identity as a woman that she was able to sing freely about its peaks and valleys.

On “6’1”,” Phair’s foundation of confidence was so solid that it added a foot to her height. She loves her life. She hates you. She was so self-assured in her identity, she was able to articulate that failing is not always a reflection of her. But rather than discuss these dynamics, in every profile and review there were repeated references to the one time she referred to herself as wanting to be someone’s blowjob queen. Her morality was constantly put in conversation with her unequivocal talent. I understood then that women were allowed to exist in songs only as the object and never the crafter of desire.

This wasn’t a conscious thought at first. As a young person eager to be seen by the more accomplished men around me, it was a gradual indoctrination into a life of casual misogyny. It’s easy to start turning the other cheek to chick bullshit.

I understood then that women were allowed to exist in songs only as the object and never the crafter of desire.

Shortly after my purchase of Exile in Guyville, I made a second surreptitious journey to buy a used copy of Whip-Smart. This time, I went to the other record store in town, to belay suspicion. The indie-kid burnout working that afternoon asked if I was buying the CD for my girlfriend. I flirted with the idea of confidently saying, “This record speaks to me in ways that you or I cannot possibly comprehend.” But it felt easier to agree to the lie and create a fictitious girlfriend who had a birthday coming up soon. “Good call,” he said. “Chicks dig this stuff.”

Listening to music in secret is a hard lie to maintain. Over the years, my secret love of Liz Phair had to be hidden away deeper and deeper. In 2003, she released a record that was deeply pop in nature, and a nation of overzealous music purists turned their backs on her. Suddenly it was of the moment to be overly critical of Phair, now in her midthirties. The right age for popular culture to deem women disposable. In Phair I saw a woman growing older and finding a new voice, walking a road she’s always been on while also carving a new path.

In my own midthirties, late at night in the dark kitchen in a two-bedroom apartment where I lived in angry solitude, I came out as trans to my then girlfriend. My world crumbled in that moment, fell to ash around my feet, as everything I knew about myself burned and fell away.

The first few years of being out are a torrent of triumph and adversity, learning to adjust to a new personage in a world you have been lying to for a lengthy period of time. I slowly learned to trust what my inner voice was demanding of me, and not what I was telling it was acceptable. I trusted my instincts more, and my listening habits followed suit as I let go of all the pretense I had carried for decades.

I picked up Liz Phair again.

My understanding of myself was a struggle, a tug-of-war between learned behavior and buried desires. As I was learning to say with confidence that I was a woman, I struggled to understand what that meant to me.

In Liz Phair, I heard new life in old lyrics. Where once I was told her music was lewd, chick shit, the writing of a brainy slut, I began to understand someone who sang with fervent love and understanding of herself as a woman—with all the flaws and triumphs that carries.

Take “Fuck and Run,” a living testament to the thrill of romantic entanglements even in moments of hardship. It’s a paean to the ways in which we put ourselves, our hearts and minds and bodies, on the line, and how in doing so we might find ourselves hurt in the end—but also how, despite all this, there is the joy of herself at the center. Phair doesn’t yearn to be different or better; she wants all the stupid old shit, like letters and soda, those simple treasures she knows she deserves.

Liz Phair showed me a path upon which I could find myself as a woman that was not golden, not bereft of pitfalls and hazards. The womanhood she put on display in the world she crafted was not perfect or ideal but was also never the point. I didn’t want to be a woman to live perfectly, but I wanted the imperfection to be my connective tissue. When I yearned for a life that felt whole, it was there in the songs on her records. She was here to make it through, to find a way down the paths she found herself on and leave a light, somewhere off in the distance, by which all of us who came after could find ourselves.

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