Monday, May 07, 2018

25 years after Guyville

My iPod currently holds 13,372 songs. And while I love music and I'm constantly poking around looking for new stuff, I confess I've gotten into a bad habit. I tend to buy albums, throw them on my iPod and then hit shuffle.

Now, I love the shuffle function. I've never been much one for creating playlists unless it's something to play at the gym. I like being surprised by the next song. It's a little radio station of songs I like. And yes, I know there's streaming. You understand I live in Iqaluit, the land where Internet comes to die, right?

I love my iPod Classic. It's a miraculous black slab of music. When Apple idiotically discontinued them, I immediately went out and bought another one as a back-up. I'm still on the first one and it's still working. I can't even tell you how many years I've had at at this point. The Classic was discontinued in 2014 and I've had that one a couple of years before that. I use it pretty much every day, either in a Bose station at home or sitting on my desk at work with my noise cancelling headphones.

But as much as I love it, I get lazy with it. I rarely, very rarely, listen to an album from start to finish anymore. I can buy a new album and it can be months before I go "huh, I don't recognize that song" and then check to see it was something I bought 6 months earlier. I kinda miss that. At the very least I should get back into the habit of listening to an album a few times before it gets lost in permanent shuffle.

I'm rambling about this because there are only a handful of albums I can remember where I was the first time I heard them. Transformative albums. Many, many years ago I used to be Entertainment Editor of the Muse, which meant dispersing music. A lot of it was crap, but every now and then you'd hit gold. Pretty sure I gave Nevermind by Nirvana to someone to review. I can't remember if they actually did. Giving away the music was easy; getting the reviews back required a hefty amount of death threats.

I recall giving the cassette (they were almost always cassettes. CDs were too expensive to waste on student newspapers) Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos to my friend Jaap. He came into the office the next day, dragged me into an office and made me listen to the tape on a battered ghetto blaster, proclaiming it was of the greatest things he'd ever heard.

(Jaap would probably say it still is one of the greatest things he'd ever heard. I wouldn't argue with him. It's a remarkable album).

Picking up An Irish Evening by the Chieftains at a college radio remainder sale in Halifax in 1994 and listening to it so much my roommate at King's begged me to stop. It quickly became an expensive quest while in Halifax to own everything by the band.

I remember buying Neko Case's Furnace Room Lullaby at Fred's after hearing a song on CBC's Definitely Not the Opera and driving around around St. John's for hours afterwards listening to it on repeat by myself because I'd never heard a voice like that.

And then there's Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville.

It is, god help me, the 25th anniversary of the album. Which means, of course, there's a special remastered edition of the album. Pitchfork, which hates almost everything, gave it a 10, which surely means the end is near. I normally curse on anniversary editions of albums because they're silly or make me feel old. But hearing the album is now 25 slams the specific moment I heard it for the first time.

I heard it at 3:30 in the morning at a house party (pretty sure it was Sherry Russell's place) after a night downtown. My friends Chris and Lisa were trying to convince others to let them put on the CD. I was deeply skeptical of it because at this time both of them belonged to the cult of Cub, a band they loved and tried to convert everyone too. I loathed the band and had grown to deeply distrust their musical sensibilities at this time.

But they won out and the CD eventually made it on, but in a bedroom so everyone else didn't have to listen and could continue on with what they were doing. I was roped in because, well, Chris is Chris. And it was jaw-dropping. It's that moment when you realize you've never heard anything like it before. I was a 23 year old guy when I heard it, so I wasn't exactly the target audience she was singing to. I was pretty much everything wrong in the world that she was singing about. But the honestly, purity and rawness made an impact. Again, next day I went out to buy it....and couldn't find it. Eventually Fred's got it in and I paid some silly amount of money for it. Worth every penny.

Others will, and have, written more eloquently about the album. And again, I think if you're a woman hearing that album it hits you in much different ways than if you're a guy.

There's been a segment of critics that have always been disappointed that Phair never lived up to the "potential" of Exile but I quite liked her next few albums. Whip-Smart  was quite good and Whitechocolatespaceegg had some moments of pure pop wonder like 'Polyester Bride'. Hell, even a song like 'HWC' has a humour and brashness that I can admire. They're not Exile, but hell, very few artists get one of those kinds of albums in a career. Asking to do it a bunch of times is insane.

So yeah, dig it out if you haven't listened to it in awhile. And if you've never listened, hop into your time machine to the early 90s and enjoy. You may have heard people try to duplicate it to some degree, but the original still holds all the power.

Last Five
1. The Parts - Manchester Orchestra
2. Who do you love - Lily Allen
3. Boogie Street (live) - Leonard Cohen
4. Trip my wire - Garbage
5. Extraordinary - Liz Phair*

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