While on the subject of the aforementioned 33 1/3 Series, one of the finest ones, which I’d just read when readying this edition of Rock Reads, is Gina Arnold’s deconstruction of Liz Phair’s monumental Exile in Guyville. Arnold, one of the finest historians on the indie movement of the late Eighties to early Nineties, puts the 1993 release into pinpoint perspective while getting inside many of its myths, geographical touchstones and feminine evocations.
Much of Phair’s persona and this record in particular took on a wider interpretation at the time of its release. There was a sense that the album’s raw expression on sexuality, personal angst, a lashing out on external demons and the dying of a musical street movement in Chicago was somehow a referendum on the artist and not the art made delving into this book a treat for me, and the author did not disappoint. This is as much a record of its times and beyond it, and Arnold leaves no subject ignored.
Of course, the one thing that intrigued me from the moment the album was released – beyond its DIY mastery of tape demos being put out as statement a la Daniel Johnston and Michelle Shocked and later Beck, all of whom perked my ears in a time when rock and roll had become a bit stale again – is its immediate reference to my favorite Rolling Stones album Exile on Main St. By name-checking arguably one of the two or three finest rock records of all time, Phair goes into sacred territory on her own terms. Many, including your truly, dismissed the originally stated idea by Phair that Guyville is a track-by-track answer to the Stones, specifically the macho messaging by Mick Jagger. You would have to be someone looking for such things to consider it as a serious exercise, but Arnold does it! And does it with the kind of intense music writing that makes doing what I do as a music journalist and essayist worth noting.
As stated, this series is worth exploring in general, but if you need to start somewhere, Gina Arnold provides a template to why these books work so well in making listening to these works subsequently appealing.