![]() ![]() ![]() The bawdiest lyrics such as, “Everything you ever thought of/ Is everything I’ll do to you/ I’ll f- you till your d–k is blue,” seemed to serve the context first, at the expense of introspection. Phair’s one-liners, in turn, rivaled boys’ talk. If you connect the dots, the wanton “Flower” can be a retort to the Stones’ gospel-blues “Let It Loose,” a ballad about a dangerously alluring woman. So it was fairly ballsy for a female musician to make her debut by flipping the bird at one of rock’s most legendary - and legendarily sexist - bands. Phair packaged it as a clever conceit (albeit a loose one, she’s since admitted): a song-by-song retort to the Rolling Stone’s “Exile on Main St.,” widely considered one of their best albums. That’s because the album is fundamentally a reaction to, rather than a transcendence of, sexism. Yet for all the feminist adoration it gets and the inspiration it’s spawned, it’s tough to ignore that “Exile” continues to be stuck in the male gaze. Twenty-five years later, Matador Records has reissued the seminal indie-rock album as “Girly-Sound to Guyville: The 25th Anniversary Box Set,” including voluminous demos and whatnot. If there’s one lyric that has, for better or worse, become the pull-quote capturing the ambition and smirky audacity of Liz Phair’s 1993 indie-rock classic “Exile in Guyville,” it is, “I want to be your blowjob queen.” That lyric, from the hedonistic hymnal “Flower,” was devised as a hit to the gonads. ![]()
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