The Airing of Grievances

"I hate you, I hate you, I don't even know you, but I hate your guts. I wish all the bad things in life happen to you, and only you."

Today it's Pitchfork's turn to interview Liz Phair re: Guyville Redux, and they do a far better job with it than the Voice a couple weeks back. Most illuminating is a reference to the famously acerbic doyen of Chicago's underground, Steve Albini, whom Phair describes as having "kind of sidestepped and said [Exile in Guyville] was an important record for women in that period" in the accompanying DVD documentary. "Sidestepped what?" you ask. Well, an adjacent link whisks you off to a 1993 exchange between Albini, Chicago Reader critic Bill Wyman, and the Reader's readership, touched off by Wyman's year end column celebrating Chicago's three most commercially and critically successful rock acts of the year: The Smashing Pumpkins, Urge Overkill, and Phair. The offending passage: "Once it became apparent that the fine line between the two was blurring, the rear guard from the underground--which I would define as deliberately non-pop, whereas I guess alternative would be relatively personal music that doesn't necessarily exclude pop--tried not only to keep them clear, but to make a big deal out of which side of the line you were on. This, of course, is bullshit, and these artists took a stand and the resulting heat to prove it."

Albini's hilarious and wrong-headed response (wrong in dismissing two great records that have "stood the test of time," although admittedly, he was right about all three acts in the long run) is worth reading in its entirety, as are many of the reader responses that flooded subsequent editorial pages. While brushing aside the sexist overtones of the Phair backlash, he deftly dismisses her music - and by extension her personally - as "more talked about than heard, a persona completely unrooted in substance, and a fucking chore to listen to." The coup de grâce occurs at the sign off, where, after excoriating Wyman for privileging "this year's promo fixtures" over artist making "timeless, classic music that survives trends and inspires generations of fans and other artists," he tells the critic to "[c]lip your year-end column and put it away for ten years. See if you don't feel like an idiot when you reread it." Whoops.