The Aging of Alternative Nation

Dipping into the archives for this entry. Look, it's a Friday night, even I'm getting ready to go out. Thought this is a good one to post anyway, since this is the best concert review that I've written so far. Expect to see a lot more in this style in the future. Enjoy.

The Aging of Alternative Nation
(Liz Phair, Beaumont Club, Kansas City, MO 11.5.2003)

I turned 30 two months ago. I had convinced myself that it was a meaningless milestone, just another number. I mean, I don’t look any different than I did a few years ago and I’m having more fun now than I’ve had at any other point in my life. Life’s good and I’m still cool and in style. Sure, they’ve stopped carding me at bars and I’ve finished education and moved on towards employment. And there is that unnerving tendency for cashiers to ask if my video game purchase is for my son but I’m still young, right?

Seeing Liz Phair last night answered that question for me. And the answer is one that myself and the rest of the alternative nation have been dreading for years. We’ve gotten old.

(I have some confessions to make before I continue. I am a huge Liz Phair fan and have been from the moment Exile in Guyville broke when I was a sophomore in college. Had her Rolling Stone cover on my dorm room wall, bought everything she ever recorded, and when I made my list of perfect mates (women I would gladly spend the rest of my life with, no questions asked) she made the top five. Plus, she’s from Chicago and there was always that chance I could accidentally meet her. In a sense, Liz has always been like my best friend’s really cool older sister, everpresent but unattainable.)

The separation of fan and music critic and social critic started as soon as I walked into the Beaumont Club. There was a good crowd, especially for a Wednesday night, and everyone seemed really excited. But there was something in the crowd that made everything seem out of place. All the pieces were there, women wearing “Guys make nice pets” shirts, guys wearing retro t-shirts, but they were all on people who just left their offices a few hours ago. Thirty year old former slackers, now content to make a living, returning to the music of their youth. Dressing retro because that’s how they used to dress but having moved on from irony to ennui.

I was as guilty as anyone, wearing a “Murray Grade School Dodgeball Champions” t-shirt that I purchased at Urban Outfitters. A fake memento for a fake school for a fake experience in an attempt for a real emotion.

There has never been a show that has produced such a disconnect within me between the fan and the critic. The fan in me thought it was an excellent show. Starting off with 6’1”, the opening track from her debut album, to show she remembers what started her career. Sampling from all of her albums and playing everyone’s favorites. Sprinkling in songs from her new album, not overloading the show with them but bringing out the best of the bunch. Her voice was not perfect but then again, it never has been. It’s never been about her voice, it’s been about her lyrics and her passion and her emotion. It’s about Liz standing onstage brandishing a guitar and belting, “I am extraordinary, if you ever get to know me.” It’s about her requesting the spotlight be taken off of her face and focused somewhere else, like on the bass player or her breasts. It’s about the fact that deep down, every woman in the crowd envisioned herself being her and every guy envisioned himself being with her and that makes for a great show.

The music critic disagrees for one reason and one reason only, the songs don’t fit anymore. It’s why Liz’s new album has done poorly, the songs no longer fit the singer. You can’t sing about the angst of turning 20 when you’re 30. You can’t sing about the horrors of those early relationships, when no one has a clue what they’re doing, after you’ve been married and had a child. And you can’t write new songs trying to harken back to that time. I’ve gotten older, Liz has gotten older, and the material must change as well.

For an encore Liz played Flower, the one song on Exile in Guyville that is most responsible for her fame. Ten years ago it was a brazen sexual expression that stunned even the most jaded Gen X’ers. A cute young girl from Chicago, recording in her bedroom, singing “I want to be your blow job queen.” And when you looked at the cd cover, with Liz’s mouth open and a hint of nipple showing, you believed her. And you wanted every word she said to be true and refer specifically to you. And she knew it and could laugh and say, “Ha, ha, never in a million years, sucker.”

Now, a thirtysomething Liz, her face showing its age beneath the glare of the stagelights, singing the same lines evokes an entirely different reaction. There’s no more shock, no more sniggling laughter in the background, just a line sung by someone who has been a part of your life for the past decade. And it makes you remember when you first heard it and who you were with and it reminds you that those days have long since past.

Give Liz credit, she is the last surviving member of the fabled Chicago scene. Veruca Salt imploded years ago, Urge Overkill went MIA and will only be remembered for a Neil Diamond cover, and Billy Corgan has been reduced to singing “Take me out to the ballgame” at Cubs games. Liz is still out there, still searching for glory. The last one standing for Alternative Nation.

Exile in Guyville is one of the best albums of the 90’s, probably one of the best of all time. Those songs are going to last forever. They are songs written by a woman taking control of her life at the moment when life becomes an ocean of possibilities. They are songs of relationships and heartache and sex and longing and every single emotion that runs through your head when you are twenty years old. As long as people are young, as long as guys screw up relationships and women try to find themselves these songs will survive. Liz Phair’s songs will have meaning for years to come.

Sadly, they won’t have meaning when Liz sings them anymore.