Last fall, around the time Britney Spears’s memoir was published, I went to the Brooklyn stop of Liz Phair’s 30th anniversary tour for her debut album . , a Gen X classic; it came out when I was a freshman in college, and every track on it reminds me of a certain lonely dorm room, a wintry campus, an unfinished term paper on W.H.
Auden. The audience, made up of people who mostly looked just like me, was there to relive those memories of a very different time. We sang along to every note.
Phair—who in the 90s was a famously nervous and unpredictable performer—didn’t engage in much stage banter, but she looked relaxed and happy. For the very last song of her encore, she played the song she’s most famous for—not from but from her “reboot” album, , released ten years later: Phair, some people will remember, briefly reinvented herself in the 2000s (in her mid-thirties) as a shiny corporate pop star with an album mostly written by Avril Lavigne’s songwriting team, The Matrix. “Why Can’t I” was featured in the teen comedy In the press, she was raked over the coals: in fact, it was my friend Meghan O’Rourke—we met in college that same fateful year, 1993-94—who wrote the in the : Where P.
J. Harvey’s wailing or Courtney Love’s anger were shamanistic and almost feral, Ms. Phair was reassuringly human in her appetites, her arrogance, her fear, her inability to quite hit that high note.
Her sexual frankness went hand in hand with a recorded-in-the-garag.