memorized breaths

i'm the vengeful woman

The archetype of Vengeful Woman in pop music is responsible for a large chunk of my music taste, aged 12 and on. For some reason I feel as if it was during the 90s where this archetype became, if not born, then at least solidified. The sociological reasons and ramifications of which I will not go into in much depth, but suffice it to say, the more lenient social mores of a decade ago allowed greater opportunity for Women Getting Pissed Off and Doing Something About It. Certainly X-Ray Spex wanted to put it up yours, Irma Thomas told you that you weren't gonna hit it, and Chrissie Hynde was perpetually coolly disinterested, but they paved the way rather than gave birth to the myriad forms of Vengeful Woman: Bikini Kill's feminist studies sloganeering, Hole's victimized attacker, PJ Harvey's bloody terrifying psychoses, and Fiona Apple's husky syncopated growls, just to name a few of the ones I've adored. I even like the bland or terrible ones, like "Sunny Came Home" and even Avril Lavigne's assorted misguided teenage bloodlust.

I suppose one of the few things I would criticize about the Vengeful Woman archetype is a lack of humor or awareness regarding the melodrama, though Polly Harvey's "Bend you over Casanova" is pretty hysterical, considering her panting. Which is why country music has been, to my mind, the greatest practitioners of Vengeful Woman, mixing threat and hilarity in equal measure, whether it be in the lyric, sound effect, or delivery.

The greatest example I can think of is Loretta Lynn's "Fist City," challenging a woman who's been cavorting around with her man. When Lynn sings "The man I love, when he picks up trash/He puts it in a garbage can/And that's what you look like to me," it is a witty putdown, and coupled with "stay outta my way/if you don't wanna go to Fist City" makes it both hilarious and terrifying, like most threats tend to be.

Vengeful Woman is directly related to Woman Done Wrong, which is a strength of the genre. There seems to have been a resurgence in country music of Vengeful Woman, thanks in large part to the success of the Dixie Chicks' "Goodbye Earl." The song is already a hoot when delineating the differences between Mary Ann and Wanda: Mary Ann leaves for greener pastures while Wanda stays in town, where "all she found was Earl." Natalie Maines' delivery of the word "Earl" here is uproarious in its shrugging dismissal, with a touch of bite alluding to Earl as a domestic abuser, in contrast to the joyous way she trills it in the chorus, making murder sound like both catharsis and party.

My favorite new additions to the Vengeful Woman canon both come via reality television, of all places. First there's American Idol behemoth Carrie Underwood, whose "Before He Cheats" manages both slow-burn revenge fantasy along with striking and illuminating detail, much of which is uproarious in its disdain. Underwood deserves tremendous credit for completely nailing the derisiveness she feels towards both cheatin' boyfriend and the gal he's cheating with. There's a wonderful dancing rhythm to how Underwood sings, voice dripping with scorn, lines like "He's probably buying her some fruity little drink cos she can't shoot whiskey" (! funny because this new girl clearly LACKS BALLS, what do you need with a horrible girl like that? A horrible girl that sings "some white-trash version of Shania karaoke"?!!!!!) and "He's probably dabbing on three dollars' worth of that bathroom Polo," lines whose attention to detail speaks worlds about its characters, meaning the chorus's decimation of the cheater's "purty little souped-up four-wheel drive" is, in this post-Beyonce age of romance-as-capitalism, appropriately cathartic and vengeful: The lyrics have spelled out this guy to be one of those awful dudes who cares more about his truck than his girl.

The second new entry into the Vengeful Woman canon comes via Miranda Lambert, who got her start on Nashville Star, apparently some sort of American Idol for country musicians. "Gunpowder & Lead" takes the domestic abuse of "Goodbye Earl" and one-ups it not with cute fantasy but by mixing it, amazingly, with something approaching the venom of Bikini Kill's "Suck My Left One." If in "Goodbye Earl" the Dixie Chicks protagonist poisons black-eyed peas (with a huge dose of wink), Lambert wants confrontation, setting up an ominous scene, darkly poetic in contrast to Underwood's blunt literalism. What finally elevates Lambert's Vengeful Woman ode is the propulsion of its attack, the explosion of the guitars in the chorus along with Lambert's throat of bile, the challenge of the abuser's masculinity, and showing that little girls aren't all sugar & spice. Lastly, "His fist is big but my gun's bigger" is as great, funny, and subversive a female appropriation of male phallus since Harvey's "50 Ft. Queenie." A sentiment I wish I could express more often, but thankfully there'll always be the Vengeful Woman in music to come up with something as great once more.

even when i was seventeen

When Matador Records and Pavement teamed up to release the tenth anniversary edition of Slanted and Enchanted in 2001, I had high hopes that they would do the same for Liz Phair's Exile In Guyville in 2003, unaware of the fact that she had been basically sold by them to Capitol after 1998's merge release of Whitechocolatespaceegg (this was also before her wildly maligned 2003 self-titled disc on Capitol, which I'll get to later). 2003 passed without a reissue and with much hand-wringing over Phair's new musical direction, leaving me with only the promise of a 2004 reissue of Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, which I never ended up buying mainly because I'd reverted back to my 14 year-old assessment that Pavement was kinda bullshit. Well it took another five years, but I got my wish, kind of: a reissue of Exile In Guyville (the remastering of which basically comes down to "um, you can kind of hear the drums better?"), though without much of the goodies I was expecting, namely a full-on collection of all her pre-Guyville recordings under the name Girly Sound (which are all available on the internet anyway). But the unexpected, sweet surprise: an extremely abbreviated concert tour wherein Phair would perform Guyville from start-to-finish. How prog.

Emily, Caitlin and I went to last night's show at the Hiro Ballroom and experienced a collective orgasm. At one point I drunkenly exclaimed, "This is catharsis!" And may have wept. Ahem. But first things first: we met up beforehand at Hogs and Heifers, one of the more aptly named bars I've ever visited, considering it is apparently some kind of biker bar with scantily clad female bartenders, oodles of bras and some construction worker hardhats comprising much of the decor, along with various road signs. They also almost exclusively had country music on their jukebox, which only reinforced the previous week's remembrance of the jokily sincere country band I tried to start in college, and how I kinda wanted to start it up again (so, dear reader, of which I think there are four: if you or anyone you know is a guitarist/fiddler/banjoist/jug player who would like to write over-the-top melodramatic country songs wherein the protagonist finds his wife cheating on him with his best friend and then--heartbroken--drives into a telephone pole while slugging a fifth of whiskey, as well as cover insanely beautiful old Americana and c&w standards, please get in touch. I cannot play guitar without taking five minutes in between chords and am "not that good a singer," according to my lovely roommate, but I've got heart!). Basically, Hogs and Heifers was an experience that mixed hilarity, oddness, skewed sexuality, and an undercurrent of terror, which was a perfect way to start an evening with Exile In Guyville.

I got drunk at Hogs and Heifers. And then got more drunk at Hiro. I am one to not drink at shows, because I find it lessens my perspective of the performance. But there I was, getting drunk and reliving my past, much of which is entwined with Phair's 1993 debut. This would bite me in the ass later, as I left Emily and Caitlin after the show because I could barely see or stand, and then they ended up meeting Phair and getting a picture. Emily, who saw Courtney Love last year at the same venue (which led me to dub Hiro as the "premier venue for aging alternaqueens"), gave this description:

i told liz phair she was better than courtney love and she jumped up into the air and did a "yes" move yanking her first/arm down (both arms in succession, actually).

Awesome.

Phair came on stage and it was like some strange homecoming, the crowd showering her with applause and love and offers to have her children. Early in the evening, she commented, "I knew this was gonna be my favorite show," and we confirmed it for her with our enthusiasm. From note one, it was an intense drunken singalong. Something nutty happens with people and this album; it's so personal, an important benchmark for so many people, especially when you were there from the get-go. I remember being twelve and hearing it for the first time, taped by a friend's older sister. I was just beginning to realize my complicated feelings towards men, and here came songs like I'd never heard, songs like "6'1"" and "Fuck and Run" and "Divorce Song" and "Flower" that shocked me to the core and basically provided an emotional template I'd yet to experience but knew would come. Earlier today, in a completely unrelated conversation, I remarked to my friend George that the only way I could have sex with anyone anymore was that "I have to kind of dislike them. I think this is all Liz Phair's fault."

I once read an astute critique of Guyville as some kind of, and I'm paraphrasing here, "smart person's report back from sexual warfare." A fucking report. It certainly does sound vaguely academic and collegial, Phair herself likening it to a thesis, what with its supposed track-by-track response to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street (I can at least hear it on "6'1""). Aside from that, there's the sound, which to my ears is the perfect distillation of 90s indie rock. As Tom Breihan so wonderfully elucidated today:

A few years back, when she was working with Avril Lavigne song-doctors the Matrix, Phair was claiming in interviews that she'd never given a damn about that whole indie/underground willfully-obscure aesthetic, that she'd always wanted to make widescreen pop music. That's a claim I'd be inclined to believe from anyone else, but Exile in Guyville is too perfect a realization of that whole indie aesthetic. In fact, for me, it's possibly the most perfect realization, the one that goes a million miles toward at least explaining the existence of every godawful Pavement-clone still sending ironic noodles out into the world. Guyville
had classic-rock slither and serious hooks, but it also had every last tenant of that aesthetic: muffled and pillowy production, flatly conversational vocals, lyrics that artfully but directly depicted very specific tangled-up feelings, jangly riffs, the vague sense that the singer was having a laugh at the listener's expense at least part of the time. For somebody who never gave a fuck about indie, Phair sure knew how to bring the pseudo-genre to its absolute platonic ideal.

Which gets to an idea fervent on Guyville and much-discussed on the reissue's included documentary: this is a record about being in a scene. Of course it's about neurosis, and of course it's about the horrendous sexual landscape, and these were things my naive twelve year-old self gravitated towards. But after being involved in a "scene" when I went to school in San Diego, I realized how perfectly the social politics and the lust/disgust dynamics one experiences towards the personae of your specific scene are etched on Guyville. It's a post-college, pre-adult world of drunken stumblings into already-doomed relationships with disinterested denizens. It's the sound of a privileged suburban kid slumming it to feel cool. It's about the yearning for acceptance and stature amongst a world you find loathsome. Is that not (a facet of) indie rock in a nutshell?

In the documentary, titled Guyville Redux, Phair remarks to Matador labelheads Gerard Cosloy and Chris Lombardi that she made the record so that she could be "famous in the neighborhood." Little did she know the firestorm she'd set off, the Pazz & Jop poll-topping, the Rolling Stone cover, the intense backlash she'd receive in the neighborhood of indie rock Chicago as well as the greater neighborhood of pop culture. She'd release four more records in twelve years: the underrated follow-up Whip-Smart, which suffered from expectation and comparison to the debut even if it was basically Guyville Pt 2; the "adult contemporary" Whitechocolatespaceegg, fraught with domestic drama and a prevailing sense of "is that all there is?"; the aforementioned self-titled pop move, wildly trashed by circles both hip and mainstream, even as I now find it an interesting and bold--if certainly flawed--record; and Somebody's Miracle, which I have never heard in its entirety as it sounded to me full of subpar Sheryl Crowisms. None of these records received half of the acclaim of the first, and the great consensus is that Phair's musical output was one of diminishing returns, a betrayal of her talent far worse even than Weezer, because who the hell expected all that much out of Weezer in the first place? In a review of Phair's self-titled record, Joshua Clover once wrote in the Village Voice:

As with early Meat Puppets, Phair once didn't seem to know how songs worked; tracking their unpredictable advance was sweet as watching baby's first steps. If they pitched down the stairs, well, that was kind of fun; they weren't real babies with tender fontanels after all...I'll always leave the light on for Liz; listen, Neil Young's made about 20 bad records, and we still love him. But it's grievous to be confronted so abjectly with the fragility of art-making—how all the elements can still be there, all the signs of genius, but no amount of calculation can render them vivid and compelling.

Which to me seems right on the money. Phair may never write a song as ghostly, sad, and thrilling as "Canary" again, but she's still too talented a songwriter to not craft something on the level of "I come when called; I come, that's all." Her dossier of one-liners are full of these kind of gems. And relistening to Guyville recently only hammered that home. I used to call it "my favorite record not written by Bob Dylan." But not even Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks connects with me on the same level, gets the same amount of airplay, as Exile In Guyville nowadays. That can certainly change, but if I'm being honest with myself, I should now admit that I've known all along that somehow, someway, Guyville sits at that lofty perch in my memory and mind. I knew it today, yesterday, five years ago, fifteen years ago, even when I was twelve.

the temperature in webster hall was certainly not as cool as kim deal

Tickets for last night's Breeders show went on sale in February; George and I, being the huge dorks that we are, bought tickets the day they became available and have been waiting and waiting and waiting for four months to finally see Kim and Kelley and Mando and Jose and "Cheryl from Florida" rip through a catalog that makes up a good chunk of our life soundtrack (George and I seem to have went through the same obsessions, from the Breeders to Fiona Apple to Fleetwood Mac, though I suppose his Guided by Voices is my X, given his Ohioness vs. my LAness).

We almost didn't go.

After hunkering ourselves away from the heat in my now thankfully air-conditioned room, we drank beer and scarfed down dinner from the new delicious Mexican restaurant in our neighborhoood (me: flautas, him: enchiladas, shared: nachos), which immediately seemed to sap our energy. Also the prospect of standing inside a hot and sweaty Webster Hall. George said, as he was sprawled on my bed in listlessness, "If it wasn't the Breeders, I wouldn't go." We then talked about how maybe we're just getting too old for shows (me: "Luckily the people we want to see only tour every five years. Or have sitdown shows"). But it was the Breeders, so off we went.

The hottest concert of my life was roughly two years ago, when Sleater-Kinney played their last ever New York show. It was baking in New York that night, and being in Webster Hall was an oven inside that oven. My clothes were plastered onto my skin, and my sweat commingled with that of everyone in attendance, jumping up and down and screaming and paying tribute to those rock heroines saying farewell. I'd never been so hot and exhausted in my life, but it was worth it: it had all the fire and passion that a rock show is supposed to have, and I don't think I'll ever see anything like it as long as I live.

That show was on my mind as we headed to see the Breeders. Not that I thought they'd create anywhere near the frenzy that Sleater-Kinney whipped up (for sure, the emotion in knowing that was the last time I'd ever see them had something to do with it, and certainly had something to do with the performance as well, though on seven occasions I'd never seen S-K give a less-than-phenomenal performance), but that maybe the actual temperature inside Webster Hall would match.

Not quite, but close. And you could say the same thing for the Breeders themselves.

I'd seen the Breeders on their comeback tour, as they were playing shows in and around LA far before the release of 2002's Title TK. I saw them in December 2001 or so at the Glass House in Pomona, giving a rousing performance of their old tunes; the joy that night was intense, nostalgia holding up a "Welcome back" sign. It was one of the best shows I'd ever attended.

Last night was probably better. Because once again, they'd been away too long, and once again we were ready to welcome them. And they are also probably a better band than they were in December 2001; they interact and cohere in a more organic way, although when you get to play a drum part like the one in "Divine Hammer" or a bassline like "Cannonball," I bet organic comes easy.

There's something not quite right about the Breeders. They are typically indie rock in many ways (at least, how it used to sound, emphasis on rock, and not the nancyboy bedwetting that's become so prevalent over the past four years): haphazard, sloppy, alternately muscular and slight. The Deal sisters are by no stretch great singers; Kelley seems to overcompensate with a clipped, almost robotic delivery, whereas Kim, well...Kim's smoked a few too many cigarettes in her day. You can almost hear her throat dissolving in shards at times. And yet there's something intangible and unexplainable about how right Kim's voice sounds, despite her technical deficiency. She stole the spotlight in many a Pixies song, she manages to completely own songs by Hank Williams and the Beatles and the Who, and then writes songs that seem impossible for anyone else to sing but her. And in full disclosure, the name of this blog is taken from what is easily my favorite ever Deal performance, from the Amps' "Bragging Party": "You are what I need to hear, so fill the air with memorized breaths," as great a tribute to the power of a voice as I've ever heard.

The Breeders are great when you're drunk. Just about everything is better when you're drunk, but for the Breeders it makes sense. Maybe it's Dayton (hello, Bob Pollard). Kim Deal writes songs that sound like intoxication. There's the surfy siesta that turns into a jackhammering in "No Aloha." The lovely, sleepy buzz of much of their recent output, most notably "Night of Joy," but also in older tracks like "Glorious" or "Mad Lucas." The disjointed mood shifts and shouts in "Cannonball" are obviously the work of somebody on something. And then there's "Iris," whose opening guitar line + following riff conveys complete punch-drunk, woozy wobbling. One of my favorite memories is of hanging out at a friend's house one night while his parents were away, a cooler of Budweisers at our feet as we sat in the gazebo in his backyard, passing a joint around while listening to Last Splash.

And then there's their stage presence. Again: something not quite right. The Deals celebrated their 47th birthday last night, Kelley still looking like a soccer mom, Kim still looking like a truck driver. As they entered the stage, the crowd serenaded them with a "Happy Birthday" that was aborted when Kim said "Thanks" and immediately began making assorted noises on her guitar to drown out our singing. Kim does not stop smiling. And when she ceded the stage to Kelley during their cover of the Tasties' "It's The Love," she laughed uproariously as Kelley smiled, playing the guitar solo while paying intense attention to her fingers' positioning. And then our resuscitation of "Happy Birthday" at the end of the show, as Cheryl from Florida brought out a cake, all the while Kim flipping everyone off and calling them/us "motherfuckers."

From Pod to Last Splash to the Amps' Pacer (of which Kim once said, "I should've just called that a Breeders record") to Title TK to Mountain Battles, last night, every song was a hit. So much so that by the end of the first encore, I didn't realize they hadn't played one of my favorite Breeders songs, "Saints," until that opening riff came buzzing into my ears.

"Thanks for joining us on this hot motherfucking day," Kim said afterwards.

Summer is ready when you are.

Setlist:
Tipp City (the Amps)
Huffer
Bang On
Shocker in Gloomtown (Guided by Voices)
Divine Hammer
Night of Joy
No Aloha
Pacer (the Amps)
We're Gonna Rise
It's The Love (the Tasties)
Walk It Off
New Year
Cannonball
I Just Wanna Get Along
Happiness Is A Warm Gun (the Beatles)
Safari
Iris
German Studies
Empty Glasses (the Amps)

first encore:
Overglazed
Drivin' on 9 (Ed's Redeeming Qualities)
Here No More
Saints

second encore:
Fortunately Gone