Best Rock-It Out of 1993  

 Liz Phair

Liz Phair was quietly triumphant in 2018, touring, talking, taking the measure of twenty-five years since “Exile In Guyville,” when she took on the man-stacked music scene of Chicago and elsewhere. “Exile” was reissued in May, as well as the music from her early “Girly-Sound” cassettes. The New York Times took notice in Jessica Bennett’s profile of Phair: “Ms. Phair was defiant and sexual and unapologetic and vulnerable at once—a kind of girl-next-door casually swinging a sledgehammer at rock ’n’ roll as we knew it, singing about sex, love and power in a direct, unmediated way that few women before her had. Part of her punch came from the tension between her clean-cut Midwestern look and her explicit exploration of desire and death. ‘Guyville’ catapulted her—twenty-five, unemployed and smoking a lot of pot in the Wicker Park neighborhood—to the cover of Rolling Stone, under the proclamation, ‘A Rock & Roll Star is Born.’” The fifty-one-year-old Phair sees it this way: “I’m sort of a feminist spokesmodel for, I guess, putting your voice out there, believing you have something to say and maybe sex-positivity or something. I have been placed there because there was a sense that I was the girl next door who just picked up a guitar and went onstage and said what everyone was thinking. And it felt empowering to me and it felt empowering to the people that heard it, especially the women. So, the accidental feminist spokesperson.” (Ray Pride)

Best of Chicago 2018