I'm still keeping an open mind about the 33-1/3 series, which has spawned so many tempting and intriguing album / author combinations over the years, though too often they seem to be disappointments. I suspect they are hampered as much by the series premise as anything. It looks like such a fundamentally sound idea—one writer, one album, one short book—but the execution can get hairy. How are you supposed to spend your 30,000 or whatever words—on details of production, cultural context, pure critique, gossip, memoir, social theory? With library research or interviews and original research or both or neither? Gina Arnold's return to rock criticism after a hiatus of a decade or so for family and graduate school has to be one of the better titles in the series, simply going by the fact that it's one of the few I wanted to start (for me so far the hard part) and then one I was happy to read to the finish.
Arnold remembers Liz Phair's seminal debut album,
Exile in Guyville, and the early-'90s times out of which it came. She lays out how "Guyville" was an actual hipster neighborhood in Chicago, Wicker Park by formal name, ruled by an indie-rock ethos that was largely gendered, and male. Arnold is best when she's getting into these issues and fiercely defending Liz Phair and the album. She tends to cast a rosy eye on the times, and more generally the people surrounding the commercial emergence and fallout of Nirvana, which she alternates with something like rage about the manipulation of indie-rock by the music industry, single-mindedly focused as always on moving units. She more than owns any role she had in an empty commercial process and her sense of shame. In many ways this book feels like an attempt to make amends—to us, and to herself.
