Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville

Gina Arnold is Visiting Professor at the Evergreen State College, USA. As a former rock critic for Rolling Stone, Spin and Entertainment Weekly, she was an early advocate of the genre now known as grunge. She is the author of Route 666: On the Road To Nirvana, (2003), Punk In the Present Tense, (1997) and Exile In Guyville, (Bloomsbury, 2014), as well as Rock Crowds And Power. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature.

Although Exile in Guyville was celebrated as one of the year's top records by Spin and the New York Times, it was also, to some, an abomination: a mockery of the Rolling Stones' most revered record and a rare glimpse into the psyche of a shrewd, independent, strong young woman. For these crimes, Liz Phair was run out of her hometown of Chicago, enduring a flame war perpetrated by writers who accused her of being boring, inauthentic, and even a poor musician.With Exile in Guyville, Phair spoke for all the girls who loved the world of indie rock but felt deeply unwelcome there. Like all great works of art, Exile was a harbinger of the shape of things to come: Phair may have undermined the male ego, but she also unleashed a new female one. For the sake of all the female artists who have benefited from her work-from Sleater-Kinney to Lana Del Rey and back again-it's high time we go back to Guyville.

A passionate re-assessment of one of the most original, groundbreaking, and controversial albums of the 1990s.

Gina Arnold was a highly successful rock writer when this album was released in the early 90s; she's now a scholar and will bring that perspective to an album in which she's still deeply invested

Introduction: Written in my SeoulChapter 1: Guvyille as GhostworldChapter 2: Sonic Pleasure and Narrative rock criticismChapter 3: My Mixed FeelingsChapter 4: Exile State of MindWorks Cited