eople can bitch about being a woman in the movie industry all they want. But it’s far rougher to be a woman making music in her mid-30’s these days; act your age, everyone accuses you of making “Mommy Music” – as if every song you write is about changing diapers and fixing tuna casserole for supper. Act or dress like a kid, however —or worse, act and dress like a kid—and prepare to be read the rrrriot act by fans accusing you of selling out in the worst possible way.


As pointed out in recent features in The East Bay Express and Salon, it’s hardly fair – it’s “unphair”, if you’ll pardon the pun. Unfortunately, while ageist, anti-entertainment industry diatribes can be interesting as magazine articles, I can’t imagine they’d be any better pop music lyrics than ones bitching about your record label are. Which is why it’s so refreshing when the occasional female artist uses her advancement in years to do something special with it.


Not that the press will always recognize those qualities, however; in fact, nobody can seem to write a word about Liz Phair’s newest record without mentioning the “age thing” (this writer included) – confusion is particularly abound as to why an artist of Phair’s stature would give two shits about the teen pop market. But Phair has been candid in interviews about her interest in getting the album, infamously helmed by Avril Lavigne’s production team, The Matrix, into the teen market. The result has been critically regarded as a phair(sorry)-to-wretched experiment in self-marketing, as if the ploy were either cynically insincere or hopelessly misguided – or both. There’s been an almost unanimous cry: the woman who once liberated a generation of young women with low self-esteem with a single record couldn’t be abandoning us now, could she?


Thankfully, that’s never been my problem. I’ve never felt any loyalty to Liz Phair whatsoever – in fact, I’ve pretty much loathed Liz Phair for ten years, largely on the dubious critical basis that I dated—and broke up—with one of those women in college. She lived across the hall, had a dangerously low opinion of herself and even looked like Phair, that is, if she had been cast as Winnie from The Wonder Years – lanky, wide-eyed and with a hint of fresh-faced feminine sex appeal. So, it was no surprise that after our relationship predictably and messily fell apart, I couldn’t hear a note of Exile In Guyville or its follow-up Whip-Smart without recoiling in memory of her.


And because I went to Phair’s alma mater, Oberlin College, where she was utterly revered, I heard those records one whole helluva lot. It was as if my ex-girlfriend was somehow exacting her final revenge – blasting her vitriol out dorm windows at me, showing up on the cover of Rolling Stone, playing shows to fawning twenty year-olds in our college chapel.


Still, I couldn’t escape the feeling that Liz Phair—and by association, my girlfriend—was some kind of fraud – that her empowerment pose was little more than a put-on designed to settle scores against men who’d done her no wrong but to get involved with her in the first place. So when word was bandied about that producer Brad Wood was her musical svengali – that he had been the brains behind Exile and Whip-Smart both and had been brought in to rescue White Chocolate Space Egg four years later, I felt somewhat validated.


Fast forward to 2003, when word of Phair’s new post-divorce, “teen-pop” record arrived. I was positively giddy and beyond smug – at last Liz Phair would be exposed for the no-talent impostor she was all along! That the critics agreed she had reached her career nadir was all the reassurance I needed. My years of torment had at last been vindicated.


But then a funny thing happened: I found myself actually enjoying the record. I’m not about to say that Liz Phair is genius or that it’s even her best – hell, I don’t appreciate her earlier releases enough to make any such claim. Still, on any objective scale, the record seems miles better than the 0.0’s and one-star lashings it’s been subjected to. It all leads me to wonder whether my intense dislike of her earlier records has somehow uniquely qualified me to enjoy this one, unencumbered by the sense of betrayal that has collectively overwhelmed her longtime fans.


I say this because it seems to me that lost amid all the clamor to pin Phair down as some kind of opportunistic sell-out is the most obvious take on what she’s doing: grappling with how stay in touch with her vitality. It’s in every fiber of the record, revealing itself in the clunkiest, most uncomfortable ways: that Matrix production, the “tough chick sexy” artwork, the lyrics about “playing X-Box on your floor” with younger guys. As a friend of mine said, Liz Phair doesn’t really sound like, well, Liz Phair – it sounds desperate. And he’s right.


But when you think about it, it does feel like Liz Phair – and that desperation, that continuing search for her identity is what gives the record its resonance. The whole record screams of rebirth, of an artist not only throwing off the chains of expectation, but in several cases perverting them to her own advantage.


Nowhere is that on better display than “H.W.C.,” her ode to using a particularly warm and pallid bodily fluid as a skin cream. Aided by dreamboat-of-the-moment, Pete Yorn on guitar and one of the few songs on the record not produced by The Matrix or Michael Penn, the song has a bouncy little beat, an infectious chorus and a honkingly funny harmonica solo. It also has become the symbol of WHERE IT ALL WENT WRONG FOR LIZ PHAIR, with no component—its lyrics, music, arrangement—having escaped the collective critical fang. “H.W.C.” has been called “tasteless,” “degrading” and “vain” – its production “glycerin-slick” and an abortion of her sexually-frank material of yore.


To that, I can only say, “of fucking course it is.” I mean, how can a song conflating the two meanings of the word “facial” not be tasteless? Tastelessness is so obviously the point, cleverly playing on Phair’s rep as a rock n’ roll Gloria Steinem, the artist who gave women the right to say “fuck” and sing about getting laid. On a record that’s supposed to show Phair reaching out to today’s fashion- and appearance-obsessed teenage girls, a Young Miss-style endorsement of the product making her skin so “clear” and “hair so bright” could hardly be more appropriate.


But look past the—ahem—tongue-in-cheek humor that curiously offended the press so and you’ll notice that “H.W.C.” is a little more than a randy joke – it’s one of Phair’s most intricate little creations. There’s an infectious pop tune, “glycerin-slick” to be sure, but rendered with a disarming sincerity that cuts beneath the surface, suggesting there might be something more to lines like “It’s the fountain of youth, it’s the meaning of life” than the most obvious reading would indicate. It’s first evident in the deliciously vulnerable catch in Phair’s voice during the otherwise humorous “You’re my SEE-EE-EE-EE-cret beauty routine” – by the time the same melody arrives in the second verse as, “FAA-AAA-ce it one of these days, without you I’m just another Dorian Gray,” the picture’s decidedly more complex, equal parts overlooked hurt, vulnerability and genuinely youthful enthusiasm (not to mention literary snob). Add to that a melody as sticky as its subject matter and you’re left less with Phair chasing her followers or deliberately throwing her career off the rails than an artist quite brilliantly closing the circle begun with her first Girlysound recordings.


Oh, and before I forget – there’s one other reason the song has been included in every playlist on my iPod for weeks: it’s sexy as hell. Yes, in that porn queen way that made Liz Phair famous, but also in that “I know her” way that made her important.


So I guess I owe Liz an apology. I can’t speak for all of the lunkheads out there who are taking the piss out of you now, Liz, but I can say sorry for the diatribes I sent your way before. And the fact is: I like this little experiment and love that song because it suggests so much more than it says – though probably too naughty to be released as such, it’s as good as any single I’ve heard in a long while. In fact, in a year filled to the brim with killer singles, “H.W.C.” just might be the cream of the crop.