I’m nowhere near being tired of this landmark album
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First off, let me clear up the business of the title of this article before I get pulled up on it. Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair’s legendary debut album was actually released in 1993. That makes it 32 years old. However, my connection with the album began 25 years ago in 2000, when I discovered it during the first year of my law degree at University College London.
As my family will readily attest with a wink and an eyeroll and a barely suppressed guffaw, at that time, music-wise, I was heavily into what came to be known as my “waily women”.
Waily women
Basically, if you were a woman in some kind of emotional pain or anguish and you picked up a guitar or sat down at a piano and wrote songs about it, I was going to buy your album. Tori Amos, Ani Difranco, Heather Nova, Paula Cole – I was all over the map with this genre. Completely obsessed.
Looking back, I realise that I was in an intense phase of self-discovery. And my way of approaching the task of self-formation was to seek out strong female voices who, through their songs and poetry, would tell me all about their interior lives so I could explore the vast landscape of possibility for female identity for myself.
These ladies smashed the prism through which I’d been taught to think about myself into tiny shards, rearranging them into a kaleidoscopic new world so much more various and expansive than the narrow bounds I’d been brought up to stay within.
It was an exciting time – but probably also highly annoying for anyone I was around when listening to my music who didn’t share my enthusiasm for the genre.
Discovering Exile in Guyville
Whilst searching for new artists on still-rudimentary music websites on the still-rudimentary internet, I noticed Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair coming up again and again. After the 10th recommendation, I decided this was kismet and went down to the old Virgin Megastore on London’s Oxford Street. As you did back in the pre-streaming world of the early 2000s, I found the album by flipping through the alphabetically-ordered CDs in the racks of albums for which demand was low. Plastic-clack-clack-clack. After about half an hour, I found it – the only one in the shop. I scurried back to my student halls and put it on my little portable stereo.
As with so many other albums in my waily women back-catalogue, Exile in Guyville was a tough first listen – especially for someone who was mostly used to splashing around in the shallower and less turbulent mainstream waters of Madonna’s music.
But I knew immediately that Exile in Guyville was a very special album. Structured as a song-by-song response to The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St., it is a confrontational and unconventional portrait of young womanhood in the late 20th century. No flowery or lovey-dovey lyrics here. No fairy-soft voices caressing the ear in a listener-friendly, non-obtrusive fashion. Phair’s deadpan vocals come right out to get us, telling us in no uncertain terms about the world as she sees it.
It’s not personal
While the album is often labelled “confessional”, Phair has stated that the songs are not based on her own life experiences. They are stories told from an imaginary location – Guyville – a smalltown kind of place with a smalltown mentality where “men are men and women are learning”.
And, as far as I could gather from these songs, the women who populated Guyville harboured thoughts, attitudes and desires which were matched to the time, but not to the place. Guyville is a place where modern trends manifest a little bit later than everywhere else, you see. For women, that meant living in a world where they are basically free and equal but still dealing with the frustration of those attitudes and rights not yet being fully lived out on the ground.
With her songs on Guyville, Phair sketches out the interior world and thoughts that this mismatch creates in the female psyche. So brutally honest and unusual are these private female thoughts that, to the rest of the world, they seemed like a series of social aberrations.
A whole catalogue of identities
Women singing so straight-out about matters that were all too real to us in our lives but not quite accepted by the mainstream? Knowing that you had certain freedoms and rights but you can’t quite land the plane and redeem them? I could relate – and that was why I became so fascinated by Guyville, with its imperfect and unpolished feel and flat repudiation of female norms. It was exactly the rawness and sheer lack of apology that I wanted in music – and to claim for myself in life.
One of the greatest things about Guyville is that – even though the imaginative place from which they sprang was the same – every song on the album is a stand-alone statement, quite unrelated to the others. It’s less a storyline made from a chain of songs than a series of snapshots of individual female experience. With Guyville, you’re essentially being presented with a gallery of 18 different women, 18 different voices. For someone who was on the hunt for her own identity, it was the perfect album.
I used to lie on my springless little student bed in Bloomsbury, listening to Exile in Guyville on my headphones and watching the traffic lights on Tavistock Square change from red to amber to green and back again out the back window. Acoustically sealed off in my own private world, being spoken to in a voice which opened up possibilities to me rather than closing them off.
What makes a good album great
Truly great albums are the ones where your experience of them changes over time and you keep finding something new in them – even though the songs haven’t changed.
My relationship to Exile in Guyville has indeed shifted and evolved over the years. Sometimes, I’ve gone years without listening to it before coming back and finding that its message to me had changed. Which songs I gravitate to in 2025 are not the ones which stuck in my head on a loop when I first bought it 25 years ago.
At first, I loved the easy rock of “Never Said”, as well as the casual cowboy slouch of “Johnny Sunshine” and the frank release of “Divorce Song”. However, in the last 10 years, my attention has been drawn almost entirely to track 2, “Help Me, Mary”.
At just 2 minutes and 17 seconds, the song is at least a minute shorter than most modern pop and rock songs. But it’s got a lot to get off its chest and has some of the best lyrics in indie music to say it.
Just a woman in a man’s world, asking for some grace
Put simply, “Help Me, Mary” is one of the best musical representations out there of the inside of a woman’s mind as she tries to make her way in a man’s world. Knowing that you’re operating in an environment run largely by men to suit their needs and natures. Seeing that it’s full of bullshit and unfairness that you constantly want to call out – but you know just as well that that won’t do you any good. In fact, it’s probably going to throw you back because the back-talk will get you a solid reputation as a difficult, awkward or aggressive woman – a pitbull in a basement. So you bite your tongue and keep buggering on.
It’s about knowing that things shouldn’t be this way for women – they should be far easier by now. But all change can’t happen at the pace you would like it to.
Meanwhile, your thoughts keep on running free below the surface. And sometimes, you get really, really mad.
Help Me, Mary captures the boiling internal disdain that happens to you when you have to carry on in such surroundings, making yourself smaller and selling yourself short to get on. When you just have to pray for grace to help you continue in the hope that – in the end, you’re going to come out on top. As Phair sings in the closing bars of the song:
I’m asking, dear Mary please/Temper my hatred with peace/Weave my disgust into fame/And watch how fast they run to the flame.
A reminder of an uncomfortable past
That’s where we women were at that point in the 1990s, keeping our voices down, not rocking the boat and still putting up with far more crap than the rights we had been granted should have allowed. With so many women sharing the same frustrations, there was always going to be a point when that monologue left our collective interior, made contact with the outside world and forced it to change.
And in 2018, it finally did: we got #MeToo.
Post #MeToo, Help Me Mary has weathered further and taken on yet another shade: historical value. It’s now a looking glass through which we can reflect on how things used to be before we girls finally spoke up and forced the world to listen.
In 2025, it’s a song of past, not of present. I can listen to it with the privilege of distance and with the satisfaction of a challenge overcome.
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Related articles:
My favourite albums…and the best tracks on them
My 5 favourite lyrics of all time
What’s the big deal? A millennial discovers Taylor Swift
Marc Rebillet and the culture of complacency
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