#25, "Divorce Song," Liz Phair (1993)

150 Favorite Songs: #25, "Divorce Song," Liz Phair (1993)

Kat asked me once, as we were listening to Exile In Guyville for the first time in a really long time, if I'd had a crush on Liz Phair when I was a teenager.

I hadn't, though I'd had to think about it for a minute. I was thirteen when Exile In Guyville was released, and while I'd owned and listened to a copy of the CD, she wasn't on my list of teenage crushes. How could she be? She wrote songs like "Divorce Song" and "Fuck And Run." She was a grown-ass woman. I was just a kid. I didn't know what she was singing about. I don’t know if it’s fully accurate to say that I was intimidated by Liz Phair, but I was intimidated by the idea of her. I had a crush on Shirley Manson from Garbage. That made sense to me.

The songs on Exile were good, though, and it makes me realize what a unique moment the early 90's really were. Because you could have a record that is so explicitly from the point of view of a woman navigating the world of dating and relationships between men and women—a world that I would spend the next bunch of years learning about, albeit from the other side of the divide—that calls out the bullshit that men do. Exile expresses that women, despite what we’re told, often want the same things that men are supposed to (sex, mostly, but like in a chill and fun way). It breaks down the ways people can hurt each other in really simple and subtle ways. It is straightforward about those things, with most of the songs sung in Liz Phair’s flat midwestern affect. And, very importantly, that record was marketed to men as well as women. I didn't buy Exile In Guyville because I was a burgeoning 13 year old feminist boy or whatever; I bought it because Rolling Stone and Spin and MTV told me to. 

A lot of the songs on Exile On Guyville meant a lot to me, and probably helped shape me in ways that I have not really given much thought to. I never had a crush on Liz Phair. But there are few ways to help boys understand how to navigate relationship dynamics with women better than having a straight-talking woman they both admire and are a little bit intimidated by lay it out how the world works in very direct ways. I didn't fantasize about Liz Phair being my girlfriend when I was a teenager. ;But the songs she wrote did make me want to grow up to be someone who could attract a woman who reminded me of the sort of person she was on Exile In Guyville. 

"Divorce Song," meanwhile, is a something of an outlier on the album. Most of Exile In Guyville is brash and empowered. Even "Fuck And Run," which is a very sad song, too, is those things in its way. But "Divorce Song" stung a little bit. It's still forceful: you've never been a waste of my time / it's never been a drag / so take a deep breath and count back from ten is a powerful invocation of expectations, but it's also vulnerable in ways that few songs about a relationship that isn't working are vulnerable.

So often it is the little things—the things that we express when we're upset, that we immediately regret, and then have no ability to undo—that doom a relationship. It's funny, because "Divorce Song" is about grown-up things that, when I first heard it, I had no real experience with. But when you did the things you said were up to me / and then accused me of trying to fuck it up more or less summarizes the way I broke up with my first girlfriend my sophomore year of high school, the same as it does some experiences that would happen once I was an adult. These things don't necessarily get easier.

Which is what's so special about "Divorce Song," and Exile In Guyville in general—there's wisdom in the song that I needed when I was thirteen, but it's not sophomoric or simple. That's the power of songs like these, that are so straightforward and smart. Sometimes you don’t need to dress it up any more than that. Liz Phair was a very smart and very talented artist even when she was in her early twenties and writing these songs, and she knew what she was doing with them. What’s amazing about them is that I was a thirteen-year-old dipshit, and the songs are so clear that I was able to figure it out, too.