The turn of the new millennium marked a realignment in both global politics and pop culture. September 11th and the seemingly endless wars that followed obliterated the illusion of relative peace and prosperity that, in the late 20th century, lulled much of the Western world into a sense of complacency. The Chicks were blacklisted for speaking out against George W. Bush’s military adventures. And the music industry was on the brink of collapse, rocked by the rise of Napster and the ensuing digital revolution.
Amid all of it, the teen-pop bubble of the late 1990s finally popped. By 2003, artists like Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake endeavored, with varying degrees of success, to break out of the Mouseketeer mold, while ostensibly edgier, more reputable young artists such as Avril Lavigne were packaged and sold as teen-pop with a Hot Topic twist. Lavigne’s success in particular had an audible influence, with Kelly Clarkson and Ashlee Simpson, among others, emulating the power-pop lite of the Canadian singer’s hit “Complicated,” which was co-written and produced by a then-unknown production team named the Matrix.
It marked such a cultural reset that even ’90s indie queen Liz Phair was urged by her label to retool her sound. Phair’s 1998 album Whitechocolatespaceegg had nudged the singer-songwriter in a more radio-friendly direction, but Liz Phair was viewed by many music critics—including the ones at the New York Times and Pitchfork, who, preposterously, gave the album a zero rating—as an attempt at crossover success as craven as those tastemakers’ reviews themselves.
And yet, Liz Phair is still very much a Liz Phair album, as its title suggests. Aside from a handful of tracks produced by the Matrix—including “Why Can’t I?,” which became Phair’s only Top 40 hit to date—the album isn’t a significant departure, sonically or thematically, from its predecessors. “Friend of Mine” is a characteristically cynical rumination on male/female relations, while the self-produced “Firewalker” bears the scrappy, ragtag style of Phair’s universally heralded debut, Exile in Guyville.
The whip-smart, third-wave feminist of those earlier releases is present and accounted for on Liz Phair, but she’s wizened with age: “As I got older I had to step out of the lines and make up my own mind…I can’t feel anymore, but I can fake it forever,” she quips on “My Bionic Eyes.” And the tongue-in-cheek “H.W.C.”—an acronym for “Hot White Cum”—feels like a piss take of Exile in Guyville’s provocative “Flower.”
But while Phair is a feminist, she’s never really been an iconoclast. Even more so than Kurt Cobain, who famously shunned the trappings of mainstream success even as Nirvana actively courted it, Phair embraced the ’70s classic rock that laid the foundation for the alternative and indie rock of the ’90s. Exile in Guyville, after all, wasn’t just a rebuttal to the Rolling Stone’s Exile on Main Street, but an affectionate, even reverent, tribute.
Liz Phair‘s aforementioned hit single, “Why Can’t I?,” is a near-perfect pop song in which a then-recently divorced Phair basks in her newfound freedom. “Isn’t this the best part of breaking up, finding someone else you can’t get enough of?” she marvels. Indeed, the song, and the album itself, serve as a snapshot of a woman—and a female artist in a male-dominated industry—at a crossroads, taking stock of her life and career with the same agency and no-fucks-given gusto that made her an indie darling in the first place.
Just three weeks before Phair’s album dropped, fellow Lilith Fair headliner Jewel made some eyebrow-raising moves of her own. Unlike Phair, Jewel was no stranger to Top 40, but by 2003, singer-songwriters of her particular stripe had been effectively banished from pop radio. Jewel’s fourth studio album, 0304, was an apparent attempt to rectify that development.
Like Phair, Jewel was self-aware enough to recognize the risk/reward ratio of such an endeavor. The video for the album’s lead single, “Intuition”—in which the artist, dressed in a white tank-top and red miniskirt, gets hosed down by hunky firefighters—drips with irony. Not everyone got the joke. In a recent interview with Spin, Jewel recalled how David Geffen took her aside and doled out some thinly veiled sexism masquerading as professional guidance: “Nobody wants this generation’s Joni Mitchell to wear a miniskirt, so knock it the fuck off.”
Despite 0304’s pretense of parody, though, its songs are unapologetically pop. Songs like “Run 2 U” and “Becoming” evoke Ray of Light-era Madonna, but like Liz Phair, 0304 retains much of its creator’s lyrical and musical prosody. The album boasts a familiar mix of kitchen-table commentary (“America”), heart-on-her-sleeve love songs (“Fragile Heart”), and straight-ahead pop-rockers (“Sweet Temptation,” which, with its banger of a hook, could have been a radio hit).
If Jewel believed, as she observes on “Yes U Can,” that “there’s a price on everything/It’s not cheap to buy your dreams,” she seemed to suffer from buyer’s remorse. In 2006, she returned to her roots with the more rock-oriented Goodbye Alice in Wonderland, her feelings surrounding her dalliance with dream-chasing summed up neatly on the title track: “Fame is filled with spoiled children/And we grow fat on fantasy/I guess that’s why I’m leaving/I crave reality.”
As for Phair, in 2021, she reflected on the reaction she received from the rock intelligentsia: “It was a time when everyone had divided up into sides: ‘I’m against this, and that’s what defines me.’ There was a real sense of us versus them. […] I was expected to be representative of something. ‘Be what we elected you to be’ – only I didn’t realize I’d been elected.”
The notion of public ownership of artists and their work inevitably permeates any honest discussion about Liz Phair and 0304—and often overshadows an assessment of the albums’ merits. Phair has claimed that she’s “proud” of that Pitchfork review, even if, incongruous rating aside, it says more about the critic’s preconceived expectations than the album’s actual substance or quality. (For the record, Slant reviewed both albums favorably at the time.)
Two decades on, Liz Phair and 0304 still sound fresh and, in fact, manage to transcend the era’s tropes precisely because of their respective artists’ distinct imprints. For zoomers with a curiosity for pop culture that predates Spotify and TikTok, who deign to give these relics of the Bush years a chance, their authenticity (or lack thereof) won’t matter anyway. To paraphrase Liz Phair’s “Rock Me,” they probably don’t even know who Jewel and Liz Phair are.
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I don’t know if Geffen is guilty of “thinly veiled sexism” on this one. If a roots rock guy from that era (Dave Matthews, Jakob Dylan, Adam Duritz) all of a sudden wanted to go Ed Hardy t-shirts and untz-untz club music or got really buff and was doing, like, “look at my abs” shirts-off vidos and Maroon 5 hooky overproduced-sounding stuff, Geffen may very well have said “What are you doing, bruh” to a male as well. Jewel and Phair have some great writing chops and have put out some excellent music, but I don’t know if I buy the victim narrative that they were oppressed or something. I think sometimes musicians of all stripes veer too far outside their skill set and their fans and the music listener in general should have the right to be skeptical without being accused of “hating” on something that just isn’t up to the standards of that artist’s best work.