Liz Phair: "Bollywood"

It’s a question we’ve been asking for the past eight years now more or less, though in the past few days with added relevance and concerned italics: Liz Phair, what the fuck?

Last week, Phair released through her web site a new song called “Bollywood”; everyone who has come in contact with it has reacted, rightly, with simultaneous puzzlement and repulsion, as though asked to solve a Rubik’s Cube made of cat feces. Phair’s music has been on a steady and universally acknowledged decline since the release of her self-titled record in 2003, and conversations about the ensuing disappointment of people who used to respect her have become old hat. Nobody was expecting, in 2010, to be shocked by news that Liz Phair had released an awful song. But here we are, confronted with something that’s bad in such a baffling and unexpected way that it’s made the Internet’s mighty jaw fall agape. Which is precisely why—on a level that is purely theoretical, admittedly a little bit sick and hopeful that I will never have to hear it ever again—I like “Bollywood” more than any of the other pap she’s put out in the past few years.

I’m long over the initial queasiness I had to deal with when the artist behind one of my all-time favorite albums made a brazen—and ever-so-blithely successful; didn’t that first self-titled record make selling out seem so easy?—foray into the mainstream. In fact—and again, this is the theoretical detachment speaking—by now I’ve come to kind of like the second half of Phair’s career as a parable about the dangers of making icons of real people and putting too much personal stock in our expectations of artists. Because, yeah, those records blew, and Phair’s intention of making a profit off her music had become incredibly apparent. But if either of those facts rendered you unable to revisit and enjoy Exile In Guyville (1993), then that’s nobody’s loss but your own. Phair put out three albums that, I think, hold up immaculately. I don’t know what they did for you; for me, they helped me navigate my late teens and early twenties and spoke to me more honestly than most of my closest friends did at the time. So I am content to accept that Liz Phair might never give me anything again; to ask for more from her, personally, would just feel selfish.

Phair’s commercial stuff was bad, and bad in a very blunt way that smelt, unabashedly, of money. So the thing about “Bollywood” that I love is that it doesn’t—I don’t know who in their right mind would ever want to listen to this song twice, let alone buy it, let alone license it for a Mandy Moore movie. And if I’m willing to entertain the notion that queer theory can tell us why Lady Gaga acted out at a Mets game or that James Franco making penis nose-hats is performance art, then I’m willing to concede that this is at least a little bit interesting.

But only to a point. The ultimate tragedy of “Bollywood” isn’t really how bad it is, but that the idea behind it is actually sort of promising. The track’s about making money for your music in the digital age, and how that’s extra difficult when you’re an aging woman with a kid to feed—a potentially fruitful topic that no other artist seems to be interested in exploring candidly right now. Phair’s a sharp, pithy songwriter, and I’d love to hear what sort of insight she’d be able to shed on that sort of experience, were it devoid of her rapping in a voice that suggests an amateurishly reverbed Olmec, or, at the very least, listenable. But I won’t waste my time hoping for that, because I have nothing left to ask of Liz Phair the artist. And as for Liz Phair the person, I can only wish her well on her quest for whatever it is she’s after these days, be it truth, success, or shitloads of m-o-n-e-y money.