LIZ PHAIR FUNSTYLE
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Phair’s idea of “rapping” is not, say, Lil Wayne’s idea of rapping. Or, say, a rap fan’s idea of rapping. Or even, like, a generous Peaches fan’s idea of rapping. It’s more like that day in the late 80s or early 90s when your parents walked in on you watching The Box and attempted an imitation. (Though, in fairness, Phair’s rapping is heavier on both content and musicality than my mom’s, and I can only guesstimate your parents’ skills based on those of my own.)
“Bollywood” is a very hard song to hear. It’s hard to hear because then you can’t unhear it. You can’t deny that here, now, Liz Phair, who has skated—not undeservingly!—for nigh on 17 years on the brilliance of Exile, can no longer do so. Funstyle is just the album to bulldoze your nostalgia. On top of that, it’ll give you a good case of what my fellow Reader critic Miles Raymer calls the douchechills.
But where Love and M.I.A. are sinister, Phair is sad. The disparate currents running through the album—the “funky” vignettes, the rapping, the few songs that actually sound like her—all evoke the same strange kind of longing. On “Satisfied,” she sings to an old beau, “You’ve got the world at your feet / With everything you need / Tell me are you satisfied? / It all comes easily to you / With everything you do / Tell me are you satisfied?” As she reframes Paul Westerberg’s famous query, you hear both frustration and envy. Funstyle isn’t just death of a dream—it’s what life is like when you wake up and realize all you lost to the fantasy, a nostalgia for what never was.
