The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [54]
Why not take Phair at her word, assume she consciously created Guyville as a song-by-song response to Main Street, and figure out what her claim means?
Along the way, there’s a good philosophical explanation for why it is that fans, critics, and even her friends and producers have found her claim so enigmatic. What her song-by-song response doesn’t mean is that her songs sound like their counterparts on Main Street. The assumption that they should goes back well beyond Exile on Main Street to certain ideas popularized in Plato’s Academy, where Plato taught his thought-by-thought responses to his predecessors (though, it seems to me, his responses weren’t always improvements and they did nothing to help us understand the two Exiles).
Répondez S’il Vous Plaît
With eighteen songs a piece, there is automatically a one-to-one relationship between each pair of songs. But what kinds of relationships are they? First, they could be merely formal, with Phair deciding that each song on her album would have some structural or musical qualities in common with its counterpart on Main Street—a similar (or opposite) tempo? The same key? The same or a similar lyrical structure? I say “merely formal” because these relationships come easy. Any album with eighteen songs can be said to have a “song-by-song” relationship with Main Street as long as the relationships include things like “being very different” and “not sounding half as good.”
Phair obviously had other kinds of relationships in mind, too. Is each song on Guyville some kind of psychological or emotional response to the corresponding song on Main Street? Phair may have regarded Mick and Keith’s songs as Rorschach inkblots, listened to them and thought about them, and then said to herself, “Okay, now I’ll write a song like that, but do it in my own way.” Like an association test—tell me what comes to mind when you hear this guitar riff or this lyric?—Guyville might be Phair’s attempt to personalize the feelings and emotions she hears in Main Street. Finally the relationships might be critical or theoretical, meaning that Phair’s songs respond to Main Street’s ideas about life, people, romance, relationships, exile, and the rest of the human circus depicted on the album’s cover. From this angle, the song-by-song response sets up something like a debate or discussion about things that go beyond the craft of songwriting and musical aesthetics.
If you make a playlist that puts Phair’s responses next to each song on Main Street, you’ll hear all three kinds of relationships.
In part, Guyville is a sonic response to the world’s greatest rock’n’roll band and its macho, masculine sound. Phair’s “girlysound” tapes, containing demos for some of the songs on Guyville, point directly to her unmistakeably light, nimble guitar playing. Compared to Keith’s crunchy Les Pauls and Telecasters, her Fender Duo-Sonic sounds clean and fast. And her voice has none of Mick’s bark and shout.
Emotional relationships abound, too, in so far as Phair’s songs, like Mick’s and Keith’s, often look at romance, sex, and relationships, though they emerge through a different prism and sensibility.
Yet the most interesting responses, at least to me, are the ideas Phair puts on the table alongside these formal and emotional or affective relations. Yes, Mick and Keith know a thing or two about exile and the human condition, but they don’t know everything. And they’re not twenty-two, female, and trying to launch a music career in Chicago in the early 1990s.
Bloody Hermeneutics
Phair’s “song-by-song response” is real, complicated, and not usually obvious. You have to compare each pair of songs deliberately and analyze them in terms of these three kinds of relationship and follow the clues, usually lyrical, that show Phair’s mind at work in response to what Mick and Keith originally wrote. In no cases is her “song-by-song response” rule-bound or automatic—as if she had said, ‘when Keith plays it like