The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [56]
A word or phrase may seem to mean that Mick is angry. But something in the next verse might suggest that, in fact, the phrase is ironic or satirical. The coherence test requires that the more you interpret, the more you circle back and revise various parts of your understanding, your work must converge toward a coherent, unified idea or set of ideas. What should not happen, as philosopher Martin Eger puts it, is that we “go drastically astray or oscillate forever between opposing poles—we converge.” 35 Without convergence, it’s time to retool and start over.
Really? You Guys Are into Music?
As for Phair’s song-by-song response, start with is Guyville itself, a place Phair described as
a specific scene in Chicago—predominately male, indie-rock—and they had their little establishment of, like, who was cool, who was in it, who played in what band. Each one wore their record collection, so to speak, like a badge of honor. Like, ‘This is my identity, this is what I’m into, and I know a lot about it.’
This was Bucktown and Wicker Park, neighborhoods in Chicago that were informal home bases for the “alternative” bands getting attention at the time, such as Urge Overkill, Smashing Pumpkins, and Material Issue. When Phair arrived after graduating from Oberlin in the 1980s, she met the guys there head-on. “Really? Okay, so you guys are into music. Watch—I can make music.”36
But Guyville is not just eighteen different takes on what it means to be a woman in a (predominantly) male musical world. That’s part of it, but Phair goes down Main Street and is most interested in what exile really means, and the different forms it can take. On Main Street there are at least three kinds of exile in play—sexual or romantic exile in regard to the opposite sex; exile in the geographical sense that involves ideas about other places, travel, and searching for a literal (or sometimes metaphorical) home; and a kind of exile or alienation from one’s self, or the self one wants to be or has been, that I call existential exile.
Romantic Exile
An example of romantic or sexual exile are the tenth songs on each album, Keith’s “Happy” and Phair’s “Fuck and Run.” They have similar tempos and describe life from a first person per-pective. Keith sings “I need a love to keep me happy” and he’s got two—Anita and his son Marlon. Phair wants to be happy, too. Phair “woke up alarmed,” so it’s clear right away that she’s not so happy. But she’s just like Keith. She’s wishing for the kind of relationships he’s got. Instead, she keeps finding herself with guys who, unlike Keith, don’t need a love to be happy. They get up out of bed and say they’ve got “a lot of work to do.” “Whatever happened to a boyfriend,” Phair asks—“the kind of guy who makes love cause he’s in it?”
In other songs, Phair’s not so much identifying with the Stones as playing and flirting with them. In “Loving Cup,” Mick is intoxicated with desire for a woman who won’t give in to him. “Give me a little drink from our loving cup,” he pleads in every chorus. But in “Mesmerizing,” Phair’s response, she wants to be the hypnotist who can put such a spell on her beloved: “I want to be mesmerizing too … to you.”
Geographic Exile
An example of geographic or spatial exile is Main Street’s “Shine a Light,” track 17. It’s a lament and a prayer for someone down and out in an alley and someone stuck in hospital room “10-0-9.” Phair’s “Stratford-on-Guy” puts herself in a similar kind of limbo, on a airplane in seat “27D.” Sonically, Phair’s guitar and the flanged drums echo the phasey organ of “Shine a Light,” but most of the connections between the songs are substantive. The light Mick calls to shine down on his downtrodden friends appears in Phair’s song as the setting sun. It sets “to the left of the plane” and fills the