This is how I saw it: Liz Phair needed to reclaim some of the energy that surrounded her out-of-nowhere indie sensation debut, Exile in Guyville. By most measures, her follow-up effort, Whip-Smart, was an even greater success, climbing higher on the album charts, selling more copies (at least initially, though Exile in Guyville has outpaced it by now), and yielding a couple of decent modern rock radio hits. But her coolness quotient took a pretty sizable hit. She became a Rolling Stone cover girl instead of a Village Voice icon. That’s not inherently bad — and there are plenty of indications … Continue reading One for Friday: Liz Phair, “California”

One of the things I appreciated about my particular era of college radio was the sense that we were still allowed to reclaim artists. I get a sense — perhaps incorrectly — that the denizens on the left end of the dial, few as their number may be these days, no longer view that as part of the mission. Once an artist crosses over to more commercial terrain or otherwise falls out of favor with college radio programmers, they seem to be gone forever. The notion of college radio acts still had just a little lingering wisp of that new … Continue reading One for Friday: Joe Jackson, “Stranger Than Fiction”

Anton Fier was a weirdly mythic figure to me when I was in college, plying my trade at the student-run radio station. He existed within the nation of independent music that was beyond my personal level of coolness, like distant figures on the vista. He was a founding member of the Feelies, a band I loved immediately, but he left after the band’s acclaimed, obscure debut, Crazy Rhythms, an album I’d never heard because its status as a low press run, long out of print artifact of greatness put it well out of reach. He was a member of John Lurie’s Lounge … Continue reading One for Friday: Golden Palominos, “Omaha”