Funstyle

Sometime over the Fourth of July weekend, Liz Phair's site announced the digital availability of her sixth album, which nobody knew was coming. The track streaming at her site, "Bollywood", is bhangra-rap about how she ended up doing TV scores out of broke desperation, featuring a bunch of "funny" pitch-altered voices imitating music-biz gladhanders ripping her off. It's one of Funstyle's four key tracks, all in a similar prefab-beats-and-wacky-voices vein; another is "U Hate It", a patchwork thing (with fake Prince harmonies) about how much everybody's going to think her record sucks, unless it's a hit, in which case they'll pretend they all loved her in the first place and her success was their doing. Its refrain goes, "I think I'm a genius/ You're being a peni-us... colada, that is."

There are maybe three main ways to understand Funstyle, the most obvious one being the very real possibility that Liz Phair just doesn’t give a fuck anymore. After a decade of withering reviews, plummeting sales, and a thorough razing of her hard-earned 90s cred, the aging pop mom has been left with no label, no management, and none too many fans. Which explains why this album recently appeared without warning on her (very homespun) website, why it’s being hawked for just six bucks, why the album art is a screencap of Phair’s desktop, and why the tracks aren’t even in the right damn order when you crank ’em through your MP3 machine.

A lot of purposefully cruel articles and reviews have been written about Liz Phair in the past 13 years. What’s really amazing about this ongoing, and never-ending, dialogue surrounding her albums, is the vehement obsession so many critics have in trying to prove that her music is really not worth wasting your time on—even though they waste their time on to it. That is why this reviewer is going out on a limb and saying that her languorously self-released sixth album, Funstyle, is actually quite good.