Old Dogs, New Tricks

This past week two pop-music stars of different magnitudes both released records via nontraditional means. Liz Phair distributed her new album, “Funstyle,” as a digital download from her own Web site, and Prince handed out cheap nfl jerseys
his new album, “20Ten,” free with the Daily Mirror and Daily Record newspapers in England and Ireland. Both records were greeted with some suspicion, in part because the artists involved have had rocky relationships with the record industry. Phair, after rocketing out of the gate with “Exile in Guyville,” in 1993, released a series of followups with diminishing returns, had a brief return to the spotlight as a far more manicured pop star, and then sank out of sight again, in part due to her separation from ATO records last year. Prince, after dominating the charts in the mid-eighties, had a much-publicized war with Warner Bros. and then became the world’s most powerful and prolific independent artist; he has tried soccer jerseys everything from distribution through an online record club to one-off relationships with labels like Arista and Sony.

The new albums are interesting in that both are statements of purpose, though it’s not always clear what the purpose is. Phair wrote on her Web site that the songs on “Funstyle” “lost me my management, my record deal and a lot of nights of sleep,” but cautions that they not be seen as crass product, which was the charge levelled against her 2003 album “Liz Phair.” “Love them, or hate them,” she writes, “but don’t mistake them for anything other than an entirely personal, un-tethered-from-the-machine, free for all view of the world, refracted through my own crazy lens.” That lens, often, is trained on a mirror. “Bollywood,” which was released as the first single (or rather, was streamed on her Web site), is a kind of hyped-up Laurie-Anderson-style monologue about the fact that Phair no longer has a place on today’s pop-music landscape; it seems to take swipes at artists like Ke$ha and M.I.A. It is also ramshackle and somewhat self-pitying, though salvaged by Phair’s sharp sense of soccer uniforms
humor; far better is the similar closer, “U Hate It,” which is built from a dialogue between two industry bigwigs who disparage Phair as a has-been until her new album—presumably the one we’re listening to—wins an award, at which point they abruptly about-face and embrace her again. (The entirely false awards-acceptance speech that forms the centerpiece of “U Hate It,” in which Phair vapidly thanks her friends and associates, her voices speeding up as she goes, is almost chilling.)