My comprehensive dissection of Liz Phair’s career begins in a bartaco, drinking a 14 dollar margarita with my esteemed Together Outrageously colleagues. She was slated to be in Boston that Monday as a part of her tour with Sleater-Kinney. If you’re like me, and worship the ‘90s in a 2013 Tumblr-esque “I was born in the wrong generation” kind of way, the duo feels unmissable. Naturally, the conversation turns to our favorite Liz Phair songs. Some classics are named; the spunky “Supernova” from the aptly titled Whip-Smart; “Polyester Bride” from the effervescent Whitechocolatespaceegg; her iconic one-night stand anthem “Fuck and Run.” As we dive deeper into the Liz Phair discography, it’s hard not to bring up her missteps. Liz Phair’s 2003 self-titled album infamously got a devastating 0.0 rating from Pitchfork upon its release, who deemed it a droll and lifeless record created for the sole purpose of achieving mainstream success. After making a name for herself as an up-and-coming indie rock musician, many viewed the album as Phair’s attempt at selling out; I certainly did. A noticeable departure from her earlier work, Liz Phair became the first pop-rock album to enter her discography. Sure, I did listen to “Red Light Fever” from time to time, but largely my memories of this album weren’t fond. As my friends and I bond over shared disdain for songs like “H.W.C.,” my opinion once again is reinforced– while Liz Phair is great, Liz Phair is not. Alas, I probably won’t go to the show. I have class on Monday nights and I start my new job on Tuesday morning, and I still need to learn my commute, and there is no salt on my rim of my margarita; wait, why am I being charged $14 dollars for a margarita with no salt on the rim? Does bartaco suck?
As I sit and ponder the bartaco business model, Liz Phair leaves my mind for the rest of dinner.
A few hours later, with four small tacos and a costly margarita sitting in my stomach, I get on the train. It’s time to pick which album I’m going to listen to on my trip home, as I dissociate and try not to perceive the Green Line’s familiar stench for 32 minutes. Maybe Liz Phair? Topical! I could play Whitechocolatespaceegg, or Exile In Guyville, or… I mean, or I could play Liz Phair’s self-titled album. That is something that I technically could do. Honestly, It’s been a while since I’ve sat and listened all the way through. Maybe my initial judgment was harsh? Who knows— I have a headache, the faintest buzz, and 32 minutes to kill. Let me reevaluate my opinion. I sit down and press play.
The album is good. I truly liked it. I almost didn’t smell the Green Line.
Liz Phair offers up a wide array of catchy pop-rock tracks; it has a sense of humor, and the same brazen wit that Phair had thus far become iconic for. “H.W.C.” is still unquestionably gauche and weird, but the rest of the album is a fun listen. This, of course, challenged my once-staunch opinion on the album; why did I think that this record was full of duds? As I mentioned, I already had a soft spot for “Red Light Fever,” and “Extraordinary” is often played at my radio station/second home WERS 88.9. “My Bionic Eyes” had a fun punch, and “It’s Sweet” was stuck in my head immediately. As I lay in bed, listening to the final chords of the album's closer, “Good Love Never Dies,” I start to see Liz Phair in a new light. Sure, maybe it was not changing the game, but it was good. Solid. Enjoyable.
It was at that moment I remembered the infamous 0.0 Pitchfork review. A whopping, irredeemable 0. The 0 that unknowingly shaped my perception of Liz Phair.
As Halsey once described it, the “basement that they run Pitchfork out of” was a very different place in the 2000’s. It was more intense, undoubtedly snarkier, and unafraid to question the legitimacy of artists; see this Jet review from 2006, in which they bestowed the band a 0.0 score accompanied by a video of a chimpanzee peeing in its own mouth. If they thought something was lame, the writers at Pitchfork were going to call it lame, likely sprinkling in other choice adjectives to really drive the point home.
Phair’s harsh review came from a time before critics reevaluated the respectability of pop music. Her shift to pop was almost universally agreed upon as a miss, an incorrect move. Pop music was understood by many critics as something bad, so naturally, the consensus was that Liz Phair’s new pop record was indeed bad– the review even begins by stating that Phair’s greatest strength up until that point was “her inability to write a perfect pop song.”
Author Matt LeMey goes on to say, “What [Phair] doesn't seem to realize is that a collection of utterly generic rocked-out pop songs isn't likely to win her many new [fans]. It's sad that an artist as groundbreaking as Phair would be reduced to cheap publicity stunts and hyper-commercialized teen-pop.” Pop is a dirty word here; a dagger to the heart at the end of an already brutal sentence.
What is much more obvious to the majority of music listeners in 2026 is that pop music is not inherently bad. Enter poptimism, or the idea that pop music is legitimate, complex, and worthy of respect. The poptimism mindset-- more so, the anti-rockism mindset-- was widely popularized by The New York Times’ 2004 essay “The Rap Against Rockism.” Ironically, an essay that came out just a year after Liz Phair was released. The author of the article, Kelefa Sanneh, would go on to explain in a 2015 interview with FADER, “Poptimism is partly about respecting what’s popular as a way of respecting audiences and saying, ‘You’re not crazy to love this stuff. I’m going to try to hear what you hear in it.’”
I fundamentally agree with the ideology of poptimism. At its best, it serves as a combative force against elitism and gatekeeping, while allowing creative, genre defining pop music to be celebrated. At its worst, however, poptimism is co-opted by internet warriors and weaponized by the Stan Twitter crowd, used as a crutch when explaining why Tate McRae deserves to be a 6 time Grammy award winner. Conceptually, poptimism is both a ticket to a world of limitless creativity and also a silver bullet placed into the hands of the worst person you’ve ever met, who will assuredly claim that you “hate fun” if you’re not gobbling up slop at the Taylor Swift trough. All things considered, poptimism has allowed talented visionaries like Carly Rae Jepsen, Charli xcx, and Magdalena Bay to receive their deserved praise.
Now, I’m not at all claiming that Liz Phair is a genius album full of genre-shifting songs that was unfairly panned by bitter pimply losers. It was an album full of pretty good pop-rock songs; the issue is that these songs were immediately dismissed just for being pop songs, written off almost immediately. Liz Phair was spit on for daring to make a song with a catchy hook.
Crucially, the flop of Liz Phair had devastating effects on Phair’s career. Fans did not enjoy her genre shift at all; it spawned widespread hate from her grungy, rocker fanbase who were immediately volatile towards the project. For a while, her reputation was tied to this album; an album that was (allegedly) so colossally awful that it inspired “some of the most vitriolic music press in ages,” according to The Washington Post. In 2019, LeMay apologized for his trite review, and explained that he had failed to appreciate Phair's openness to different kinds of music. However, the damage was done. Liz Phair’s name would never carry the reputation it did in the ‘90s. Even into the 2020s, Liz Phair still conjured enough outrage to inspire charming Substack articles such as “The Problem with Liz Phair's Self-Titled Album is That It's an Irredeemable Piece of Shit.” Sanneh’s article was just a year too late. Maybe if poptimism was introduced to the public just a few years earlier, then the public consensus on Liz Phair would be more rational.
I am not the first person to come forward with the daring take that Liz Phair was not a 0 out of 10 album. Maybe there is no point to this piece of writing. Maybe I am just yelling into the ether about how Liz Phair deserves more respect, goddamnit. But, when a ‘90s icon and trailblazer is panned for 20 years for daring to put a pop twist on her sound, all because of anti-pop losers in the Pitchfork basement, it is my sworn duty to educate the masses in any way I can. The panning of this album stunted Phair’s career in a major way; maybe it’s worth reassessing other so-called sellouts from a poptimism lens? Food for thought. I think my 40-something dollar trip to Bartaco was worth it, in a roundabout way. And while I do not plan on regularly purchasing overpriced margaritas from bartaco, it was still pretty decent. It had a nice tang and it went down smoothly; kind of like Liz Phair.
