Liz Phair’s ‘Stratford-On-Guy’ Shows Us A View From Purgatory
When Liz Phair released her 1993 debut album, Exile In Guyville, she was speaking to the idea of being a woman in a Chicago Rock scene that didn’t exactly seem full of female contemporaries at that time. ‘Stratford-On-Guy’ was specifically written as a reaction to those feelings.
Directed by Liz Phair herself, the video conveys two important motifs: The feeling of escapism & the anxious purgatory of being in limbo.
The entire video is a hazy, dreamy piece featuring Phair on an airplane at night; staring out the window and putting into words the city skyline slowly drifting away from her view, 30,000 feet in the sky.
She is a person who has decided to break free of her surroundings and get out of town for good. But with that comes a certain type of meditation on life. Imagine being in her position. You’re literally transitioning from one situation you can’t take anymore to a completely unknown one. You can’t go back, but you can’t look forward either. You’re just there. 30,000 feet above the earth. Stuck in a big metal tube for what must feel like days.
The idea that you’re being forced to look out a window and watch your old life shrinking away from on high is, as Phair points out late in the song, akin to something straight out of a movie.
The whole scene isn’t remotely frightening, per se. But the collection of blurry panning shots & woozy drifts across a sleepy airplane combined with Phair’s down-tuned & discordant instrumentation behind the verses sets a mood that lands like a fever dream. Both the song and video work perfectly in tandem to make you feel stuck in a void; forced to deal with your own existential thoughts.
The video does cut into this tone a little with some passing moments of Phair and her band goofing around on the plane and eating glow-in-the-dark spaghetti in a black-lit kitchen. But these moments fit in aesthetically enough that they don’t detract from that overall feeling of hanging between phases that Phair articulates so well.
If you have ever taken a leap of faith and jumped at making a life altering change, you know that actually waiting for that chance to process can be the worst part. So many questions and concerns to deal with when you get to your new life. Did you leave any threads hanging in your old life? Well you can’t do anything about them right now except to either ignore them or let them stew in your head as you sit still and wait for your in-flight meal.
It’s that unsettling limbo and malaise that Liz Phair is able to tap into so well here. In watching this video, we’re merely a passenger with her. Able to walk away at any time. But even in this short time with ‘Stratford-On-Guy’ Phair is sharp enough that she is instantly able to get across such vibrant emotions from her window seat in purgatory.
Shoutout to BrianStack153 on Twitter for the music video suggestion. You can recommend a music video for me to review by reaching out below:
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