(Credits: Far Out / WFUV Public Radio)
Wed 3 September 2025 21:30, UK
Feminist trailblazer, guitar hero, fan of the occasional nip slip, Liz Phair is known for many things. But her second LP, Whip-Smart, fails to make the cut, despite the empty promises made by Capitol Records about the album.
It’s late 1994, a year with highs and lows for the music scene. Nine Inch Nails have released their second studio album that would go on to sell three million copies, Kurt Cobain has been found dead at just 27, and the likes of Weezer have blessed us with their groundbreaking debuts.
Still reaping the rewards of her newfound fame, 27-year-old Liz Phair picks up the phone to yet another interview request. According to critic Bill Wyman, it rang “literally incessantly” at this time. Why? Because all eyes were on the budding star, who, the year before, had released her debut, Exile in Guyville, an album that would sell more copies for Matador Records than any other.
When she began to record a string of new songs in Chicago and the welcome respite of the Bahamas, the alternative world turned its attention to what was set to be Phair’s groundbreaking second take, Whip-Smart, which served as the product of a six-figure joint venture between Matador and Atlantic Records.
As part of the deal with Atlantic, Phair was informed that she could direct her own music videos, something the artist relished in and quickly took to be a personal film project. “I kept trying to assert my artisticness,” Phair told Slate, adding, “I could be a director, sure. Anything to stop what was happening, which was that my job was going to be a performer.” Sadly, the project never reached its potential as she realised that her plans might just be too big for their boots, and she was dealing with “getting on with just being Liz Phair”.
Atlantic’s president at the time, Danny Goldberg, told Billboard that Whip-Smart was a “worthy successor” of Exile, going as far as to say that it will “hit gold quickly”. While executives at Matador hoped for only 10,000 or so copies of Exile to be sold, Atlantic certainly raised the bar with Phair’s second album, launching a target of 500,000 units. For reference, when Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind, was released in 1991, the band’s record label, Geffen, hoped to sell just 250,000 copies, despite Nirvanamania eventually leading to these units, and more, being met weekly.
But it wasn’t just the film project that flopped before it could walk. While Whip-Smart is far from being a failure, it was unable to meet the lofty expectations and predictions of Atlantic Records. The album went on to sell 600,000 copies and eventually became gold certified, but it took five years to get there, contradicting the immediate success of Exile, which went on to be listed on Rolling Stone‘s ‘500 Greatest Albums of All Time’.
Opening with tracks ‘Chopsticks’ and ‘Supernova’, the latter of which remains Phair’s second-most-streamed song on Spotify, Whip-Smart served as a departure from the sexual frankness of Exile that so many fans, mostly male, enjoyed. In many ways, her second album served as a reminder that there was more to the artist than what society wanted, especially from her.
Speaking to Pitchfork, Phair admitted that this conservatism fuelled her musical career: “It was my gateway drug into alternative”. On a similar note, or to put it more bluntly, she once admitted to Request, “I didn’t lose my virginity when I was 12, and I don’t want to fuck everyone until they’re blue. People expect me to be Liz Phair all the time, but I’m Elizabeth Clark Phair and I have an entirely independent existence.”
Whether it was this departure or the chaos that preceded it, Whip-Smart couldn’t fulfil its true potential. Still, Phair looks back on the record with fondness, noting, “For the most part, that record is a wonderful snapshot of us succeeding at staying true to ourselves in the middle of the chaos”.
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