Generation Franchise

Last fall, around the time Britney Spears’s memoir The Woman in Me was published, I went to the Brooklyn stop of Liz Phair’s 30th anniversary tour for her debut album Exile in Guyville. Exile is one of the epochal albums of the 1990s, a Gen X classic; it came out when I was a freshman in college, and every track on it reminds me of a certain lonely dorm room, a wintry campus, an unfinished term paper on W.H. Auden. The audience, made up of people who mostly looked just like me, was there to relive those memories of a very different time. We sang along to every note. Phair—who in the 90s was a famously nervous and unpredictable performer—didn’t engage in much stage banter, but she looked relaxed and happy. For the very last song of her encore, she played the song she’s most famous for—not from Exile but from her “reboot” album, Liz Phair, released ten years later: “Why Can’t I?”