Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Robert Christgau | A |
| Entertainment Weekly | A |
| Los Angeles Times | |
| The New York Times | (favorable) |
| Pitchfork Media | (9.6/10) |
| PopMatters | (10/10) |
| Rolling Stone | |
| Slant Magazine | |
| Spin | (10/10) |
The resulting album was released in 1993, receiving widespread critical acclaim. It was the number one album in the year-end critics poll in Spin and the Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll.
Exile in Guyville was also a mild commercial success. The videos for "Never Said" and "Stratford-On-Guy" received airplay on MTV. By the spring of 1994, it had sold over 200,000 units, peaking at #196 on the Billboard 200 and was Matador's most successful release so far. In 1998, it was certified gold by the RIAA.
Phair reacted to the reception of Guyville, saying "I don't really get what happened with Guyville. It was so normal, from my side of things. It was nothing remarkable, other than the fact that I'd completed a big project, but I'd done that before... Being emotionally forthright was the most radical thing I did. And that was taken to mean something bigger in terms of women's roles in society and women's roles in music... I just wanted people who thought I was not worth talking to, to listen to me." The sudden success of the album also generated a somewhat negative response from the local Chicago indie music scene. Liz commented, "It's odd... Guyville was such a part of indie. But at the same time... I was kind of at war with indie when I made that record." Another problem that arose from her success was also dealing with her stage fright.
Despite this, the album inspired a number of imitators, and the lo-fi sound and emotional honesty of Phair's lyrics were frequently cited by critics as outstanding qualities. It frequently appears on many critics' best-of lists. It was ranked 15 in Spin's "100 Greatest Albums, 1985-2005". VH1 named "Exile in Guyville" the 96th Greatest Album Of All-Time. In 2003, the album was ranked number 328 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The album moved one spot up in their 2012 revised list. In 1999, Pitchfork Media rated Exile in Guyville as the fifth best album of the 1990s. However, in their 2003 revision of the list, it moved to number 30.
Read more about this topic: Exile In Guyville
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)