the Girly Sound entry on Wikipedia

[petitedeluxe]

Sorry to be so random on my first post but...

I was at Wikipedia's Girly Sound entry a few months ago and I thought I saw, in addition to the image they have now of a xeroxed picture of Liz Phair with her arms crossed, separate covers for the Yo Yo Buddy Yup Yup Word To Ya Muthuh and Girls Girls Girls tapes...was I hallucinating? Does anyone know what I'm talking about or did I just imagine it all or maybe I just got it confused with something else?

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

[wooden and alone]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girly_Sound

where?

[JeremyEngle]

The album artwork isn't up there now -- don't know if it ever was -- but it ought to be. It would help raise consciousness of the fact that Girly Sound was the artist, and Yo Yo Buddy Yup Yup Word to Yo Muthuh and Girls Girls Girls were two of the albums.

[TrampolineFrSpace]

At least there is a pointer to the girlysound site at the bottom of the wikipedia page.

Maybe the main page should add the covers for the two cassettes, in addition to the songs??

[Denneval]

This is one of the two I put on the entry:


The images were deleted despite referencing where they came from. I suppose someone could try again.

[TrampolineFrSpace]

Kudos for trying.

[Denneval]

I updated the track listing; it was absent and it made me sick, so I did something about it.

Blah.

[JeremyEngle]

I don't see anything wrong with having a tracklisting for the two tapes (wasn't there one up to begin with?), as well as displaying the original artwork, but I don't get the special significance assigned to the so-called Bliss & Phetish "release". There were, after all, cassettes circulating for probably five years before Patrick Oltraver tried to digitally remaster them (rather unsuccessfully, I might add), burn them to CD-R, and distribute them to a small faction of the online fan community. If anything, the Secretly Timid CD bootleg had a wider distribution and at least as much legitimacy -- it not only predates Oltraver's project but was actually sold in record shops and got more song titles right than Oltraver did, e.g. 'Batmobile' and 'California'. Yes, it's abbreviated, but so was the Bliss & Phetish set, which actually boasted, "The Complete Liz Phair Girlysound Demos" (there are at least 4 things wrong with that title).

As for the rest of the notes appearing with the tracklisting:

1) I don't necessarily think it's accurate to say that 'Ant in Alaska' was "re-recorded" as 'Go On Ahead'. Some chords and a strum pattern were apparently borrowed from the former, but they really are two entirely separate songs. Same goes for 'Thrax'/'Jealousy'/'Tell Me You Like Me'. If it seems necessary to note that her later songs appropriated sections from particular Girly Sound songs, the notes need to be more specific. Additional consideration would have to be given to songs like 'Soap Star Joe', 'Stratford-on-Guy', etc., which in their appearances on Guyville are much easier to call re-recordings. Additionally, the track lengths of the subsequent re-recorded songs (and 'Go On Ahead') seem irrelevant to the Girly Sound entry, especially if that information is supplied on the separate Wikipedia entries for the respective albums on which the newer songs appear.

2) The phrase  "one of eight that had never been released prior to their 2006 debut" definitely needs to be amended or abandoned altogether. Those songs certainly were released to the initial recipients of the tapes in 1991, which was the actual year of their debut. Somewhere down the line, someone -- a fan with no personal ties to the artist, I'm guessing -- got crafty (or nefarious, if you prefer) and edited the tapes so that as many as 10 tracks never saw the scope of distribution afforded to the rest of the set (assuming she held the third tape to the 14-track standard set by the first two). This really was nothing more than an unfortunate accident occurring along the chain of fan distribution, but the phrase used in the Wikipedia entry doesn't really reflect that at all.

3) The version of 'White Babies' that "appeared from an answering machine recording" was credited to Liz Clark Phair on the Kicking Giant section of the compilation Chinny Chin Chin: 4 N.Y. Bands. Kicking Giant was Tae Won Yu's band. 

4) 'Don't Hold Your Breath' is actually printed as 'dn'tholdyrbreath' on Liz's original cassette artwork, and 'In Love With Yourself' appears as 'in love w/yself'. Actually, there are several discrepancies between Liz's original type-written tracklisting and what appears in the Wikipedia entry. Almost all the song titles appear in all-lowercase letters (then again, so do the songs on Whip-smart).

5) When one thinks about the obscuring of many Girly Sound songs, the incorrect song titles, the misidentification of the tapes as "girlysounds" or "The Girlysounds Demos," the absence of the original cassette artwork,  and -- perhaps most importantly -- the misconception that the name Girly Sound was referring to the cassettes, when in actuality it was the artist -- the moniker Liz used in place of her own name -- it seems reasonable to conclude that the least possible significance should be assigned to the information -- or rather the butchering thereof  -- supplied by anonymous fans over the years. We know enough now to set the record pretty straight without relying on past misinformation at all.

I hope I don't come across too curmudgeonly; I'm really only concerned with historical accuracy, but there's been an inordinate level of inaccuracy wherever these cassettes are concerned, and it just seems best to try to fix it whenever possible.

Comments? Corrections? Death threats?

[Denneval]

JE, thanks. Seriously.

I'll rework the article... just remember that you're one of the few (those that do not include XRay ... vomit) who have the knowledge we need to get it all down right. By all means, as you already do, point any inaccuracies out immediately, if the effort isn't too much to ask.

I felt that the listing of the Bliss and Phetish tracks were necessary, Wikipedia-side; probably all of my efforts in cleaning the article up would have been thrown out, had I removed that whole thirty something list of songs without including some memory of them. I'll slowly phase them away.

The original track listing that I put up somehow was removed, along with the original artwork, because Mesmerizing doesn't have enough credibility ( - the Wikipedia talk page gives me shit about it).

Should I say re-worked instead of re-recorded?

[TrampolineFrSpace]

Hey, how about we take the images and everything that they threw out and place that material on girlysound.com?

I think that we're going to have a guitar tabs section, which I need to work on the initial prototypes for, but we could also have the information that JOG was intending to place in the wikipedia page as well.

Since the wikipedia page points to girlysound.com, someone looking for more information will just find it here.

I still need to work out the logistics on getting pages uploaded (I can't upload, but I'm sure that I can work something out).

I do have a "scratch place" over at the halfcenturyproject (my personal website), so I can post prototypes over there and then when it's done, we can upload to girlysound.com.

Let me know what y'all think.

[TrampolineFrSpace]

---

I was wondering about those previously unreleased girlysound tracks when my wife and I walked over to JBox this morning for breakfast.

2) The phrase  "one of eight that had never been released prior to their 2006 debut" definitely needs to be amended or abandoned altogether. Those songs certainly were released to the initial recipients of the tapes in 1991, which was the actual year of their debut. Somewhere down the line, someone -- a fan with no personal ties to the artist, I'm guessing -- got crafty (or nefarious, if you prefer) and edited the tapes so that as many as 10 tracks never saw the scope of distribution afforded to the rest of the set (assuming she held the third tape to the 14-track standard set by the first two). This really was nothing more than an unfortunate accident occurring along the chain of fan distribution, but the phrase used in the Wikipedia entry doesn't really reflect that at all.

If we assume that a few copies of the tapes are given out to friends of Liz (we have the names, but that's not important at this point) and that they started making copies, then there shouldn't have been any "critical" or "control" spots in the distribution chain.  In order for some songs to disappear, they would have had to have disappeared early in the chain.

This also goes towards what seems to have happened.  It seems that individual songs were being copied and sent instead of intact copies of the original tapes.  That just seems weird to me because it is much easier for people to just copy the whole damn thing and send it on along instead of going to the trouble of editing and splicing.

When there were hours of material for the wcse sessions, I can see that someone would "edit" those down to a manageable quantity, but three casette tapes worth of material should have remained relatively intact during early generation copies.

Just one of those things that don't make sense to me.

[shmoopy]

If we assume that a few copies of the tapes are given out to friends of Liz (we have the names, but that's not important at this point) and that they started making copies, then there shouldn't have been any "critical" or "control" spots in the distribution chain.  In order for some songs to disappear, they would have had to have disappeared early in the chain.

This also goes towards what seems to have happened.  It seems that individual songs were being copied and sent instead of intact copies of the original tapes.  That just seems weird to me because it is much easier for people to just copy the whole damn thing and send it on along instead of going to the trouble of editing and splicing.

When there were hours of material for the wcse sessions, I can see that someone would "edit" those down to a manageable quantity, but three casette tapes worth of material should have remained relatively intact during early generation copies.

Just one of those things that don't make sense to me.

Well, going back to 1991, Molly Neuman (http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Club/2471/00000154.html) talks about how Tae Won Yu (the person who was responsible for circulating the majority of the Girly Sound songs around) sent her a mix tape with 2 Girly Sound songs on it. It goes to reason that the incomplete bootlegged copies of the tapes that were most often traded were compiled  from various sources-hence the incorrect song titles, fluctuation in sound quality, lack of album titles, and the general lack of knowledge about Girly Sound.

[DoctorM]

I have a bit of a problem.
Throughout the Wikipedia entry the earlier CD releases are called the Bliss & Phetish recordings.

I HAVE those CD's.  I got them from Bliss & FETISH records in the late 90's.

Can anyone explain the name discrepancy?

[DoctorM]

Look for lack of ANY evidence to suggest that anyone EVER called that release Bliss and Phetish (except this website), I'm going to update/correct Wikipedia.

[DoctorM]

Just so you all know.
I have updated Wikipedia.  All references to "Phetish" have been replaced with "Fetish".
As far as I can find, the Wikipedia page was the ONLY place that has ever used the "Ph" spelling.

AllMusic guide, my CDs (with cover art and company logo), and every other Phair information site calls the publisher "Bliss & Fetish".

I assume someone derived that from Phair/Fetish, but Liz Phair bootlegs were not the only albums they made.
I recall a pretty extensive list of artists in their bootleg collection.
In fact the GirlySound CDs were B&F5 and B&F6 (catalog numbers).
That means there were 4 other albums before they even started into Liz Phair material.