Lisa Lisa And Cult Loeb

BY LISA CRYSTAL CARVER

Click Here am do

Click Here Vice: Tell me about the filming of the “Stay” video. It’s all over MTV right now.
Lisa Loeb: How did you get your look and your way of carrying yourself?
You look like a dancer.
There’s one moment in the video where you’re sort of crawling and you snarl slightly at the camera.
It evokes a feeling. A lot of people can play a guitar; not as many can evoke.
Are you a rebel or a good girl or a dirty girl?
What kind of fan letters do you get?
Are you Jewish?
Does that have anything to do with anything?
There are these bad boys in trouble all the time—they feel that you possess the love of a good woman who could, should you bestow it on them, redeem them. But you’re sort of “out there” a bit beyond mere good girl, in that perhaps you could understand them.
One person said your lyrics are perfect for people in their 20s who are no longer what they used to be but are not yet what they’ll become.
Can you describe the feel of New York City right now, in 1994?
Do you go back to Dallas at all?
What’s the tone in Dallas, compared with New York?
Sounds like what you’re doing in New York.
If this were the future, he’d be asking you, not Juan.

THE SQUAT-DWELLING ABORTION-GUILTY DREAMER

Scott Doyle: You [Lisa Carver] have called Lisa Loeb “Natalie Merchant lite.” Now here’s the thing. Natalie Merchant you want to sleep with but you kind of don’t because she’s too matronly. Lisa Loeb… You could fuck Lisa Loeb. You have a shot. Lisa Loeb is like the girl who works at the coffee shop. She’s fuckable but accessible. Nice but dirty.

Vice: Do you seriously think you have a shot with Lisa Loeb? You don’t think she’d be scared of you?
No. I could fuck Lisa Loeb. Lisa Loeb is like one of the guys. She’s smart, she’s funny, but she’s one of the guys. And I think Lisa Loeb is a dirty little girl deep inside. Hearing Lisa Loeb, for the first time in my life I want to live in New York City. Your 20s are all about having shitty relationships. Lisa Loeb sings the way you want to make a girl feel. You want to make a girl sing those songs to you. You imagine the people you left behind going, “Stay!” Or to hear those songs and think of me. She sings the songs I want other girls to feel about myself. “Do You Sleep?”—one of the most brilliant songs ever written.

Do you operate a squat?
Yes.

How many times have you been arrested?
Just once.

For what?
Actually I was PC’ed for attempted suicide. I had a pregnant girlfriend and we were splitting up. It was the night she was getting an abortion.

Oh my God! Well, I’m not going to include this in the Lisa Loeb interview!
Why not? Why not! As I said, I’m 22 years old, in the middle of this horrendous relationship where I don’t know if I want it to last or if I want it to end. You’re in the middle of a lot of life choices at 22. Your life could go either way. You’re at that cusp of either entering real adulthood or “I want to drink coffee and listen to Soundgarden all day.” Lisa Loeb sings to that. She’s like bubblegum, but she’s deeper than bubblegum. She’s one of those girls that a lot of guys listen to but don’t talk about. Tori Amos is one of those girls. Liz Phair. Angry women, but you could hang out with them. It’s a new thing in 1994.

What’s PC’ed?
Protective custody. Means you’re going to hurt someone else or yourself. When you spend a night in the drunk tank, you’re usually PC’ed.

Do you think your lifestyle makes you more or less qualified to love little Lisa Loeb?
More. Oh, definitely, more.

Could you describe your ideal date with Lisa Loeb?
She would sing to me as we sat in fucking Battery Park by the Hudson River.


THE BUSINESSMAN

Keith Newell: While on a business trip in Austin, the vice president of debt and loan collections blew off a dinner meeting with clients, leaving me alone to deal with them. What was he up to? I gave the night auditor at the hotel desk $5 to ring me when he came back in. I already suspected his defection had to do with Lisa Loeb, as I’d previously caught him blowing off another client lunch only to return with two Lisa Loeb CDs, which he’d tried to pass off as presents for his wife. I checked the listings, and sure enough Lisa Loeb was playing that night in another part of Texas. He was obsessed. His love for Lisa Loeb was a dark secret as he was such a ladies’ man, and her cutesy head tilting and advanced-style glasses were not what our sexist, high-earning male coworkers would consider hot. The desk clerk rang, and I rushed downstairs. In an effort to wring a confession from him in the middle of the night, I told him I thought Lisa Loeb was hot in an unattainable way and he need not hide his infatuation with her from me.

He sullenly kept staring at the lobby floor and said, “I’m over her.” He wouldn’t say anything more. Seeing her live, I guess, he got too close to the wizard behind the curtain, and the reality was too much for him—or too little.


THE DEGENERATE CURMUDGEON

When did you first hear or see Lisa Loeb?
Mike McPadden: In my office at Hustler. “Stay” came on the TV. I thought it was this perfect hunk of despicability. There are things I really fucking hate, but they’re works of genius. Flawless execution of their creator’s vision that serve to successfully masturbate the audience. I had that reaction to “Stay”—there are no words to convey the grunting horror that I felt, yet admiration for its brilliance. You have this dress; you have the cat; you have these glasses. The thing that struck me first is she does this semi-cocked-eyebrow/Elvis snarl. At one point she does it on her knees and just looks in the camera and warbles: “Sta-a-ay.” That moment stayed with me and I hated it so much I got a little turned on by it.

Who is the audience it was aimed for that it perfectly manipulated?
The media are trying to tell Generation X that people like you and me—these fuckups—are cool and they should want to be like us. It’s for mainstream people of our age who think it would be a good idea to leave society… but they don’t actually do it. So you could watch the video of her empty apartment and pretend that’s your crash pad. I’m appalled by Reality Bites, the concept of it. I really hate it.

You have a real work ethic, as pretty much everybody in the porn industry does, and people in Reality Bites do not. 
These succubi find fringe-dwelling artists/writers/musicians “cool” and therefore co-opt legitimately interesting work, boil it down free of toxins, and splatter the castrated version back out into the mainstream under the guise of “alternative” culture. These are the white people who listen to public radio and shop at food co-ops and think they’re leaving the mainstream but they’re not. They’re just another formatted lifestyle/belief system. There’s no difference between liberals and Republicans, if you’re in lockstep with your party.

My take on Lisa Loeb is she represents to fallen Catholics in and out of jail, the fighting Irish of your kind, what a normal life would be like, how her love could transform you. But from listening to you, I’m feeling more that her message is to normal people that they could transform themselves into someone like you!
She’s a double-edged blade. No, no, I think you’re right. She serves as a portal. There’s the ragtag, seceded-from-society folk, and then there’s society folk themselves, and let’s meet in the middle, in this womanly portal… with the glasses and the dress and the cat.