Goodbye To Guyville

Album: Stull (1992)
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Songfacts®:

  • When you see the word "Guyville," you probably think of Liz Phair and her 1993 album Exile In Guyville. But she didn't come up with the term - Urge Overkill did, which she acknowledged.

    "Guyville" describes the Chicago music scene of the early '90s, which Urge Overkill and Phair were both a part of. Urge, with a an overwrought swagger (they wore huge medallions) and heavy rock sound, could fit in, but Phair couldn't.

    "It was a total sausage fest," Nash Kato of Urge Overkill said in a Songfacts interview. "It seemed like a constant frat party."

    "It was because of this industrial aesthetic," his bandmate King Roeser added. "Like rock and roll was some kind of power tool you could wield and get your manly feelings out. That wasn't the rock we were listening to. That was never our idea of music. It was music as the domain of men, and that song was our ode to say, 'We're done with this. We don't think this is how it should be.'"
  • This is a pleading song, with Nash Kato "urge"-ing his girl to get away from all the other guys in Guyville and come to him for comfort. "The tune is based on a Sam Cooke, Otis Redding-style love song," King Roeser explained. "It's kind of a pleading song in the vein of a tearjerker. That's what we wanted to be, more like Otis Redding where the song is going to break everybody's heart, not just people who want to build a garage behind their house."
  • "Goodbye To Guyville" is the last song on Urge Overkill's 1992 Stull EP, which also contains their cover of "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon." That song took off in 1994 when Quentin Tarantino used it in his movie Pulp Fiction.

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