"Uh Huh Her." Thoughts on the new PJ Harvey?

I'm liking "The Darker Days of Me and Him."

guessing it's a joke. consider someone like myself asking a record store clerk about pj's new album.

Really liking "Mr. Badmouth" thus far, very Dry/Rid of Me-sounding. I hope the rest of it is like this, instead of her last couple.

Which syllable to stress? The second?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

"Uh Huh Her" is such a great album title! Yr nuts!

better album titles for the new pj harvey album:
My Heart's In The Highlands
Brian Blessed
20 Line-Dancin' Favourites
Homiez Erect Select

This is OTM. I was actually thinking just the other day about how my enjoyment of PJ Harvey is kind of an anomaly in some ways, in that I don't think I could identify a common element between her music and "stuff I ordinarily like" (which is, admittedly, a wide category).

xpost: i always found kim gordon songs better on paper than in the ear.

Before it was leaked, a few loops of the songs were leaked, so maybe that's what some of you are hearing.

I don't like "Cat on the Wall."

hahahahahahahahaha!

"If I believe that PJ's last GREAT record was Rid Of Me and her last REALLY GOOD record was To Bring You My Love and I sold her last two records out of sheer boredom, will I like her new record?"

£10 £9 £8 £7 £5 £3 £2

in the M&VE.

No.

i think so. i'm liking it quite a bit so far.

I cannot believe this is possible.

actually both title and cover of new one remind me of some hasil adkins record or something.

Is This Desire: not flat-out awful, yet not involving enough that I ever miss having it around.

Lots of people seem to think that To Bring You My Love is the apex of her career (SPIN, Jim DeRogatis, Greg Kot). But Is This Desire?, you're right, doesn't have a whole lot of supporters (though I've never understood why: is it because it's her most "electronic" album?).

Anyway, this one...It didn't make much of an impression the first two times I listened it, but on the third, it clicked. I'm really digging it now.

"The Pocket Knife"'s my favorite track at this moment: "I don't wanna cause a fuss / I just wanna make my own fuck-ups." "The Letter" is surprisingly dance-able (sort of). I had it playing on my computer while I was getting dressed this morning, and I noticed myself really moving to it without even realizing it.

"Seagulls" isn't listed as an actual track on her site, but it was an individual download on the page I found the album on. It's really unnecessary--just a little over a minute's worth of seagulls squawking. Which kind of reminds me of those stupid Sounds of Nature tapes my mom used to put on when she'd get stressed out.

I like just about everything else on Uh Huh Her quite a bit. Even this minute-and-half-long instrumental thing called "The End" is great (mostly just because it vaguely reminds me of Michael Nyman).

Is This Desire? was a fitfully successful blend of her romantic angst with Trickyian sonics, and is definitely her ugliest and most inaccessible album, which turned a lot of people off. Some of the songs seem almost incomplete and underdeveloped in how short and stark they were, but conceptually, it was her strongest and most coherent work. Probably. It's a toss up between ItD and RoM. I loved how almost evrey song narrated a doomed tale of pitiful female protagonist - and they all had great names. I wish that duet from Angels with Dirty Faces was included as a bonus track, even though it mar the concept. It's also her most classicist, Victorian record, re: the songwriting, so I can understand how some might think it's just humdrum self-indulgent performance art. But I think it's mysterious and beautiul, and the apex of her storytelling skills with how much she can convey through saying so little (revisit "The Wind," "Catherine," "A Perfect Day Elise" - and the sublime "Angelyne").

I anticipate "Uh Huh Her" being a return to form, and I much prefer this cover to her clutching a Gucci bag wearing sunglasses. At night.

Dry is head and shoulders above her other albums to me, then Rid of Me and the 4-Track Demos, and then the last three.

Also, Pitchfork agrees with my view, so of course I am correct

eh, but she sings them nicely though.

As usual I have to remind myself that it's not the fault of Petridish, who I suppose can't help being stupid, but the idiots who pay him money to excrete his shit in a broadsheet newspaper.

I'm not that big a PJ Harvey fan really, I can't stand the songs when she goes mental.. but her melodic songs are great. The Letter's really grown on me.. I didn't like it much at first, but the guitars in that are cool.

The thing that puzzled me last night was how both the blokes and the girls were obsessed with what she was wearing (a yellow dress and pink stillettos by the way.. photos here. You don't get that when you have blokes performing.. even if they were wearing cool boots.

I'm thinking that this'll be where the glamour-kitten image of Stories... and the dirty blues intensity of Dance Hall At Louse Point meet.

Man, I had the biggest crush on Alexis Petridis when I was 18 or so. ...my how times change.

yep.

Ha ha and of course "Taut" is the best thing Kim Gordon never did.

Anyway, since then I've had some guilt about not picking up "Is This Desire?" Just never got around to it.

I agree the new album's title and sleeve are both incredibly awful, but I'd like to hear it.

"Taut" is the best thing ever - "even the sonofgodhadtoDIEMYDARLIN'!!"

I thought "Stories" was her best LP ever, actually; I could care less about Thom Yorke but it still worked, that track. Didn't care for her Hal Hartley film too much but so what. Coming to New York did her some good I guess and I like the way she says "San Diego" on that last album. I like the way she seemed to have been all freaked out by America, too, I like her and above poster is right--what she does shouldn't work, it seems kinda simple and stupid but then she sings. Maybe she's been listening to Hasil Adkins or Jandek, judging by the new CD's cover, that's fine.

so, the michael medved of music criticism, then.

I like Rid of Me about as much as the subsequent three actually. I bought it when I was thirteen (one of my very first albums) and I still find that I like it more each time I play it (which is not a whole lot, admittedly!).

I'm actually quite looking forward to this album and I love the title and the cover more and more all the time.

Uh Huh Her was meant to arrive today... where is it? where? Fucking Royal Mail. Grrr.

On first listening, Uh Huh Her is definitely a step back toward some kind of emotional coherence and direction. Like her earlier stuff, it's understated, with few muddying layers, and seems half-written initially. This is a good thing. Many of these songs, while retaining the raw blues spine of her early 90s work, are wrapped in more Latin flesh. And thankfully, her unique eroticism is back, female but not generic.

At times, she almost sounds like she's flirting with preciousness a la Sinéad O'Connor circa I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, and she gets away with it. At others, she's a dark savant sibling to early Hole Courtney sans the histrionics. In fact, by mostly shedding her own histrionics, and injecting some kind of Patti Smithery (she's done that before, more overtly), her voice has reached its apotheosis (perhaps) without ever succumbing to the dreaded word/concept "mature".

Oh. Another quick observation: the album gets progressively stronger.

Fuck, this is nice. It'll change, I'm sure, but for now, standouts are "The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth", "Shame", "The Slow Drug", "It's You", "The Desperate Kingdom of Love" and "The Darker Days of Me and Him".

The shorter songs/interludes help stitch it together. It feels like it all belongs. (Even those seagulls.)

Embarrassing as it sounds, I love her (music!) more than ever. This makes me very happy.

I just want to defend Albini's production of Rid Of Me wholeheartedly. I remember when I first heard his production of Wedding Present Seamonsters and it took me years to get used to it despite my respect for both him and the Weddoes. With PJ, though, his production made perfect sense because there was more silence, more breathing room. It's hard to imagine that album having been better without him.

(As for my synopsis, I've quit worrying about embarrassing myself on ILM -- my personality leans toward the ridiculously effusive and enthusiastic, I just can't do hipster reserve, so I no longer even try.)

(Polly Harvey is actually astonishing-looking, like some kind of semi-malevolent nocturnal creature in human form, which makes her sort of compelling.)

WOW!
It looks like it could say Big Black, but are you sure???

Anyone else thinking of Karen O right now?

A few of the new songs, eg "The Life and..." strike me as YYYsesque too.

This really should be the other way around.

It might just be the MP3s I downloaded (which sounds like they might be the vinyl rip), but this is heavier and sludgier (ie the Desert Sessions/QOTSA dude has rubbed off).

Is Civil War Correspondent not one of the most poignant anti-war songs ever ? those lyrics, geez... Rope Bridge Crossing and Heela are amazing as well...intense, over-the-top, but with almost a camp-like sense of enthralling fun bubbling in the background to the drama (esp the part where john parish does back-up vocals on Heela) -->

"
{She ...}
{She was a girl, she got her hair done nice}
{She said "i've given all I got to my healer man}
{He put his hands on me, showed me what I am} "

I like it quite a bit as well, I know Ally made it her album of the year at the time. Actually, there's no PJ Harvey album I hate at all -- they're all pretty great!

Actually, my memory/impression of the reception received by Stories... at the time it was released was very favourable, wasn't it? On some level, it reminded me of the contemporaneous All that I Can't Leave Behind (they were not only released in the same year, but the same month) -- both in its critical reception (a return to guitar rock/form!) and in its large sound, even down to similarly awkward attempts to re-mythologise New York City.

(It's a whole 'nother thread, but has anyone else noticed how many bands/artists were writing explicitly, overtly about NYC in the months leading up to 9/11? I know they always have, but the numbers seem disproportionate, like the collective unconscious had an inkling or something.)

Yeah, how lucky was she to write "Kamikaze" for her New York album ...

Yes, I agree.

(And just to back up my weird assertion above, alongside U2 and PJ Harvey, there were songs by Doves, Richard Ashcroft and Interpol arpound that time all featuring NYC either heavily, thematically, or overtly in the titles.)

Many of the tracks on slsk etc were ripped from vinyl.

* British person using American idioms.
* Romantic conception of self as 'intense artist'.
* Literary humanist worldview influenced by American short story, poetry workshop lyrics such as: 'Can't you see my handwriting?/the curve of my g?/the longing?'
* 'Strong woman feminism'; 'girls can be violent too, you know!'
* Guitar orientation. (Connected to point above.)
* She makes the kind of records that make critics say things like 'Lust, anger, hurt and trust do their timeless dance once again.' (Kitty Empire)
* She makes the kind of records that make punters say 'Is this really about her break-up with Celebrity X / Y?' (Insert Nick Cave, Vincent Gallo, etc.) -- ie it's record-making as a sort of All-Celebrity LiveJournal.

"WARNING, this dopey bitch likes fox hunting and enjoys upper class people tearing a helpless, exhausted animal to shreds. She is a cunt and therefore in buying this album you are also a twat. And her basic "re-invention" is wearing ass high skirts. No more radical than Emma Bunton, then".

Tie this in with his comments on the big and rich thread and I have to ask, are we in for an all-out anti-america essay at the homepage soon?

the thing about her having a romantic conception of self as intense artist is another mystery to me. first question how do you know this? i perceive her as making intense music. as making the kind of music she likes to make. as being herself. maybe i am naive. but she comes over as authentic. or better original, unique. and even if she had that romantic perception. how could it ever influence the appreciation of her music? you seem to try to cover her with far-fetched rationalised labels to store her somewhere in the cave. what's the point?

what's bad about the strong rock girl thing? do you think she chose it in the beginning intentionally to promote her career? i don't think so. and even if it is so, she is brilliant at it.

and how can you reproach her what the critics write about her? that's totally ridiculuous. this point only makes sense if she made her records to make critics write that they are full of lust, anger etc. she didn't make "dry" for that, even you can't believe that. she risked something, tried something new and it worked out. that's what all your criticism sounds like. you envy her her success. is that true?

http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drg300/g327/g32720ot42m.jpg

hahaha, yes -- if only PJ had consulted the Observer before going into the studio, we would have been spared KE's crimes against reviewing.

*"Punk-blues" is just an arbitrary category that, like all arbitrary categories, doesn't really describe music that has any complexity whatsoever. I wouldn't call Polly's music "punk-blues".
*Seems to me that she can use whatever idioms she want to use.
*I think that her intensity is completely organic, and not a pose at all.
*I have no idea what her influences are. All I can say is that I find a lot of the lyrics on this album to be deeply moving.
*"Girls" CAN be violent - and vulnerable, and funny, and romantic, and realistic, and any one of a number of different things that I think she is on this album.
*They're also allowed to play the damned guitar, for crying out loud.
*She's not responsible for silly things that critics say.
*She's also not responsible for people who make lazy autobiographical connections.

Anything else?

i'm all for calling out calum and momus when they're being silly but this reads like vegan bashing.

-- alex in mainhattan (alex6...) (webmail), June 8th, 2004 10:37 AM. (alex63) (later) (link)

because momus doesn't actually really like music, as one listen to any of his records will attest.

seriously, i don't understand why momus bothers to listen to music at all, when some elaborate diagram of a piece of music's cultural positioning would speak as well to his concerns.

...

fuck my modem has disconnected four times in 15 minutes!!!!!

Foxes are great, and they deserve not to die in agony. But, equally, Polly Harvey deserves something more than some kneejerk anti-American dismissal, or some guilt-by-association just because of where she hails from. Because where she hails from makes her something distinct from a raft of copycat faux-art-blues gnomes.

Okay, I got off track, but I really love the music of this individual, and have for a long time, and none of the criticism on this thread feels very honest to me. In fact, it feels exactly like posturing to tell the truth.

Basically I think Polly is a rebel, but one who rebels against the wrong things. Polly and I have different conceptions of where the world is at, what it means to conform or rebel, and who the enemy is. Polly embraces values which I find cheesy: rock and roll, an irresponsible and destructive individualism, Romanticism, 'Police Woman feminism' (a perversion of feminism which proposes that women should become selfish, aggressive, egocentric assholes just like men)... and so on.

Traditional cultures -- many still exist all over the world, and every society has its own compromise between traditional and modern values -- have a delicately-poised, highly social model. People have roles, responsibilities, duties. The individual is ubjugated to the collective, and wants are subjugated to needs. People may not feel 'free', but they feel something just as important: needed and integrated. In the west, though, we're heading towards a different society. In our highly capitalist society, we smash traditional social relations, replacing them with a 'lonely crowd' of atomised, irresponsible consumer-individuals in single-dweller units, bingeing on food, drugs, consumer items to fill a perceived inner void; not a God-shaped hole, but a society-shaped hole. When they consume art, these individuals are attracted to products which exemplify a somewhat self-pitying and destructive mass market version of the Romantic movement.

Women suffer particularly from the shift from traditional culture to modern hypercapitalist, atomised culture, because women were formerly at the heart of traditional cultures, which were highly-integrated and social. In modern western cultures, though, men dominate. While claiming to 'liberate' women, modern western cultures simply force them into a rugged, assertive, aggressive, atomised, asocial, individualistic lifestyle, forcing them to embrace the worst excesses of men (with, however, fewer reproaches, since their self-assertion is seen as 'the way forward' and 'good for them'). So women become cowboys, phallic rock stars, arrogant assholes, etc. And this is supposedly 'progressive'.

If Polly Harvey were what I consider a real artist -- in other words, someone critical of her own culture -- she might be reacting against these negative elements of modernity or brainstorming more positive ones. Many female artists do exactly this; Bjork, for one... But PJ seems to me basically complicit with the problems of our culture. Her songs typically present a stereotyped (and dated) image of 'the nice girl' or 'the compliant girl' and say 'I'm not like that'. (On her new album there's a fake folk song about a little girl who carries a knife and threatens people who want to marry her with it, and another, 'Who The Fuck?' which just says 'Who the fuck do you think you are, trying to straighten my curly hair...') This rejecting defiance is actually a craven kind of conformity. It's an embrace of masculine values, and American values, and fragmented, miseryguts Romantic values. It's 'rockist'.

The reason we use the word 'rockist' as an insult is that rock values have become deeply conservative. They have become the mainstream values of our culture, just as American values have. Polly embraces rock and America, and she embraces an asocial, neo-primitive, neo-Romantic, irresponsible model of the feminine, in which it becomes no more than 'the masculine which we do not reproach for its irresponsibility'.

Now, there's a lot wrong with traditional culture too, and a lot right with western culture. For me, what's right about western culture is its amazing capacity to innovate and experiment. Lesbianism! Gene splicing! Computers! Avant garde art! However, Polly is not really interested in advanced freedoms and new societies. She's not gay or experimental or utopian, she's aesthetically conservative. Classic rock! Guitars, bass, drums! She's stuck at the stage of taking jabs at traditional culture (a traditional culture we recognise less and less in our own lives, hence the wooden and schematic feel of many of Polly's songs, their odd atavism) rather than taking jabs at the culture we actually live in.

Her ambivalent attitude to fox-hunting may well reveal her ambivalent attitude to traditional culture in general: she may well be deeply nostalgic for the marriage-and-social-obligations model she seems to be attacking, and that's why she keeps returning to it (wearing steel-capped boots) in her songs. She just likes to hang out there. Like her ex Nick Cave, she's fixated on some sort of sepia-tinted vision of the past, the 'swamplands'. A real rebel doesn't rebel against 'then' and 'there', though, a real rebel rebels against here and now.

this has nothing to do with whether or not i agree with him on pj harvey, really. if i didn't like pj harvey i'd find his arguments just as irrelevant.

x-post

momus you're thinking of 4 non blondes or something.

By the way, I also dislike Patti Smith. Laurie Anderson speaks my language, Patti Smith doesn't.

that's a meaningless bit of grandstanding. the concern is the insistently reductive way in which you interpret aesthetic objects ethically.

(xpost -- conservatism in music, who gives a fuck? We can appreciate many stances, without always taking some political approach, right?)

David: I think you're being very honest there. Most people would try to attack someone calling them 'conservative' by trying to outflank their opponent and making them look conservative, but you just say 'Who cares?' I think that's the crux of it.

there are works of art that employ superficially conservative gestures but whose details vibrate with life and tenderness and pose an implicit critique of complacency.

see: "how green was my valley," bluegrass ca. 1945-46

this is the kind of thing i think the persona you have devised is blind to. if that's ok with you, then, well, that's "conservatism" too, in a particularly damning sense.

x-posts

romanticism is so 1831!

(lots of x-posts)

This is well expressed, and is something I wish I'd articulated, but of course I didn't. Ah well.

That's a good question, and I think the answer is 'It depends when, and according to whom.' Romanticism was a radical movement aligned with the French and American revolutions. Rock and roll was also a rebel movement in its day. I personally take the position that both are played and integrated -- which is not to say over, of course, just to say that their centrality should be battled against.

Matthew Collings made a TV series, Hello Culture, about exactly this question. Interesting interviews online with John Lydon etc.

How should their centrality be battled against?

(Haha, a whole new thread there, probably!)

(And, even funnier, amateur!st and I seem to be engaging two different Momuses here, and it's kind of cracking me up, but I do have to get some sleep now.)

sorry if i'm simplifying, but i think momus may have a point in regards to symbolic ideology, and what's so wrong to discuss it? a critic's interpretation of an artist's work is independent of any original intention, pomo rule #1 of course.

it is partially true that pj harvey has been so acclaimed at playing rock music, as a man would play it, and even the gender-bending of rid of me's most stringent tracks were not acclaimed for their fluidity with identity in the first place, but because they simulated uncompromising and "loud" punk / DIY ideals. (prepare for generalizattion)-> for most rock critics, mostly who are male, to acclaim a female artist's work, either they have to be turned on by them (reference kenan herbert's liz phair review), or else the woman has to masculinize her sound and aesthetic (polly, patti, even chrissie). yes, polly is very good at playing in the first place...but she underscores archetypal male characteristics such as directness, linearity, violence, and bravado..

...but what about such artists like tori amos, who refuse to use typically "masculine" instruments such as the guitar, and center their work around the piano, as well as refusing to compromise their work around any linear coherence? tori remains an abstract force, a feminine voice from a feminine perspective, and like the amazon/com review of boys for pele mentioned, everything about her work, from the music to the lyrics, is abjectly "feminine" - as a georgia o'keefe painting. she remains in her feminine, emotional world of abstraction; how many times has she made the pazz and jop top 20 ?

for that matter, when a woman does try to use rock instruments such as guitar, but refuses to curtail the sterotypically-feminine traits of verbosity of expressiveness - such as, yes alanis - she is slammed for being incoherent and self-indulgent, instead of perhaps expressing her own, individualized emotions which by other standards rockists value very much. there is a different standard here, and as much as i love polly, i think it's important to at least recognize this bias, and see how it leads to differing reactions to artists who steadfastly engage in the feminine (like tori) or those who successfully trangress all notions of gender with polymorphous sexuality, such as madonna - even though that's even less valued "dance-pop," and a whole different discussion altogether

(x-post -- aw, shit Vic, this is one of the most interesting discussions on ILM in a while, and I really have to go, but it's tough not engaging your own thoughful post here.)

i think this is a misunderstanding on your part, and in my viiew momus wasn't doing that at all - he was (i think?) talking about how women are championed as such when they are like men, without mentioning his own standards of gender behavior

or maybe she just does it badly? i'm not in favor of giving artists points for their good intentions.

you make some interesting points, vic, but i don't think polly harvey and patti smith "masculinized" their sounds in order to appeal to male rock critics, i think they did it cos they wanted to sound that way, because they happened to respond to blues and rock. what's wrong with that? for that matter, i differ with the implication that we ought to respect female artists more when they stick to the sound and style traditionally associated with their gender than when they try to co-opt "male-associated" elements of rock like the guitar. i've heard this argument made in regard to riot grrrl, and i find it limiting and ridiculous. (not saying that you argued that; i was responding to what i felt momus had implied)

(Great posts from Vic Iodine here!)

I think my attitude on the feminism question is influenced by Asian attitudes. To illustrate: while I've been on this thread, my Japanese flatmate has been on the phone to a fashion company in Osaka. They were offering her a job. She told them she's already been offered a job by a female western designer in London. The Japanese woman then said 'Ah, she may be hard to work for. She is an 'absolute' person, not a 'relative' person.' What they meant was that the London designer has a reputation as stubborn, dominant, fesity, not a team player. This is a common Asian perception of western women. It's not that Asian women are 'submissive', but that all Asians are team players and like integrated societies rather than atomised societies. It's a waste of energy to fight everybody all the time, and Courtney knows it. Maybe.

according to momus, pj harvey perpetuates what he calls "a perversion of feminism which proposes that women should become selfish, aggressive, egocentric assholes just like men." i'd say his standards of gender behavior (for both genders) are pretty apparent in that remark. he's certainly not referring to some objective universal standard of behavior, since i doubt everyone in the world considers PJH to be an arrogant asshole.

di, hi!!! miss you!!!! and haha i always had the impression of polly being man-ly and manlike from day one, not only because she actually *sounds* like a man during her first three records at time, but because her energy, power, anger is expressed in a thunderous force that resonates with me on some terrain of "the masculine" (as opposed to, for example "you oughta know," or "blood roses" or "professional widow" or even half of live through this, but courtney is like her own special category, since she seems to be one of the few who actually *does* self-consciously appropriate rock mythology for her own ends and critical acclaim..its like she's a moot point)....that along with all the artwork from the early period of an angry, hairy polly, gave me the impression of manliness. plus, all of her menstruation songs - it seemed to imply a resentfulness almost at the act of the feminine cycle itself, instead of an embrace of it.

massive xpost

-- The Lady Ms Lurex (lucylure...)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

it's time for me to get new-agey as you knew i would - but hey, it's me. i think the question here has to do with _archtypes._ in most world cultures previous to the20th century, i don't think it would be a stretch to say that masculinity was associated with autonomy and independence, and femininity with nurturing and if not dependence, at least interdepence. this i s proven with how the Sun, the archtypal male symbol, was also representative of independence and individuality, whereas the female Moon was reflective and inclined to relating to others.

okay, sorry.!! back to our regularly scheduled momus bashing/programming...

i guess it just goes to prove that men do not have the monopoly on loudness, thunderousness, etc - which are being characterised here as masculine. if women can relate to that too, then perhaps they are HUMAN traits? and i dunno if you've noticed, but most women grow hair on their legs and under their armpits and some other places. some of them shave it off. therefore men do not have the monopoly on body hair either.

xpost. momus stop you're giving me a dry-on.

and i'm neither trying to reinforce nor deconstruct these gender norms here (though you know i'd be with you at the first moment to dissect them where appropriate) - i'm just observing them, and how they comeinto play here.

and yes they are inescapable, but we must remember that we are a composite of both forces of course, as both the sun and the moon are necessary, as the breath of life moves in and out of us (cheesy new-agey clincher you knew was coming!! )

see this is where we have to stop for a second - cos i can, in one sense see where you are coming from, vic. but just because PJ in some people's eyes, endorses a kind of masculinity and therefore plays into the hands of patriarchy - does not mean that she's inherently endorsing patrirachy. we're talking interpretation, and how people make use of their intrepretations. in other, equally valid lights, she could easily be read as a threat to patriarchy. (in any case, masculinity shouldn't really be equated with patriarchy).

and yeah that wasn't really aimed at you, more aimed at what i perceived as your defense of momus, who is i think coming at this argument with a very different agenda to you n me.

'Masculinity without men'. At first glance, I have to say that this looks like a classic example of 'me too'-ism; we don't need men to be men, we can do it better! Might this be a part of the universalising of masculine values and the erasure of feminine values?

Masculinity + power = patriarchy

'I learned that the most interesting masculinities are not male'

and

'Halberstam would have been much better served if she had included a fem perspective in her unabashed celebration of butch subjectivity'

why should halberstam address fem identity when so many other feminists have?

i think it's interesting to see how, for example, someone like karen o is also living upto rockcrit "fantasies" of the "rock-goddess" ideal, which is what many want her to be, in the hopes of making her a success to pjh

Well, I'm trying. On my new album I sing in a falsetto voice, ask Jesus to 'come back as a girl' and 'save the world without too much tomato ketchup', and call for an instant ban on foxhunting.

'The first record's maximized use of a minimal and brutal sonic palate of drums, guitar and feminist catharsis shone a light on the dearth of female rock presence and more importantly on a prodigious and unabashed new talent that shook up the music industry - over and underground. [...] Uh Huh Her, as its title indicates, strips the music of any superfluities and leaves only the voice and the songs. Harvey plays everything but the drums on every track and this intimate return to minimalism makes for some incredibly compelling bedroom music... A suit of songs both slight and bold emerge out of this delicate construction to create some of Harvey's most introspective and memorable work, combining the best of her previous investigations, while simultaneously returning to the vital and unadorned strength of her beginnings. [MC]'

All the stuff about PJ being 'unadorned' reminds me that I forgot to mention 'the Protestant ethic' as another thing that annoys me about PJ. This thing about 'stripping the music down to its bare, pure strength'. (I have 'catholic' and 'baroque' tastes myself. Clutter away! Surprise me!)

And to say that Polly shone a light on the dearth of female rock presence worries me. What, suddenly we realise that 'most women can't rock', but should?

i ask myself how you listen to music. do you first inform yourself about the political and aesthetical views of the artist before opening your ears?

i think there is good guitar and good electronic music, there is exciting avantgarde and boring avantgarde, there is good music by masculine and feminine women. you are full of prejudices and preconceptions how good artists should be (like you?). you are running around with blinders. you don't let the music grip you. it's all so rationalised. the exciting thing about music in my book is that it trespasses ratio, that it has a direct emotional appeal.

catholic/baroque and protestant/pure is another interesting dichotomy for sure. i am more of the protestant side but what is really important is the mix. there are no pure dichotomies like that.

I've just had an interesting thought. Rock became central and normative. It went from being a way of losing control (ripping up cinema seats!) to a way of maintaining control (rock is played as your Virgin Airlines flight taxis towards the runway). We're all supposed to be rockers now. Capitalism became 'rockitalism'. Tony Blair was in a band that sounded like the Rolling Stones! etc etc.

Now, look at all these PJ Harvey songs that rock hard, and say to men 'fuck you, who do you think you are?' They're songs of jubilant rejection. It's very much a celebration of female control. Men want me, and the future of humanity lies between my thighs, but I'm the one who gets to say who goes in there. Now, in the past, in traditional societies, a woman celebrating her power in this way might have demanded that a man love her, marry her, provide for her, become a stable and responsible member of society, etc. (This is the message of songs like Gwen Guthrie's 'Ain't Nothin' Goin' On But The Rent': 'You've got to have a J.O.B if you want to stay with me') But PJ Harvey is saying something different. Women are still central, still controlling reproduction while men merely control production -- but in a time when rock and its irresponsibility is central, PJ's message is 'You've got to be a party animal and rock like a fucker to get between my thighs'. It is part of the culture of compulsory, joyless post-protestant hedonism, of dogmatic dissolution. If rock is Law, women will use rock as the main criterion in their Trials of Hercules. Woe betide the Man Who Does Not Rock. He will not reproduce.

i really don't like your way of slagging off males. there are no males. we all have male and female parts in ourselves. yin and yang. you know. and rock isn't a male dominion. rock is just letting yourself loose, forgetting about all that brain stuff. having fun.

Ahem, I said upthread, of 'Who The Fuck':

The only good thing about it is the silly backing vocals right at the end.

this is totally true. on this thread, momus characterises women as either feminine or not-feminine, and refuses to accept and acknowledge the shades of gray. and those shades of grey are where actual women's lives and art lie - both pj, and the asian women momus so lovingly fetishizes. women's lives are internally complex and women are diverse people. this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who considers women to be human beings.

i think vic is quite otm until he gets all new age and shit and i kind of want to see more people talking about 'is this desire?' and 'dance hall at louise point', although this thread is isn't called "Thoughts on the PJ Harvey albums before the one before the new one"

weird thing about momus is how much more time he's prepared to spend arguing his point than going and finding out more about it. yes everyone else noticed this in 02, i'm slow okay

Even when Polly was flirting with masculine imagery earlier on it was much more fluxed up than simply beating the boys at their own game. She was almost more like a male drag queen in a woman's body, and I think this gave her a really compelling indeterminacy - one never knew where the layers sotpped and the "real" Polly was hiding.

-- Momus (nic...), June 9th, 2004.

Er, singing falsetto is one of the most masculine things a singer can do, becaus ewomen NEVER do it!

Also, foxhunting isn't very masculine is it? It has the full support of as many women as many and those who actually do it, well, they're a bunch of wimps!

Now, I don't think it matters how you position yourself against gender roles of modern culture, as long as you do it with a healthy dose of playfulness, irony, camp or queerness. I believe that, and that alone, can raise questions about gender identification, roles and the heteronormativity of Western culture. And this is something, BTW, I find Momus doing brilliantly in his art. Or Björk, for that matter. "Perversion of feminism" or "gender capitulation"? Well, in the end, feminism is about freedom of choice more than anything else.

Though, I am annoyed with the following statement: "Women suffer particularly from the shift from traditional culture to modern hypercapitalist, atomised culture, because women were formerly at the heart of traditional cultures, which were highly-integrated and social. In modern western cultures, though, men dominate", I find it being slightly revisionist. Sure, women were the "heart" of traditional cultures - but they were Hermia, the heart of the hearth. The angel in the kitchen, etc. The point being, men dominated Western traditional cultures too. Now, I like being 'free' in a sense that I can vote, walk the streets alone, being seen in public, to think and speak my mind.

POP <--> ROCK
singles <--> albums
emphasis on recording <--> emphasis on performance
emphasis on technology <--> emphasis on musicianship
artificial <--> real ("authentic")
trivial <--> serious
ephemeral <--> lasting
successive <--> progressive

...and Richard Hamilton defines pop art as being "popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business".

Since the birth of modernism, mass-produced consumer culture has been seen as utterly female: from Madame Bovary to the female authors who wrote mass-produced, cheap novels as opposed to male artists. I mean, when I say Britney Spears, what do you think of, if not screaming teenage girls?

But I know this wasn't your intention so i'll drop it.

Umm...

Richard Hamilton should spend less time worrying about pop art and more time improving hs FG%.

So is your version of 'male' and of 'female' nothing to do with 'men' and 'women'?

Your 'male' and 'female' are just homphones for other words, those in commn usage?

Not really, no. The gendered body is all about interpretations, isn't it? A body that appears to be male doesn't necessarily have to be of the male sex, and vice versa, right? And a woman can have character traits that are percieved as male ('being masculine'), right? So no, I don't think that 'masculinity' necessarily has any connections to the male body.

Then again, English isn't my first language. Perhaps I should have written "that dicotomy is that of masculinity/femininity".

(I find this topic very interesting!)

But I think there's one ambiguity in the binary list of traits that Timothy Warner breaks down. Pop is artificial, he says, rock is natural. Pop is female, we're saying, rock male. (For instance, I am a pop artist, not a rock artist. My stance is female, althogh I am a male. I'm quite willing to accept that. With the exceptions of 'albums' and 'progressive', I align quite easily with the Pop side of that list.)

And yet, on the artificial / natural binary, women don't swing easily to either side. Women are seen as 'artificial' to the extent that they're more likely to be seen as social creatures rather than rugged survivalists or self-sufficient monads, or to the extent that they're more likely to wear make-up and 'contrive' their appearance, etc. A cultural female, as anyone knows who watches a drag queen or a woman making up to go out, is constructed. This all works fine with the female music star as a pop performer, the shining artificial jewel at the very centre of culture's crown.

But there's, paradoxically, a strong and persistent linking of woman to nature in our ideology, and that gives women access to the Nature imagery of rock music; hence the 'Earth Mother' rock woman archetype -- Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, PJ Harvey. Here woman is presented as primal, primitive, passionate, changeable as weather, uncontriving and untrammelled. The trouble is, the dual role of woman (both artificial and primal, both 'pop' and 'rock') creates an unintentionally comic amalgam: the 'Fake Primal' woman, both ephemeral and eternal, fake and real, glitzy and dowdy. One of the funniest things to watch is when a transvestite does an impersonation of this kind of 'primal' pop-rock female. You'll see a drag queen at Wigstock doing a Kate Bush impression that turns into Joni then Bjork, all of them gesticulating in overly-theatrical attempts to 'get back to nature'.

The thing that doesn't fit for me, though, is this characterisation of PJH as an "Earth Mother". Janis, I can see, perhaps, but Polly and Patti are art rockers, and as you yourself point out, the younger of these two has attempted to deconstruct even that via humour and self-mockery. That said, you are possibly onto something with your comic amalgam (Fake Primal), however -- even though I'd lay odds on there being a male equivalent too (70s Bowie? Beck? haha...Plant? Cobain?)

I was thinking about this today and you're right. Something doesn't have to be exclusively a male trait to be masculine.Beards are masculine but I'm sure some women have them.

Personally, I don't think I would describe butch lesbians as feminine (unless they were not wearing the clothes that go with that image).
I would certainly not describe them as masculine though!
I think a lot of people might.

I do agree that [...]the dual role of woman (both artificial and primal, both 'pop' and 'rock') creates an unintentionally comic amalgam: the 'Fake Primal' woman, both ephemeral and eternal, fake and real, glitzy and dowdy, though I am uncertain of the conclusion. I feel that at times, that "unintentionally comic amalgam" is slightly carnevalesque and hyperbole, and that makes me prone to think it's queer and dissonant in a butlerian sense. The drag queen on Wigstock mentioned above, isn't that a man that is imitating a woman, who in turn is imitating 'The Woman'?

Ah, right. I should point out that some of the things written above are analytic and not descriptive, to avoid misunderstandings. And of course there are shades of grey, no woman or man embodies ideas perfectly. But first of all, I believe that generalisations are necessary for theory and analysis, and even if the ideas are totally and perfectly represented in factual bodies, they are present in discourse.

('semantics' means 'meanings' so they are very important!)

Agreed. But I'm sure you understood the meaning of my post, even though I'm not fully capable of expressing myself in english.

Yes, I think I understand that we all (including the redoubtable Momus, haha) have to talk in dichotomies when being analytical -- it's like a necessary evil, and yet simultaneously one way in which, rightly or wrongly but definitely understandably, the wonders of academia become tainted in many peoples' eyes.

And I'm certainly less "arguing" than I am exploring (while desperately trying to relate this discussion back to Polly Harvey over and over again).

I agree with some (much?) of what you, and Momus, are saying here. But this: "man is always in control of his nature" is incomprehensible to me. Perhaps it's because I'm a male sexual abuse survivor (the predator was a woman, just to complete the ass-backwardness) among other things, but I have not felt in control of my nature for large stretches of my life so far. But then again, this is when the personal and anecdotal eclipse the universal and analytical, a state I often find myself identifying with... hence... probably... my love of PJ Harvey's music, with its visceral yet exquisitely art-posturing stance (best of both worlds, perhaps?). You see, without sounding wilfully naive, I haven't always viewed her music through the lens of gender. Sometimes, sure, since it's an obvious theme. But I've also viewed it through the lens of victim, of predator, of reveller, of combatant, of goofball, of survivor, etc. In some ways -- from my odd and very individual perspective, admittedly -- interpreting Polly Harvey's persona and musical output via gender is as arbitrary as interpreting it via (say) left-handedness, or via her ability to wipe the floor with people at Scrabble. Does this make sense?

Oh, and last things last -- the idea that women are perceived as being ruled by their bodies and men by their minds, can be massively contradicted by the meme of big head/little head -- ie/ that men are ultimately driven more by sexual desire than by rationality -- something I've heard echoed and repeated (to the amusement of all, of course) by men and women throughout my life. I mean, the popular image of testosterone and its effects is of a hormone that is rapacious and dangerous, even, whereas estrogen/progesterone are seen in a calmer, more nurturing light. I guess what I'm saying is, you can always turn these dichotomies on their heads whichever stance or posture you decide to take, and in the end, we're all struggling to assert our egos and hopes and need for simple human connection on an unforgiving landscape... using various combinations of compassion, humour, arrogance, creativity, hostility and warmth, to name just a few, gender be damned. (Not that I want to damn gender, really, exactly, haha.)

So, um... I just ran out of steam.

Polly embraces values which I find cheesy: rock and roll,

Rock and Roll is a value? You heard it here on ILM, folks.

In some ways -- from my odd and very individual perspective, admittedly -- interpreting Polly Harvey's persona and musical output via gender is as arbitrary as interpreting it via (say) left-handedness, or via her ability to wipe the floor with people at Scrabble.

Of course you're right here, the pluralism and flexibility of identities is a key part of modern subjecthood. David Simpson's book 'Situatedness' is a good guide to it: we're at pains, now, to spell out where we're coming from, to show that our discourse is situated. We all speak a language called 'Azza' -- we speak 'as this, as that...' David did it above when he began speaking 'as a male sexual abuse survivor'. I don't mean to belittle the pain that that may have caused him, but it does lead us into a particularly modern problem. If I can choose which identity to assume, depending on the situation, what appeal am I making to authenticity? What model of the self am I proposing? If it's a plural self, is it a real self, a genuine self? Might I be caught, ten minutes later, speaking 'as' something quite different? David mentions that he might find Polly Harvey singing 'azza' lefthanded person or a good Scrabble player just as important as her singing 'azza' woman. But are all identities equally important? When he proposes himself 'azza' sexual abuse survivor, wouldn't he feel rather annoyed that people kept relating to him as a whizz at Scrabble?

Just so we get it straight, I'm not a Harvey fanatic, so my purpose is not to give a knee-jerk defense of anything she does. But I marvel at how people can intellectualize music to the point that it isn't even music anymore but a "value".

'Rock and Roll and Christianity are two transcendent ideologies which have been subtly altered on their arrival in Japan.

The transcendental values of Rock and Roll as a belief system can be summed up in the phrase 'sex and drugs and rock and roll'. Life, in this ideology, is about getting high, fucking groupies, and playing guitar music 'from the heart'. It's about rebellious individualism, intoxication, romantic adolescent nihilism, masculinity, irresponsibility, promiscuity, and so on.

Rock and Rollers sometimes use the Confederate flag as a symbol of their transcendental values. Sometimes they even use swastikas. They wear black leather. They include demonic imagery in their lyrics, suggesting a simple inversion of the transcendental values of the Western Christian tradition. Rock and Rollers may seem to reject the dominant values of the west, but in fact they are their ultimate expression, the same way pirates are the ultimate expression of the principles of international maritime free trade.

Rock is not superflat. Like the Christian religion, it privileges certain places, certain times over others (the church or the concert hall is more 'real' than the house or the tour bus, hymn singing or guitar playing is more 'intense' than talking). A rock musician's life exchanges ten hours of monotony in the back of a tour bus for an hour of glorious transcendence onstage. The Christian's whole life is a burdensome prologue to the joy of his death and eternal life. This downgrading of 'normality' in favour of a few fleeting moments of orgiastic release or heavenly bliss obviously lends itself to drug use and explains why religion is 'the opium of the people'. (It's a metaphysic -- with the emphasis on physic -- which applies equally to rave music if we're to believe Simon Reynolds in 'Altered States'.) The cultists of the early Christian church would recognise the lifestyle of the average Rocker, because it's really a form of life-rejecting asceticism.

The transcendentals in the package we call Rock and Roll are mostly values very much at odds with Japanese tradition. Why sing about the devil when Christianity has never taught you sexual repression in the first place? Why vaunt the merits of drugs in a country where they're hardly available? Why pose as a renegade rebel in a land made pleasant by the warm, diffuse habits of consensus?

What's wrong with transcendental values? Simply the fact that by constantly referencing an absent or invisible reality, they belittle what's present and visible.'

Down By The Water is totally related to 'this gender/sex/situatedness rubbish', I'm afraid. It's the story in which the narrator (male? female? we don't really know) meets a 'little blue-eyed girl' in an archetypically 'natural and primal' place, 'down by the water':

She said "no more"
That blue eyed girl
Became blue eyed whore
Down by the water
I took her hand
Just like my daughter
I'll see her again

Oh help me Jesus
Come through this storm
I had to lose her
To do her harm
I heard her holler
I heard her moan
My lovely daughter
I took her home

Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water.
Come back here, man, gimme my daughter...

Now, it seems to me that this is a 'murder ballad' in the manner of Nick Cave, and it shares with Nick Cave's work a conflation of murder and sex (see 'Where The Wild Roses Grow'). It also 'answers' politically-correct feminism (and its idea of the woman as victim) with an appeal to values like 'the primal' and 'the natural' and 'rock music' and 'Romantic literature'.

(I was accidentally watching the edit of Later Louder they showed a while ago, I was confused and thought I was watching last nights.)

For me it is wonderful warm sub-bass, tricky rhythm claks on a wood block, clear, simple drums and a soft voice whose only words I remember are about 'blue eyed boy' and 'little fish'.

Like all those metal songs with 'go suck Satan's cock' cunningly backwards-tracked in?

Er, yeah.

In other words, you would notice (and probably object) if PJ Harvey's new single were a protest song calling for better conditions for women working on short-term contracts in a call centre.

'When you say P J Harvey's new album is raw, what are you really saying?

Are you saying it sounds as if she wrote all the songs and played all the instruments, except the drums? (This much we know for sure.) Are you saying the music sounds ragged, as if it had been bashed out in an afternoon? Are you saying the album is somehow pure and unfiltered? Are you saying she's singing the truth?

'Ms. Harvey has spent more than a decade brilliantly toying with inane assumptions like these. She understands the wild daydreams that a jagged guitar lick and an overaspirated syllable can inspire. She knows that a bent note in the right place conjures up expectations of bluesy authenticity, even in listeners who should know better. And she has figured out that in rock 'n' roll, plagiarism can be a form of honesty: songs often ring true because they remind us of other songs.

'...Sometimes the rawest lyrics are also the most overcooked... "Uh Huh Her" is full of songs that could be barbaric yawps or ironic poses, depending on how you hear them. Which brings us back to raw, back to that fraudulent (but seductive) idea that a wily rock veteran has simplified her music to show us her soul... She knows exactly what's she's doing and how she's doing it, and the album booklet makes sure we know she knows...'

If my theory is right, the correct response to 'who the fuck do you think you are, trying to straighten my curly hair' is either 'Who the fuck did you think you were getting involved with, he's Vincent Gallo!' or else the Spinal-Tappish 'I don't know why they couldn't get along, they're sooooo similar really'.

How so? Can P J only sing about her personal life? BTW, I didn't know she was ever in a relationship with him, it doesn't interest me that she was, it doesn't influence my listening experience now that I do.

x-post

You mean you need a fan to say that it's the music and voice that matters the most in the end for that listener? Hi there!

pj harvey of course is a type of goth. i'm sure you'd think all goths should start singing about doing the dishes or even get a healthy interest in politics and parents of goth children would concur. what makes her relevant and most goths not is that a) she started out writing good catchy songs like "dress" and "sheilanagig" which have interesting lyrics, strong female perspective, good singing, nice rock arrangements that aren't too cliched - and she continues to do so; b) she varies her approach with each album in a classic rock way, trying to give each one a different feel and cohesion and yet staying true to an overall essence of her own style.

anyway in the arts a practitioner of the gothic style can do something in a very old-fashioned way or be very up to date - ann rice is pretty un-modern, but lars von trier's "the kingdom" was pretty "postmodern" if you will, and faulkner still seems cutting edge to us. so too someone doing social realism could be quite modern, could not be... i guess lots of hip hop is a pretty modern form of what you're talking about, momus.

but to attack pj harvey on grounds that she is conservative... just shows how snobbish one is. it's like an anarchist saying the socialists just don't go far enough; it's like a fan of merzbow thinking that my bloody valentine is too poppy. most girls in america and britain still could benefit from women artists giving them exhortations to empower them, and that's that.

I find, though, that her lyrics can be read differently. Fruits and liquids are connoted to female sexuality and reproduction, remember for example Lady Macbeth saying "unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood […] Come to my woman's breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers". And it seems to me that's how Harvey's using 'water' as opposed to 'dry'. Take the following examples from Dry, remembering its heavy use of biblical imagery: Mary Mary drank it soft (Water) – Send those angels down to woo me now (O Stella, Stella Maris also being "the star of the sea" and synonymous to the mother of God) – Pick the fruit / Realize / I'm naked […] So fruit flower myself inside out / I'm happy and bleeding for you (Happy and Bleeding for You. Compare to Genesis 3:6-7 and 3:16) – I'm swinging over like a heavy loaded fruit tree (Dress) – The sun doesn't shine down here (Plants and Rags) - This fruit was bruised / Dropped off and blue / Out of season (Happy and Bleeding). I would suggest that "Dry" thematically is about reproduction and having a hard time to concieve (and just to point out, this was a really quick analysis and I don't know wheather or not there's a biographical truth behind it) - things that are very real and very important to modern women. Granted, this is a pretty archaic imagery, and certainly one that could put Harvey in the 'pseudo primal' context. On the other hand, there aren't many 'modern', interchangeable metaphores around. Even though I am more than willing to criticize the discourse of rock men & women and the context of within PJ Harvey is placed, or even the metaphores being used – and their connotations – but I really can't criticize the use of them.

most girls in america and britain still could benefit from women artists giving them exhortations to empower them

I find that incredibly wrongheaded. Does PJH 'empower' women by her dark brooding, or does she just lead them into a cul-de-sac where they can stew, neglected, with all the demons in Pandora's Box? Since we're social animals, what cures and 'empowers' us is to be lead in the direction of the social. Is PJH a living example of a woman with successful social relationships? A role model who's going to lead us to happiness?

I quoted these words by Richard Sennett on another thread, but I think they're relevant here: "Masses of people are concerned with their single life histories and particular emotion as never before; this concern has proved to be a trap rather than a liberation," he wrote. Given that each self is "in some measure a cabinet of horrors, civilised relations between selves can only proceed to the extent that nasty little secrets of desire, greed or envy are kept locked up".

:) fair enough, though i didn't say you said he was... bear with...

you were saying he is of the modern world (ie pragmatic, concrete world of things) as opposed to being of some fantasy world, and i agreed with your disctinction implicitly inasmuch as i called harvey a goth. but it gets my dander up [as i am a science fiction writer] when people have this attitude that art which uses nonreal things as its subjects.

so i was trying to say, hey that's interesting that you think formby's modern, cos to me his meanings are grounded in a long-since marginalized and almost buried artistic viewpoint of realism, a sort of arch-naive pre-modernism. if we're talking about social value of an artist, to me, that's a pretty fecking conservative place to be.

so i think we still are talking about the same issues in a way. you are saying, and i do not quote, "she isn't relevant to me and my modern world, and i can barely imagine how she's relevant to anybody, she may even be deleterious," and you do say Does PJH 'empower' women by her dark brooding, or does she just lead them into a cul-de-sac where they can stew, neglected, with all the demons in Pandora's Box? to which i can neatly reply, i dunno, i'm not a psychologist who's seen the terrible effects listening to the music of angry women with guitars who act like men. i am not being snide but i am being sarcastic when i say you seem to know a lot about what women need.

Is PJH a living example of a woman with successful social relationships? A role model who's going to lead us to happiness?

now we're going beyond attacking her lyrical subject matter, and her retrogressive use of guitars, to going ad homenim? come on. i am not bound by some outdated view of human relations that says all our sexual relationships should be stable, cooperative, long-lasting, etc. apparently this rock star girl has screwed several famous men, and writes songs about it or whatever. yes, i think that is a good role model, i really do!

we're getting at some real fundamentals of life here - having painful relationships may in fact be not detrimental to human existence; many artists deliberately seek out damaging relationships; smart human beings use sex to further their careers; guitars may be modern.

finally, i am going to step back and more obviously state how funny it is that in a discussion about pj harvey, momus holds up george formby as a counterexample. your music certainly does have much more in common with his...

you may find it slightly interesting that as an american i was introduced to formby by richard thompson. try to find a review of his work that doesn't use the word dark... in a way thompson might be exactly halfway between pj harvey and george formby.

It gets my dander up [] when people have this attitude about art which uses nonreal things as its subjects.

...

I'm not a psychologist who's seen the terrible effects of listening to the music of angry women

yet you're one of those here who is constantly trying to ratchet up the tone and discuss recontextualization of the memes in the sociopolitical hypertrophy. eh?

of course if "my little goat and me" and "is this desire" are really about the same thing...

I've made the decision not to follow PJ Harvey's career closely. She's not my kind of artist.

yet he still fancies himself enough of an expert to lecture us on why she is not only a "bad artist" but a bad role model for women.

the arrogance is unbelievable, yet not surprising.

how can you say it's silly to see singers as social role models? they are by and large stage performers, yes? their fans sing along, yes? if not they who, then, would be a role model? are only people one's met allowed? or people from good safe careers, honorable trades?

I guess the part that ultimately confuses me is the following: as someone who loves the music of PJH, in general, I've never ever thought of her as someone particularly cutting edge or radical (sociopolitically, or whatever), so I don't really understand the "conservative" attacks against her here (uh huh here?). She has played around with the blues, and with old andro-centric rock'n'roll tropes, but I've never gotten the impression of someone who is precious about that, or has elevated herself to some kind of rarefied avant-garde plane. In fact, most interviews I've read having largely betrayed her very English ordinariness. the whole "conservative" thing seems to be a straw (wo)man.

Oh, and quickly, "Down by the Water" has always strongly reminded me of a traditional song most often associated with the Irish band Planxty, namely "The Well Below the Valley" (seriously, check those lyrics out). The fact that its a traditional folk song would certainly suggest "conservative"; but then again, its subject matter, flying in the face of what is usually acceptable within that genre, might suggest otherwise (reactionary, sure, but that doesn't negate its power). Or not. Really, this is more of an observation that parallels Momus's own reinterpretation than it is anything else, and now my head hurts, so...

(Last quick observation/question: why do people get so defensive about their tastes? And even more so when someone happens to attach some attitude or political label to them. I mean, I like Bob Dylan but I'm not a misogynist. I like P J Harvey, but I'm not a misandrist... or a misogynist, for that matter.)

-- Momus (nic...), June 12th, 2004.

I don't mean (and didn't say) that lyrics aren't very important to me. I said the lyrics aren't very important to me, the lyrics of this particular song.

I'm curious about being called 'rockist', because I don't know what it means, really, and I've yet to find an adequate explanation here.

Your way of looking at the world isn't universal Momus, not everyone thinks like you, or even thinks how you think they think.

Others to whom lyrics have been unimportant at various times:
Yoko Ono, Mendelsohn, Mogwai, Derrick May, Aphex Twin, Fugazi, Pink Floyd, Ugefutsu, Bjork, Lightning Bolt, Dexter Gordon.

Other songs whose lyrics are important to me:
Shellac - A Prayer To God
Team Dresch - Don't Try Suicide
Fugazi - Bed For The Scraping
PJ Harvey - You Said Something
Bjork - All Is Full of Love
Nicollette - Wholesome
The Chordettes - Mr Sandman.

-- Momus (nic...), June 12th, 2004.

Whether I noticed the lyrics or not would depend mostly on how they are sung and the music that goes with them, not the words themselves (although they do play a part). A song like that would probably be clearly presented, with the lyrics to the fore, so I probably would notice them.

A song calling for better conditions for women working on short-term contracts in a call centre would be out-of-character for PJ Harvey (rather, for the PJ Harvey she projects). For that reason it doesn't sound, on paper, like a particularly good idea. I think it (usually) detracts from a TV comedy when one of the characters looks at the screen and says something knowingly to the audience - a similar break with character that I don't like.

I wouldn't exactly say I'd object to it though, why should I?

Of the songs I've heard and know I like, TGIF by Le Tigre probably comes closest to that subject matter, but Le Tigre are not PJ Harvey. (TGIF is not one of the better songs on that album, but it is still very good).
Distinguishing, sometimes unfairly, between men and women is something Le Tigre often make a point of doing.

Distraught, Unsettling, Gutsy, Crunchy, Brittle, Intimate, Aggressive, Provocative, Passionate, Fiery, Intense, Sexy, Bleak, Brooding, Angst-Ridden, Cathartic, Eerie, Sexual, Theatrical, Tense/Anxious, Ominous, Confrontational

Nick Cave's 'tones', according to AMG, are almost identical:

Distraught, Bleak, Brooding, Angst-Ridden, Literate, Nihilistic, Ominous, Eerie, Theatrical, Gloomy

And here are the 'tones' for George Formby:

Witty, Playful, Plaintive, Joyous, Irreverent, Fun, Amiable/Good-Natured, Carefree, Happy, Cheerful

Eccentric, Irreverent, Cynical/Sarcastic, Elegant, Sophisticated, Cerebral, Stylish, Sexual, Silly, Theatrical, Witty, Provocative, Refined/Mannered, Playful, Humorous, Sleazy, Literate, Ironic, Wry, Acerbic, Brash, Quirky, Rousing

Wierdly enough, Aristophanes is more modern than John Irving.
Wierdly enough, Bob Seger is more modern than Enrico Caruso.
Wierdly enough, Girls Aloud is more modern than the cave paintings of Altamira.
Wierdly enough, the the Telegraph pole is more modern than the dvd player.
WIERDLY ENOUGH, THE TERM "MODERN" IS COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS IN ANY
INTELLIGENT CRITICAL CONTEXT. YOU SHOW YOU ARE A FULE FOR USING IT.

Nick (Distraught): Hi Polly.
Polly (Distraught): Hello Nick.
Nick (Bleak): What's new?
Polly (Unsettling): Not much.
Nick (Brooding>: Oh.
George (Witty): That's a turn-up for the books, then, isn't it, sir?
Nick (Angst-ridden): Ha ha... ha.
Polly (Gutsy): Shut the fuck up, George.
George (Playful): Make me, M'Lady!
Polly (Crunchy): Okay, I will (crunches him on the head).
Nick (Literate): Hoist on your own petard, there, George!
George (Plaintive): Ouch!
Polly (Brittle): Serves you right. Now go out and get us a bag of heroin.
Nick (Nihilistic): Yes, heroin.
George (Joyous): Very well, sir!
Nick (Ominous): Shall we make love while he's out?
Polly (Intimate): Yes.
Nick (Eerie): Come 'ere.
Polly (Aggressive): Make me!
Nick (Theatrical): Bitch!
Polly (Provocative): Catch me first!
Nick (Gloomy): I can't be arsed.
Polly ( Passionate, Fiery, Intense, Sexy, Bleak, Brooding, Angst-Ridden, Cathartic, Eerie, Sexual, Theatrical, Tense/Anxious, Ominous): Oh, all right then.
George (Irreverent): I've brought the stuff, you blimmin' gothic junkies!
Polly (Confrontational): Give that to me!
George (Fun, Amiable/Good-Natured, Carefree, Happy, Cheerful): Catch me first!
Exeunt, chasing George

btw, the new album is probably her most Cave-y, though for none of the reasons implied by that charming little script there.

Who's copying who?

PJ Harvey is crunchy? Mmm...PJ Harvey cereal...

Heard a song off the new album on the radio today. I had the volume turned down pretty low but something about it kept making me think "wow this is really cool I wonder who this is?" I was delighted to find it was her.

as far as the whole gender-bending thing, there really isn't much of that here (I guess some people could make a case for "Pocket Knife"). Just seems like the flipside of Stories From The Sea where she's reacting with horror to a strong outside influence rather than gratitude.

The interesting thing is that this 'Japanese' de-transcendentalising tendency is also happening in western post-modernism. As time goes on, the west becomes more and more 'Japanese' in its concern with the surfaces and details of subcultural style rather than its transcendental claims. Rock as 'a way of living' or 'a way of being truthful' or 'a religion' is replaced by chains of circular references like the ones the NYT review of PJH's new record referred to: 'this sounds like a blues riff, so it references something that references authenticity'. More and more, rock's authenticity is faked in the west just as it is in Japan. Its depths are trompe l'oeuil, nothing more than endlessly relayed references back to an authenticity which is, finally, absent. But this doesn't stop rock from being 'transcendental', because the transcendental is all about references to something absent. 'In the end, soul itself is the longing of the soul-less for redemption'.

xpost

In art it's very hard to avoid transcendence. Warhol tried, Murakami is trying, the Brothers Chapman are trying. What happens is that your denial of transcendence becomes a new form of transcendence.

1. artists should NOT be regarded as role models (quote: "I think it's fairly silly to see artists as social role models of any kind"). How true. So many artists, historical and contemporary, are mental cases, borderline-sociopaths, egomaniacs or substance abusers. The act of creation, and the thought and often bravery involved, is the real role model I guess

2. That music IS the trancendance (quote: "But this doesn't stop rock from being 'transcendental', because the transcendental is all about references to something absent"). Briliant point. In fact, music and drugs are probably so closely linked because music IS a drug. Rock is an amphetamine, jazz is like booze, etc etc. I dare say music is probably the most mood altering substance in existence. And people take drugs to to reach what seems to be "absent" in their lives (calm, happiness, energy) and some just use music for the same end result. Which is I guess to say that even inauthentic music can still work it's magic (just like organic vs. chemical drugs which all lead to the state of being stoned).

Of course, this doesn't really have all that much to do with PJH but that argument seems pretty exhausted. BTW I haven't heard much of PJs new disc but the bits I did catch sounded like she's getting more therapeutic release from the music than her fans ever will. It' s one thing to be raw, and another thing to be just undercooked. But I do love the wee lass, and I'm sure I'll warm up to her new disc in time. Hmmmm... maybe that's what the "warming up to" actually implies - making the "raw' effort more digestible.

B.

oh brother

Yes, I had forgotten this one, but it did bother me when I first read it: Tell that to any teenager. Artists being seen as role models is about as inevitable as it gets. You can think it fairly silly that when you drop an object, it falls to the ground, but gravity works anyway.

When someone like PJH comes along to give Rawk a new lease of life (and she is credited with being a sort of godmother to the new, credible garage Rawk, in which young, pretty, liberal kids are getting 'back to Rawk basics'), I see it as 'Police Woman Feminism'. She turns 'fakeness' into 'empowerment'. She takes the idea that you can't play this 'authentic' music unless you're black, male, American, white, male, American, reactionary, male, English-speaking or whatever, and proclaims 'Yes, you can! Look, I can!' Rather than condeming Rawk values as reactionary (as someone like Bjork would), she extends Rawk vocabulary to subjects like menstruation and abortion. Her femaleness and Britishness, rather than disqualifying her from access to Rawk's Black Magic, become her way of granting Rawk an afterlife, a prolongation of its license. Instead of letting it die of natural causes, die the death of a ludicrous elderly Dionysus like Austin Powers, she gives it a means to survive longer, providing a liberal balance to Rawk's essential (by now) conservatism (its primal screams, its emotional atavism, its wilting mojo).

By embracing Rawk, PJH prolongs its legitimacy, removes the charge of inherent misogyny under which the genre might finally have collapsed. It's just like Angie Dickinson pumping fresh, female blood into the police TV thriller genre. The moribund genres have taken all the 'authentic' blood they can, and, late in their vampiric careers, are willing to embrace their former antitheses: women, children, foreigners, old men, whoever. Rather than giving up their power, they 'empower' outsiders, allowing them into their dark rites. Inclusion permits perpetuation.

What's interesting, then, is to watch the tussle that ensues. Do the arriving Wimmin make Rawk or Police Drama truly 'feminine', or are they sucked into some eternal masculinity inscribed all the way through their adopted media? Is femininity erased, or is Rawk? Can a guitar -- or a gun -- ever cease entirely to connote a penis, and can 'raw power' -- or killing -- ever be something that women do better than men? Because, to make up for lost ground, if they're really serious about occupying Rawk as a permanent territory and making it truly feminine, rather than just making themselves accessories to the masculine, women will have to show they rawk or kill at least as well as any man, as naturally, with as much entitlement. And then they're going to have to explain to us why it was worth universalising these values anyway.

raw = sounds different to how it would if you spent more time on it

back to bacsics = go back to doing things the way you used to

It hardly proves the line doesn't exist or isn't important, though, does it? I think it comes into the category of 'Rawk doing a Houdini escape act from its own contradictions'. When we think 'Bob Dylan', some of us still think of that moment where he 'goes electric', in other words makes the transition from one claim to authenticity (folk) to a rival claim (rock). (Note: he doesn't abandon authenticity itself, he just switches modes. Mark E. Smith is, I'd say, a different case. His authenticity is, he thinks, a birthright, and derived from being a 'prole'. It's extra-musical. Nothing he can do musically can ever be inauthentic as a result. Drum machines, art gestures, poetry, it's all within his credit limit, his class credibility karma.)

The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, AC/DC, REM, Status Quo...

...But since rock is a sub-division of pop, the Houdini-like thing rock has to do is change all the time, but make it look like you're staying the same (the Stones, who change more from decade to decade than people realise). Or to change all the time, but emphasise that it's because you're chasing the avant garde essence of rock, its original spirit of rebellion and innovation, which is merely to be found, each year, in a slightly different place (Bowie etc). But mainly, rock abjures change (Status Quo, Oasis) and is quite happy to be a sort of museum piece like the classical orchestral repertoire of dead masters.

Regarding her ambiguous Britishness: I got a kick out of the album's liner-note inscription saying "British accent, goddamn it!". Brilliant, in a way: you can read it as a self-reminder to get rid of the accent or to keep it.

Now you're being facetious!

Counteraxample: Madonna.

She's one of the longest running and most successful pop acts yet she's remained virtually constant over the years: all her songs are about love, sex and kooky spirituality set to an easy-on-the-ear chart-style 4/4 backing.

Now, everything has got mixed up. David Bowie, for instance, is a Rock performer who comes from the variety tradition. He made it clear he was 'playing' characters like Ziggy Stardust. He was using the sound of rock music, but mixing it with vaudeville-variety role playing. He was in role onstage. (Since about 1980 he's gone back to the more rock-blues tradition of 'just being me' onstage.) Blues-Rock's insistence on first person narratives, on tragedy and pain, on authenticity, and its African-American musical language worked if you were a bluesman, but the further you were from the Blues, the more you became basically a blackface variety artist simply playing a Blues character onstage. Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker and PJ Harvey are all doing this kind of Variety act -- they're cabaret actors playing bluesmen. They're British people playing American roles, they're a woman playing a man, they're people from now playing people from then, they're rich people playing poor people, etc. More disturbing is the idea that they're playing a tragic role 'for laughs', or faking authenticity. And in PJ Harvey or Nick Cave the 'fake primal' does always run the risk of being comical.

At whose expense? When we read Nick Cave's novel -- the story of Euchrid Eucrow, 'the product of several generations of raw liquor consumption and inbreeding' -- aren't we unsettled by an affluent white Australian mimicking an American deep southern accent? Isn't it a form of comedy blackface? Isn't he poking fun at conservative poor people? Nick Cave even invents a new version of 'I' for his narrative voice: 'Ah'. 'Ah' is a comedy-vaudevillian parody of the 'I' you hear in tragic blues songs.

The point is, vaudeville doesn't get any more parodic than when vaudeville performers parody blues performers. That's when vaudeville is at its most fake -- and its most cruel.

Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker and PJ Harvey are all doing this kind of Variety act -- they're cabaret actors playing bluesmen.

Is it okay for white people to do hip hop? Black people to play punk?
Straight people to do disco?

Hip Hop is a direct successor to the blues, in terms of lyrics and social aspects, which adds weight to your argument.

It's not that it's not okay for these hybrids to happen, it's just that we have to keep an eye on the paradoxes, sleights of hand, patent absurdities, trompe l'oueil, hypocrisy, irony etc that inevitably results. We have to be aware that, instead of listening to 'one man's true story', we're watching a sort of transvestite Houdini getting out of a trunk, tied up, in deliberately-bad blackface, wearing a crooked wig. These are different entertainment experiences and are likely to elicit different emotions in us. I mean, how exactly does one love a ganguro girl? What am I loving when I love her? Do I still love her when she takes the make-up off?

Anyway...someone like Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters or whoever is such a huge cliche, so carefully ticking all the 'bluesman' boxes that they are playing the role. They're black-faced black people if you will.
Even if they're not aware of it.

"He would rather be me or someone else sometimes ... like the radio interview when I couldn't show up ... he went on and took my part — said the things I would say."

"It's part of pop-art, I guess, that everybody can impersonate somebody else ... that you don't always be you. If tomorrow I find somebody who is pretty much like me and I put her here to sing, she can be Nico while I go to do something else."

Heroin, no doubt. It's interesting that, while pop stars are often 'addicted to painkillers', rock stars resort to heroin. This 'pain killer' actually supplies them with the suffering their wealth forbids them, and is therefore a direct route to authenticity and the blues credibility the genre demands. Heroin = the white man's burden.

Rock is rebellious, yet like many 'rebels' it rebels against the wrong things, against the things it's told to.

For example, every society has its own compromise between freedom and safety -- a delicately-poised, highly social model.

In our highly capitalist society, we smash traditional social relations, replacing them with a 'lonely crowd' of atomised, irresponsible consumer-individuals in single-dweller units, bingeing on food, drugs, cigarettes, consumer items to fill a perceived inner void.

In the case of nicotine this is a self-imposed void and the void is part of the attraction- an insufficiency of the drug provides a craving every bit as essentially soul-satisfying as the fix that succeeds it.

Without pain, no joy. Without tension no release. Without suffering ...?

Tobacco is a product that kills, smokers enter a death-pact with a product which exemplifies a somewhat self-pitying and destructive mass market version of heroin. Yet cigarrette companies are huge multi-nationals, with global distribution, lobby groups, r&d, design depts that tailor the packets to your live-fast-die-young / fuck-you attittood.
Fat middle aged men with condos and mistresses, selfish, aggressive, egocentric assholes.

Now, everything has really got mixed up.

i do like discussing these sort of things:

In our highly capitalist society, we smash traditional social relations, replacing them with a 'lonely crowd' of atomised, irresponsible consumer-individuals in single-dweller units, bingeing on food, drugs, cigarettes, consumer items to fill a perceived inner void.

this is a good thing! a very good thing! if it sounds like an existential crisis, excellent! that's where humanity's at! we need to figure out ways out of repressive social relations, and damaging relations to poorer nations and the people there. a modern middle class white is faced with a stark choice - do i live my life and socialize, and get a family and career and listen to happy dance music, or do i look for something meaningful? the existential crisis is quite simply the search for god or meaning or depth or truth. it's "trainspotting", it's how the human race progresses, by evolving. if no-one evolves, what we end up with is a bunch of clever rich people who destroy the planet.

to believe that rock music, guitar music, is moribund - what rubbish! the sound of a raw guitar tone - for example, a bunch of teens on stage in a bar playing a raunchy cover of little richard or a sonic youth-influenced yet half-assed original - it's a good thing, because it's exciting. a raw guitar sound is like a thick slab of rich color in a painting.

That's an interesting comparison, because the equivalent of 'rockism' in the art world is the belief that painting is 'the real thing', a direct expression of the painter's emotions, 'timeless', and so on, whereas other forms of art like video art, conceptual art, installation, performance etc are trendy will-o-the-wisps, fly-by-nights, etc. Were you tempted to say 'a raw guitar sound is like a nice slowly-swinging video camera in a Vito Acconci single-channel video work'? You probably weren't.

I'm tempted to shout at PJ Harvey, in a similar spirit: 'You rock in your work, don't you? Rock, rock, rock!' For me, to rock and to be stuck are the same thing. To rock is to have chosen the past over the future. It's to be stuck in a dry place without inspiration. However, in Britain the music world is a lot more conservative and backward-looking than the art world. The Mercury Prize rewards Rockism in a way the Turner Prize will never reward Stuckism. In the music world, I'm the crank stuck outside the Tate railings protesting.

And if you're looking to crack the surface of what turns this girl named Polly Jean into the songs, sounds and ever-morphing images of PJ Harvey -- the things that may prove to be powerfully influential over her -- you won't find too many people she considers contemporaries.

“I do try and listen to what's happening in contemporary music, but there is very little that I get excited about,” she admits, without a hint of regret or an apologetic sigh -- it's just the way it is, as far as she's concerned. “I do tend to listen to older music rather than newer music. Having said that, a band that I always follow is a band called The Fall, from England. I do find that he's one of my favorite contemporary songwriters -- Mark E. Smith -- and their albums, the last run of them, the last three or four, have really been incredible. And they put out a couple of records a year, so it's always exciting to me that they're releasing new stuff. Other than them, there's very little I've been listening too lately.”

I'm the crank stuck outside the Tate railings protesting

That would make you stuck!

I'm fit and working again-ah!

Is that why all his teeth fell out?

"There won't be any future without rock" sounds equally ridiculuos as apodictic statement but is probably closer to the truth. People will always connect to the primal feelings expressed in rock. Rock has been there for 50 years or so (not counting the blues past)and has been declared dead hundreds of times. Whereas something newish like laptop music may well cease to exist tomorrow as other recent trends like techno already have more or less. They simply don't have the power and the urgency of rock. Playing identity games is so 1960s. On the long run people get bored with it and want the real thing. Andy Warhol was the future in the 60s but he is dead now.

EITHER

[b]Same Shit Different Arsehole[/b]

this is the pop music business model obviously. you give 'em the same catchy pap fronted by an ever-changing conveyor belt of young faces. witness cover version recyling, the stock in trade of breaking a new pop 'artiste'.

[b]Same Arsehole Different Shit[/b]

this is a more radiohead/U2 type of schtick. you've got to deliver the goods that your core fanbase want, at the same time as only [i]cosmetically[/i] altering what you really do. witness Achtung Baby, Joshua Tree with a few knobs on, sold to joe P as the new ironic post-modern U2 with artwork to match. actually that's unfair to radiohead, they have made actual musical changes over their lifespan.

so back to Peej. i must out myself right now as a HUGE fan, but i feel she's kinda treading water on this one. i can't listen to ITD front to back, but on some of those tracks the phasers are clearly set to 'Mindblowing' (Sky Lit Up, No Girl So Sweet etc). UHH sounds like a retread of old stuff but done in a slightly more palatable fashion. i dunno, i'm not feeling it. i expect a certain amount of [i]risk[/i] out of her - hell, Stories was so unexpectedly caution-to-the-wind melodic and poppy that it knocked me clean off my feet. no, it isn't her 'best' work, but you could still feel the decisions and the price it exacted from her. my bitching is testament to how high she's set the bar on previous outings.

on the plus side, the seagulls send me off into a deep and blissful sleep.

sorry for being a dreary pedant.

And we all know who this is, don't we Momusmatix?

Bobby Gillespie once said, in a rockist justification of his relevance despite being over 40, 'The young can't get it up like us and Iggy can'. So I'd paraphrase that and say 'The living can't get it up like Andy Warhol and Guy Debord can'.

by the way the blonde redhead album was a major disappointment imo. almost mainstream sounding. like a bland pop album.

This thread is bonkers. But anyway, I've listened to this a few times over the weekend and it's very, very god, isn't it?

very god? Begotten not created?

haha, yes and yes!

Hmmm. Damn my cold fingers.

i love this album.

"I have no time for anal love" still cracks me up