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

* 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.