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

*"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