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

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.