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

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.