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

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'.