Classic Album Reviews, Pt. 10

Examining Desire and PJ Harvey

1998’s Is This Desire? Fills Me

“I hate myself for loving you.”

I know: that’s Joan Jett, but the line came to me as I was beginning here, because sometimes I do hate myself for not saving articles that say what I think, or that motivate me to consider what I previously hadn’t.

So somewhere, someplace, a music critic described Polly Jean Harvey’s work as “not for every taste” or some words to that effect. Not profound, I know, and weirdly understated even. Who to compare her to? I would have said Patti Smith, but Harvey herself, who apparently loves Smith, called such comparisons “lazy journalism” ( Ellie Bothwell (14 October 2011). “10 Things You Never Knew About PJ Harvey | Clash Music Exclusive General”. Clash.).

I suppose such a comparison occurs because of eccentricities associated with both artists — music that grates against convention or pleasantry. You know, I know, that not all sounds are or should be “pleasant.” And comparisons can make us lazy and stupid. People want to lump Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Sonic Youth and The Pixies, Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Monkees.

Maybe even Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw; Brahms, Bach, and Beethoven.

When I first read that Harvey alienated some listeners, I got a perverse joy — perhaps akin to my championing Yoko Ono or others’ defending Courtney Love.

It seems that women artists face this kind of scrutiny far more than their male counterparts do, or maybe it’s that our sample size for women artists is too much like that of any other sampling regarding gender and the arts, or business, or whatever sphere you want to name (which I guess is why controlling a woman’s body is such high priority for the more puritanical elements in our past and present).

And speaking of such things, Is This Desire? asks such a basic question, really — one our nation has no problem supporting if desire emanates from a man. Well, not exactly “no problem,” because the excesses of desire have dismantled and unseated at least a few men in power recently. Consider this paragraph from an opinion piece about “Replacement Theory” in the NY Times yesterday:

“This belief transforms social issues into direct threats: Immigration is a problem because immigrants will outbreed the white population. Abortion is a problem because white babies will be aborted. L.G.B.T.Q. rights and feminism will take women from the home and decrease the white birthrate. Integration, intermarriage and even the presence of Black people distant from a white community — an issue apparently of keen interest in the Buffalo attack — are seen as a threat to the white birthrate through the threat of miscegenation” (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/opinion/buffalo-shooting-replacement-theory.html).

We all have desires, but somehow female desire must be really controlled, which seems to be about one thing, but maybe is about another: the male’s fear of not being able, or patient or caring enough, to please a woman.

Control desire and if that doesn’t work, make it sinful and illegal if, that is, it’s practiced by a woman, or anyone really who’s not a white male in our society.

Which is maybe why, if you listen closely enough, PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire? is so moving and revelatory, and maybe intentionally not as easy to listen to as our mainstream culture would wish.

Released in 1998, her fourth album is said to be her favorite. You can read about the difficulties in its production — that Harvey was going through some suffering; that the recording was split into two distinct time periods; that the label had input that Harvey was too physically sick to resist.

I don’t know all the details, and in some ways, I don’t care. It’s definitely my favorite album in her canon, and I’m not sure why except it hits on such a personal, emotional level.

The “hit” from the album is “Perfect Day Elise,” though a hit for PJ Harvey is like saying James Joyce had a popular work. If you study words and think about all the images they convey, or could, then the song does hit pretty hard:

“He got lucky one time Hitting with the girl in room 509 She turned her back on him, facing the frame Said, ‘Listen Joe, don’t you come here again.”

Except, of course, he does, after “the White sun scattered all over the sea,” and “He got burned by [that] sun/His face so pale and his hands so worn…”

He “lets himself in room 509,” and cries that “It’s a perfect day…”

Elise.

That this was a hit on any level proves that someone was paying attention — that maybe someone always is. Listen to it, the threat, the reality, the relentless drive of guitar, bass, and drum, and of course, Harvey’s voice, described as “contralto.”

Desire comes in too many forms to list, but Harvey often uses light, in shimmering, scattering images to explain what we feel or at least think we do. In the companion songs, “Catherine” and “The Wind,” St. Catherine is invoked, the former song from a male perspective, the latter from someone else.

The male claims that he’d “break from your heart/you left the thing stinking/I’d break from your spell/if it weren’t for my drinking…” He expresses his “envy” for the “ground you tread under;” for “the wind, your hair riding over…” He envies “to murderous envy your lover/’til the light shines on me/I damn to hell every second you breath[e]…”

The result of such envy, in “The Wind” is:

“I see her in her chapel High up on the hill She must be so lonely Oh Mother, can’t we give A husband to our Catherine? A handsome one, a dear A rich one for the lady Someone to listen with.”

Desire, or misplaced conformity to the norm?

Other lights can mystify, sparkling someone else’s eyes like the ones in “Electric Light,” where under it her beauty “tears my heart out every time.” Or in “The Sky Lit Up,” where she “remember[s] light…the sky, my friend/and I’m lighter than I’ve ever been.”

And that sun, now setting, scatters the white light again in “The River,” where we can “throw our pain,” for it to be “washed away, slow.”

Pain, desire, washed away, clean, but is it?

Desire?

Other songs, like “Joy” are amusing mainly if you know Flannery O’Connor, but even here, Joy “looked away/into a hollow sky…” and wants to “go blind” after she comes “face to face” with her “own innocence,” and the “nothing” that he had been “believing since I was born.”

The women in this album’s desire : Leah, Angeline, Joy, Catherine, Elise. Do they escape? Are they unscathed if they do? Does their desire doom them?

Consider, finally, the title song:

“Hour long, by hour, we two stand When we’re dead, between these lands The sun set behind his eyes And Joe said, ‘Is this desire?’”

And is this desire enough, enough enough?

Does it save, is it fulfilled, and can our society tolerate it, grant it, live with it?

Or do we turn back to darkness, lie down in it, let it take us?

Musically, the album takes us everywhere, especially to the darker land-tones, with special nods to Rob Ellis and John Parish. And to Flood and Head.

And in the end, the album’s title befits everything that can be taken so many ways, like desire itself. What we do know is that some things can’t be denied, suppressed, or repressed, or at least, they can’t be for very long. Though if you’re “the woman a man walks by” you might think that time has lasted forever.

Because maybe it has.

All songs written by Polly Jean Harvey, and not for every taste.

🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

Thanks for reading. Should you want to read other outstanding Riff writers, try some of these: Paul Combs, Jeffrey Harvey, Noah Nelson, Bonnie Barton, Chris Zappa, Jessica Lee McMillan, If Ever You’re Listening, AB, Steven Hale, Pierce McIntyre, Christopher Robin, Kathy Copeland Padden, Aimée Gramblin, Karla Clifton, Alex Markham, Kevin Alexander, JP Timko, Sarah Paris, and David Acaster.

Here’s a previous Classic Album review: