Sneaking into the early nineties college rock scene, PJHarvey put out what seemed an album of Angry Feminist songs, nice, but sticking to your basic power pop formula. And then the second album, Rid of Me, came out and cut like a knife into any staid image of simple music, and the songs of which helped earn her the sobriquet that is the subheading of this piece:

While performances such as this are a huge part of why that title was bestowed upon her, a closer listen to the interview at the end of that last clip gives a fuller, although not complete picture. She was a young farm girl, thrust into big city life, who had never even had a boyfriend when she wrote those supposed spurned women screeds. She had simply taken the stories from her parent’s old blues records and rewrote them with herself as the star.

Changing up the presentation and musical style, drifting away from the pop background and finding footing in a style of her own making for her third album, she fully embraced the violence of her desire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBk3MdU9Y2A 

What has become clear in this stage of her career is that she had been creating characters to base the lyrics of each album around, lyrics of blood, desire, shame, alternating between harrowing and beautiful. Whether they were aspects of her own changing life or not is up to the listener to determine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PXOkcVGnOU   

And, thus, Polly Jean Harvey passed through the nineties and into a new millennium. With an artist who has had such a long and storied career as her, it is impossible to present it all at once. And in the time since her breakout, she has moved on to making anti WWI albums(!) and what seem to be simple folk songs about the area she grew up in. But, as the only two-time winner of the British Mercury prize, listening to her is never easy, and always rewarding.

 

Tune in next time, same ZWAK time, same ZWAK channel.