PJ Harvey – Rid of Me

PJ Harvey was responsible for something in my musical education; I just can’t remember exactly what anymore. Maybe it was the experience of turning on music and that gets your friends yell at you to turn it off, damnit, a life-lessons checkbox which Four-Track Demos helpfully blacked in. At any rate, the point is that when Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” hit big on MTV and everyone was talking about how empowering and strong it was, I could yawn with a jaded assurance. All Alanis wanted to do was make the ex feeeeel bad, whereas Polly wanted to tie hers to a chair so he would never ever leave. And how empowering is that, right?

But it wasn’t the dumb kind of empowerment, either, not simple or straightforward. (Polly has said she isn’t a feminist, and while I disagree, I can understand the sentiment–who wants to be a feminist when Sarah McLachlan is a feminist?) This was ambivalent and nuanced. It wasn’t just “I am woman, hear me roar!” breast-beating–even in her most female-power anthem, “50 Foot Queenie,” she’s not going on about the hard work women have to do and the godess and etc., she’s saying “tell you my name F U and C K!” And the fact that all this is elevated to a comedic degree should be clear in the final runup, where she repeats “You come on and measure me / I’m X inches long” and X keeps getting bigger and bigger. (Hahaha.)

Same thing in “Rid of Me”: it actually starts from a position of traditional weakness, with the woman desperate and clinging to a man who is going to leave her. It’s a torch song, in a way (something she’d get much more involved with in later albums), but with a clear twist: instead of letting him go and bemoaning her fate, she is clinging in this very literal way to the person who should have the power. And so she’s taking on this powerful position, but whereas the Lifetime version would be to get together with her girlfriends and drink margaritas and talk about how men suck and they’re not going to compromise and are going to stand strong, the narrator here is saying no, I am not going to wait; I am going to get what I want now. It’s a crazy act, an irrational one, but it’s one of passion and control. It’s a scenario that isn’t reductionary about human nature–it admits our weaknesses when it comes to the opposite sex, but it also finds a way to work with that directly.

But it gets better. The Hollywood version of “Rid of Me” would doubtless end with the woman either subdued by the man or dragged off by the authorities, and someone would probably mutter, “Crazy bitch.” But this is being told from her perspective, and it doesn’t end; the man is not released, but held captive for the song’s duration, and we don’t really know what ends up happening to him. Instead, we first get the narrator taunting him (“I beg you my darling, don’t leave me, I’m hurting”–remember he’s tied up at this point) and then taking sexual pleasure, both from the situation and from the lover in question. There’s no question in my mind that the moment when the slightly off-tune guitar combines with Polly’s ready-to-snap keening of “Lick my legs and I’m on fire, lick my legs and I’m desire,” totally out of context at first, but then repeated until it makes sense–to say nothing of the desperate, a capella howl it becomes at the very end–there’s no question that it’s a key component of what I think of as rock ‘n’ roll.

As cool as it is to hear the Albini-miked drums crashing in on the first version of “Rid of Me,” I’ve always preferred the take that leads off Four Track Demos for its sheer power and intimacy; without the other instruments, it’s like you’re the one she’s got tied up in the chair (or so I’d like to think!). But even this didn’t prepare me for seeing her do it live. This was two years ago, at the Hammerstein Ballroom, a venue that holds a few thousand people. She’d already done one encore with the full band and she came out with just this open-body electric guitar and a mic and a spotlight. And as soon as she launched into “Rid of Me,” there was not another noise in the house for the duration of the song. She had those 3000 people absolutely, perfectly transfixed. And it was beautiful, and quiet, and wonderful–and then she turned on the distortion. Now, I knew, as an experienced guitarist, that that noise just shouldn’t sound very good without drums and bass behind it; much of the power of turning on the distortion comes with having the low-end and sharp-attack beats to back it up. But when Polly hit that pedal and started yelling, more than any noise-rock I’ve ever heard, it felt like my skull was being pried open with a flathead screwdriver.

It wasn’t until some time later, though, that I realized what she was at that moment: a chick with a guitar. In that sense she was no different from Ani or Sarah or Dar or whoever. But at the same time, she wasn’t. After all, when you say “girl with a guitar,” you do think folk. You don’t think Polly Jean playing as loud as she can and yelling, “I’ll make you lick my injuries!” And that’s too bad. Not because folk, or even McLachlan-esque empowerment, is bad per se, just because “girl with a guitar” shouldn’t just mean that; it should mean so much more. PJ’s been around for a good ten years now, but still most women in bands are singers or not-very-proficient instrumentalists there to provide “stage presence,” i.e. titties. There are many great female musicians, and thank Christ–I’d hate to think what modern music would sound like with the kind of sausage-fest we’re used to. But there should be more. There should be more women like PJ, or Linda Perry, or Georgia from Yo La Tengo. Women who are great musicians first, and not pretty faces or pretty voices. No offense to the pretty voices–I know singing’s hard–but I just wish more parents would give their girls guitars, that’s all. Give ’em guitars or drums or bass or sax and tell ’em to listen to “Rid of Me,” goddamn it.