PJ Harvey: Big Complex Female Voice in a Slight Rock Star Package

Let's begin with "Joe," a Demo from 1992's Dry recordings. The vocal performance, so uncannily assured and unselfconscious, is one thing. Then the duet setting of her effortless vocal heaviness against the abstracted slabs of industrial grunge guitar gives the song demo a post-punk conceptual feel. She's a little package but a powerhouse voice and personality. And I'm not just trying to objectify her with that contrast. It seems integral to her power. Like Iggy Pop's "Five Foot One," the power in her voice taunts those that might underestimate her diminutive frame.  

Dinosaur riff rock gets stomped on and dominated by Ms. Harvey in one of her perhaps underrated periods. It's a boss performance in England in 1998 circa her album Is This Desire? 

"The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore," from 2000's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, my running favorite Harvey album but I need to give some others more attention-Anyway, this number is an absolute rock & roll hall of fame grand salami of a rock single but, I just checked, it didn't chart and she's actually another one not in the official R&R Hall in Cleveland. (More of what's wrong with people and the authorities, I'm telling you!) Harvey doesn't have any big hits but her albums chart okay, a couple top tens. And her audience, or cult, if you prefer, is a sizable alt-rock audience and surely big enough for the Hall's consideration?! Maybe they're still trying to catch up with the '90s? I know how that goes but PJ Harvey is a historic rock star original and past due for serious consideration for recognition by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. 

Also, by 2000's Stories..., note how in the song "Good Fortune" she's still doing her Smithian vocal stylings, my first critical hesitation with her music back in '92/'93, but now she's tossing this stuff off like she's dancing in the streets, like it ain't no thing. Or it's just another kind of art song style she does, no sweat. Patti gives Bruce "Because The Night." PJ gives a confident nod to Patti while maybe throwing in some Stevie Nicks for good measure. Masterful mistress of the late rock era. 

 More evidence: "When I'm On Ether," from 2007's White Chalk. If not psychedelic, a drug song masterpiece.  

Don't have time to get into it too much but I think Harvey is a tremendously rich source of evidence for the rockist argument. I.e., rock is essentially pop with an oppositional, iconoclastic, counter cultural, and/or anti-commercial streak built in. Its authenticity isn't rooted so much in class as in personality; its "wokeness" is a reflexive antagonism to straight authority. It's "alternative," by definition and in principle. Harvey's art insists on her individual identity while at the same time making use of various musical legacies and traditions. Progressive art song and heavy blues rock, for two. And she's part of a long line, if small club, of shamanistic rock stars with big vocal diva prowess. 

For heaven's sake, PJ Harvey belongs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame if ever there was or is such a thing?! Not that I have any idea whether or not she would appreciate the honor or even care. Hall of Fames are bs but if you're going to do bs why not show some judgement and try to make your bs count? 

"Strange Town," The Groundhogs (1970) and The Fall (2008)

John Lee Hooker's favorite backing band when he toured England in the 1960s. The Groundhogs. Another one of those Top Ten British bands, like Hawkwind, The Pretty Things, The Jam, that never won the same kind of success in the US. They were not played on the classic rock radio I listened to on the West Coast, for instance, although they absolutely perfectly fit the classic rock radio format. Tony McPhee another guitar god with the tasty rhythm riffing blues licks. Folkie interludes abound but full-on maximum r&b pounding and stomping jamrock when it counts. Biker gang cousins to Derek and the Dominos, who were all over classic rock radio. You go for any of this sort of music, blues rock, progressive rock, classic rock radio from the 1970s and 1980s on the harder edged garage rock side you will love their '71 album, Thank Christ For The Bomb (right, the sacrilege probably didn't help their cause in US markets). Not to be missed, anyway. Underrated classic rock album great. Although, if you must forgo the full album experience, "Strange Town" is the peak. The song. 

And here's Mark E. Smith, The Fall, being a Groundhogs' "copyist" (as he once said of Pavement, mere "Fall copyists"). And almost four decades later, 2008, Smith sounds drunk, slurring his way through his crank paranoia. It's a "Strangetown," everyone is so glum. He turns the hippie rock into an abstracted studio pop punk noir. A tight edgy riff rock rhythm with a few space rock sound effects. It scales down the original, gives it that Smithian (Mancunian?) bleak, scrappy Fall twist and demonstrates, again, Smith could still sometimes push the right buttons. At age fifty.