PJ Harvey’s Astonishing Debut
In her new collection of essays, Sex, Art, and American Culture, Camille Paglia conforms to the caricature she presents in her public antics: a gender-based version of the syndrome nicely outlined in its racial form by the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy in the caustic “Famous and Dandy.” (“What will we do to become famous and dandy / Like Amos and Andy?”) The song’s about how the culture can force even “liberated” blacks into clown roles. Paglia’s the female rendition, only worse: in a sad, Clarence Thomas-ish way, she’s busily constructing an intellectual base for those benefiting from the Backlash. Her methodology by now is obvious: she knocks the left off guard with a feint (defending homosexuality, abortion, drug use, pornography), but then unleashes the zinger, typically something along the lines of an attack on the idea of date rape. To back up her position, Paglia endlessly cites the case of a woman “going upstairs” at a fraternity party. Male sex is hot, Paglia says, and women shouldn’t complain when they get burned.
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While Paglia shores up the foundations of the phallocentric worldview, the voices of the already burned still keen in the realms of foxcore and the Riot Girl underground, all luminously laid out by Emily White in the Reader a couple of weeks ago. Spurred by ambitions from the extravagant (We want to put out a record as good as Road to Ruin) to the modest (We want to tour the country in a van), bands like the irresistible L7 (who on Bricks Are Heavy are indeed in Road to Ruin territory) and Bikini Kill, who in a recent show at the Czar Bar blasted their way through “Rebel Girl” and passed out recipes for herbal abortifacients, continue to construct self-conscious alternatives.
Dry is a scorching catalog of the horrors of contemporary sexual politics, but it’s never didactic, never really explicit. Harvey wrote the songs, sings them, plays the bitter, wrenching guitar and the scary, lacerating violin. The arrangements are spare, almost empty: the songs on the completed record, in fact, are only slightly tricked up (some cymbal-less drumming is added) from the original mournful demo tracks. In them you can still hear Harvey sitting alone at home, constructing a signal rock ‘n’ roll album one track at a time, inspired, perhaps, by the high jinks of Paglia, whose breasts, Sheela-na-gig-like, spill out of her dress so proudly in her recent portrait in Vanity Fair. Paglia, like the woman in “Oh My Lover,” is begging for attention and ready to please. But on Dry Harvey tells what happens when a woman tries to walk on water for a man. She sinks.
