It opens with a creeping rhythm of Manichean proportion, if only it were more pronounced. It lumbers along with muted exactitude, setting the scene, establishing the tonal context that will carry the album through, as its opening track. The atmosphere it constitutes is unsettling, leaving one apprehensive on the thought of what it may conceal. A momentary relief descends when she issues forth her wrought vocals. These are pained and sincere, striking at the root of squandered love and articulating the sense of desperation that often follow in its wake. A sense of pining desperation is palpable in the strain of her tender voice, captivating if not transfixing us.
We are participants in her grief, her raucous emotional turmoil. The song entraps us, leaving us with nowhere to turn, to bid escape. We may only stare down the force of her sorrow, taken as we are by the hypnotic quality of her circulating guitar. The song follows this course for two minutes, allowing ample time for us to accommodate ourselves to what appears as though a malevolent tone, one courting discord rather than harmony. This is her intent: to give you a false sense of security, emotional, mental, whatever this may be; enough time to let you get settled down, providing a sense of safety, all resting on the assumption that that current dynamic, the prevailing conjuncture, will not change but stay the same, as it has done. It has for the past two minutes, for most of the song; during which time few intimations of change were demonstrated. Then, with the torrential velocity of a sudden rupture, the song breaks forth into life, with a uncalled suddenness that will leave you feeling distraught and enthralled in equal measure, all at once. It is an instance of what Edmund Burke referred to as the Sublime in art. A sudden change accompanied by an auditory shift, he wrote, is ‘sufficient to overpower the soul, to suspend its actions, and fill it with terror.’
PJ Harvey’s ‘Rid of Me’ amply succeeds in filling us with terror, though a terror that quickly subsides into acute delight as we are swept away in the ensuing turmoil, her emotional reckoning, loosing ourselves. Though only for a moment; enough time to occasion reflection. How does one go about ‘interpreting’ a song such as this? One could take leave from the lyrics – visceral and unequivocal, as they are – and surmise that this is a song dealing with the burdensome weight of failed love shouldered by the speaker, a weight that seems to have pushed her into madness – evidently so by the final third of the track, when she warns her former lover that: ‘I'll make you lick my injuries[;] I'm gonna twist your head off, see / Till you say don't you wish you never, never met her’. This is the point. In this, Harvey achieves something remarkable; all the more so for its apparent simplicity. She captures the dynamics of love in the song’s structure as in its lyrics. The harmony she forges between these currents is an occasion for delight. The capricious nature of ‘love’ is rendered with awe-full clarity; and the sublime nature of amorous infatuation is given full expression. To fall in love is to be taken by a sudden dynamic rupture that leaves you feeling distraught and enthralled, surfing a precarious high, that strikes you all the more viscerally as it begins to crumble beneath your feet.
As the opening track of Harvey’s sophomore album, Rid of Me, the title track does an admirable job at setting the tone for what still remains an under-recognised and under-appreciated work. It was released in 1992, and as a work dealing with rather explicitly with several aspects of female sexuality, desire, and embodiment, it spoke little to the cultural mainstream of this period in Britain, Ireland, and the United States. The type of art she embodied was not popular; it did not sell, and appealed only to an ‘indie’ or ‘alternative’ musical sub-culture that harboured some degree of tolerance for the radical aesthetic ideal she championed: personal music arising from a female perspective. The pioneer of this new aesthetic paradigm (because it was ‘new’) was, of course, Kate Bush in the 1980s. Harvey, as with Björk after her, sought to develop and propagate this aesthetic within a culture and entertainment industry that was growing increasingly recalcitrant, complacent, and reactionary.
Harvey stood outside this mainstream, in the company of Bush, Björk, Tori Amos, and many other gifted female artists of her stature and productivity. It is only in recent years, as their relevance becomes apparent and as the aesthetic they embody gains new traction, that they have begun to be revived and afforded their due recognition as the pioneering artists and innovators that they clearly are. Kate Bush leads the field at this time, as the primary representative of a radical aesthetic and sensibility that has long been suppressed and pushed to the side as irrelevant or overly sentimental. PJ Harvey will hopefully receive the same belated recognition and admiration in the years to come.