Feminist Music Geek

Cover to "Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea" (Island, 2000); image courtesy of wikipedia.org

People sometimes refer to Polly Jean Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea as a kinder, gentler sound from the English singer-songwriter. Frankly, I don’t know what they’re talking about. Maybe it’s to do with the relative lack of drama involved in the album’s recording process, as Rid Of Me and To Bring You My Love were reportedly fraught with tension. It can’t be its content. Harvey may not make her lover lick her injuries, compare her selflessness in a relationship to a Sheela na Gig, or forsake heaven here, but the stakes couldn’t be higher. It may be love that she’s feeling, but it’s still potentially destructive and dangerous in its power, especially when let loose in (pre-9/11) New York City. It’s evident from opening track “Big Exit.” She wants the fucking gun, people.

If that isn’t enough vitriol for you, may I direct you toward “The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore” and “Kamikaze,” two songs that may be responsible for the extraneous parental advisory notice printed on my copy of the album.

Stories From the City was my PJ record for a while, though Is This Desire? would later come to challenge my ears and ideals more. The first album I had was To Bring You My Love, which I got for Christmas my junior year along with The Chemical Brothers’ underrated Surrender. It was a profoundly upsetting listening experience. After listening to it all the way through, I listened to “Teclo” a few more times and hid the CD under the bed, a place that I’ve only since reserved for The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen and My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Its intensity scared me. But once I got used to it, Harvey’s intensity became one of her most clearest assets as a musician. It became especially appealing when juxtaposing her out-size voice, guitar playing, and stage presence against her shyness.

Some people also categorize Stories as her love album, which I also don’t understand, regardless of whether or not this album is about a rumored affair with Vincent Gallo. For one, I can’t pick an album of her’s for you that doesn’t focus on love. But this album seems most closely fixated on how love evolves, rather than obtaining it or being dashed against the rocks by it. Perhaps these were the same folks who quoted the lyric about Harvey watching her lover undress in the “This Is Love” and thought no more about it.

Did they hear “A Place Called Home,” “This Mess We’re In,” or “We Float”? Yes, these are love songs in a sense, but they are not about the beginning of a relationship but the restlessness or disillusion of it and the hope that it can become good or something else. There is no stasis here. Harvey’s bombastic guitar playing and Thom Yorke’s presence as a guest vocalist, most notably on “This Mess We’re In,” only ramp up the tension.

Even songs like “Good Fortune,” which seems to be an ode to wandering around New York’s streets with a lover, ends with the protagonist ready to uproot her sense of home.

I came to Stories during the winter of my senior year in high school. I was just about to break up with my first boyfriend. We dated for over a year, were totally unfulfilled and bored in our relationship, but were fairly a popular couple amongst the social circles of Alvin High School, which also made us kind of obnoxious. I was tired of being in his shadow and ready to move on. The album’s erotically charged content drifted me toward fantasies of galavanting around New York City with a mysterious stranger I met on the subway. This led me to project the album’s feelings on to the boy I started dating a week after I broke up with bachelor #1. It’s something I might share with fellow Harvey fan Rory Gilmore. Yes, songs like “One Line” are that powerful.

But the more I listen and reflect on Stories, the less I think about it as an album about the love shared between two people. Instead, it seems to be about the love a woman has for her interior life and how that’s manifested in her engagement with uncertain, sprawling terrains. These areas inform the album’s title and its content. For me, its most evident in Harvey’s engagement with the street, defined by longtime collaborator Maria Mochnacz‘s cover. Note that Harvey’s sunglasses, which protect her eyes from all that neon, present the illusion that she’s looking at you. It actually appears that she’s looking over her shoulder, perhaps confronting what may loom behind her. I think this freedom bewilders and excites her, as it does for many women who take time to acknowledge what a politicized act it is to walk a city street alone. I don’t do it near enough. When I do, I’m very aware of my size, sex, and, gender. I need to be more comfortable with it. I need to reclaim it.

It’s this love of the street that motivates her to study geography, navigating her environment alone in order to acquire a sense of fluency, since she has no interest in finding home beyond the journey toward it. Sometimes this leads to danger, which can also lead to epiphany. Sometimes these travels lead her to find someone to walk with, but can just as often prompt her to leave if her partner can’t or won’t keep up. This seeming departure from the wild, romantic gesticulations that characterize her early period into more mature, complex, and unresolved inter/personal reflections continues to inform her subsequent work (I’d argue it’s evident on Is This Desire?). Even if she doesn’t identify as a feminist, I’ll still follow the woman traversing the crosswalk alone.