The first music I fell in love with was classic rock and Britpop, two genres I still love to this day, but share something pretty glaring—they’re mostly dominated by men. I loved the rollicking songs of The Kinks, the rough snarl of Liam Gallagher and the creepy bravado of Black Sabbath. Their music fit in perfectly with the masculine way I carried myself, and it actually made me feel more confident in that self-image. I could listen to these lofty songs without having to grapple with my insecurities around femininity—they just made me feel good. I wasn’t purposely avoiding music made by women, but most of the bands I was listening to in my mid-teens were male. This was partially because I was ignorant about all the great female artists, and quite possibly because I was subconsciously a harsher critic of that music. I now know that was a manifestation of the rejection of my own femininity, but I still feel immensely guilty about it because today so many of my favorite musicians are women.
One of the first female artists who really resonated with me was PJ Harvey. Her songs are muscular and marked by thunderous guitars and a strapping persona that slaps you across the face. Harvey wasn’t just assertive—her music was physical in a way that I hadn’t really heard before, making a lot of the bands I was listening to before sound bland or uninspired. Her 1992 debut LP Dry (which was recently reissued on vinyl with an accompanying demos album) isn’t my favorite PJ Harvey album, but it was my introduction to her music and her introduction to the world. Like much of her early work, Dry was rudimentary, visceral and sexually explicit, and it totally blew my narrow perceptions of femininity out of the water. It was melodramatic yet primal, angelic yet dysfunctional—exactly what I needed to hear at the time.
It wasn’t just the lines Harvey sang, but how she sang them that got my attention. She sings with theatrical agony (“Oh My Lover”), magnetic indifference and pop brilliance (“Dress”) and blunt, sensual vigor (“Happy And Bleeding,” “Sheela-Na-Gig”). As someone who hadn’t yet heard Patti Smith’s Horses or Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, this album hit me like a truck. The way she accentuates certain phrases or lines is astounding. She expels the word “victory” in her song of the same name as if an ominous creature is crawling up her back, garbles several lines on “Dress” to deride a man and tweaks her emphasis on each repeated line of the “Fountain” outro (“And on my hill I wait for wind”), almost providing alternate meanings.
Harvey poetically divulged tales of being chewed up and spit out by men, but still exuded a sexual confidence that celebrated her desires. Hearing these sentiments from a lanky, 23-year-old woman who grew up on a farm helped instill my belief that young women are powerful, complex and don’t need to conform to any standards (whether that’s daintiness or forcefulness). Harvey’s androgyny (captured in her raw album covers throughout the years) and lack of concern for gender roles was inspiring and something she continued with later songs like the gender-swapping “Man-Size” or marriage-defying “The Pocket Knife.”
I’m still navigating my own self-image and identity, and I’m not really sure where it will lead me. But watching people proudly set fire to restrictive views of femininity or masculinity—whether they’ve internalized these things or not—makes me feel like I don’t have to have all the answers. Sometimes I imagine myself in the first line of PJ Harvey’s “Victory” (“I stumble in and in, you fit me with those angel wings”), bumbling around in a sea of my own muddy thoughts and perceived expectations, but Harvey welcomes me into her weird world anyways. From: https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/pj-harvey/gateways-pj-harveys-dry
PJ Harvey, Bjork, Tori Amos
