Diogenesagogo, Dr Dark, I am more in agreement with you than you might think. You’re both very clearly right that PJ’s current output comes from a different place from the early stuff, and looking at it as ‘a shift from the visceral to the cerebral’, from being driven by the gut to the head, is not inaccurate, I think, and in the past I've used
exactly those terms – although stating it in such a polarised way exaggerates it. The early work was vocalised dressing-up (Polly said once that she never felt any sense of catharsis or release performing and it’s clear that even the most apparently unhinged moments were in fact absolutely controlled), while on the other hand I think ‘Dollar Dollar’ (a track I really didn’t like initially) is perhaps the first time she’s ever sung about something that happened to her directly, without any distortion, obfuscation, or re-imagining. So it’s not a black-and-white business: but, basically, you’re right. She clearly underwent a huge gear-shift in the mid-2000s and deliberately turned her back on what she’d been and done before, not to reject it (she still performs some of it, of course), but to move to a different place creatively.
When I first heard
Hope Six I really found it hard going. The way I eventually characterised the ‘problem’ was a bit different from yours, though similar: I settled on the complaint that Polly had turned away from using her imagination towards reportage. After all, although
LES assimilated masses of source material, it still took all that matter and then subjected it to the smelting heat of her imagination, which
Hope Six didn’t do. But as I’ve discovered more about the way the album was assembled, even that objection falls: she hasn’t simply reported, she’s amended, developed, and interacted with what she saw and heard. Imagination is present, albeit playing a subordinate role. The music performs an alchemy which turns those specific experiences into something more universal (so, you would assume (well, I did) from its style that ‘Ministry of Social Affairs’ had a Washington setting, when in fact it arises from the Afghanistan visit). All I’m left with – because I still have some issues with
Hope Six – is that from time to time she doesn’t achieve what she sets out to, mainly because what she sets out to do is so absurdly ambitious it’s a wonder she manages
anything with it. I think there are real dangers for her in working this way, because it’s rowing against the tide of her own genius; but she’s almost certainly aware of that. Virtually the only statement from her in amidst the complete silence of the last two years has been that she found battering poems into songs harder than she thought it would be, and I suspect she won’t try again, at least, not in the same way.
Now, I suspect a lot of our
frustration, let’s say, resides not in any aspect of the creative process, as such, but in the
voice. Listening to her now you get the impression of someone continually pulling their vocal punches. If I ever had the chance, among the many, many things I’d say to her would be along the lines of ‘Darling, I know you’re all saintly and humble and self-effacing these days and you don’t want to overwhelm the text and all that, but go on, just unleash that steamrollering voice on something again. I know you can. Go on. Make us howl, make us bleed.’ But she won’t, not at the moment, until she decides to sing for herself again, rather than on behalf of others, which is exactly what constrains her. But then you wouldn’t say to James Joyce, ‘You know that thing you did?
Ulysses, wasn’t it? That was good. Do something else like that.’
Where I disagree with you (both) is that I feel Ms Paglia is entirely awry in her account of the genesis of ‘genuine’ art. I think the cerebral mode is as valid as the visceral, in that it’s just as capable of communicating truths of worth. Whether we, as consumers, are receptive to them depends on us rather than the artwork. I know that what I feel about Polly’s current work is coloured by who I am: deeply English, historian by training, broadly left-wing, Christian, and born in Dorset. You can see how everything she’s been doing lately speaks to that – quite apart from the sense that I’ve grown along with her this last quarter-century, and I believe profoundly that everything she’s done in the past was a preparation for the colossal moral importance of her current work. If it doesn’t speak to others in the same way – well, it doesn’t have to, and it’s neither their fault nor its. There are parts of the Harveyan
oeuvre with which I am less than enamoured and next time she may well produce something I can’t abide! Hard though that is to imagine.
joy wrote:
...unite in this aesthetic experience ... Rosi Braidotti
You have the advantage of me regarding contemporary philosophy and ethics. But if the allegation is that Polly encourages us to dip into the misery of others as a narrowly artistic experience, no, I don’t find that. My own attitudes, feelings and desire to act have been sharpened and broadened by listening to her work.
DrDark wrote:
Lying in the Sun
Ah, there you are, you see. One of my least favourite tracks!