The Garden, a PJ Harvey Discussion Site

Apologies if this has been posted before, but I came across this highly academic essay on Polly's Man-Size Sextet by a professor at Cornell. I suspect it's a fairly old piece :

http://music.cornell.edu/sites/people/f ... arvey1.pdf

Personally I'm not sure there is quite the significance she attributes to every minute nuance of her lyrics & performance, but it's food for thought; I found the explanation of the actual music the most interesting part, I've always wondered why I find Polly's songs so complex & satisfying when they seem superficially so simple. It also rather confirms my suspicions that Rob Ellis is one helluva drummer!

P.S. I'd love to see Camille Paglia do something similar!

Sounds like he likes to think....im sure pollys writing process is a simple one.

Yes, Thazi found it back in March: http://thegardenforum.org/viewtopic.php ... ell#p25972. I think it was written while Ms Peraino was a doctoral student, so a little while ago.

There simply *can't* have been that degree of calculation in what Polly wrote and performed in her early twenties, can there? That doesn't mean those nuances weren't there, though. I think most artists of all kinds, most of the time, produce work instinctively and leave it to others to draw conclusions. It's why Polly's absolutely right never to say anything about what her work is 'about' in any detail: that would constrain it, contaminate it, almost. One of the many interesting things about her is her developing sense over the years of being creatively in the service of something bigger than she is, which is a feeling I think a lot of artists come to. So you can both send your work out into the world and not worry too much about what people will make of it, and also come back to older work and see things in it that weren't obvious in the past. You remember the conversation we had about Polly and feminism? Her output can function feministically without that being her conscious intention at all. So anyone can analyse away to their heart's content!