PJ Harvey and Music Video Performance

Abigail Gardner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317080732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

PJ Harvey's performances are premised on the core contention that she is somehow causing 'trouble'. Just how this trouble can be theorised within the context of the music video and what it means for a development of the ways we might conceptualise 'disruption' and think about music video lies at the heart of this book. Abigail Gardner mixes feminist theory and critical models from film and video scholarship as a rich means of interrogating Harvey's work and redefining her disruptive strategies. The book presents a rethinking of the masquerade that allies it to cultural memory, precipitated by Gardner's claim that Harvey's performances are conversations with the past, specifically with visualised memories of archetypes of femininity. Harvey's masquerades emerge from her conversations and renegotiations with both national and transatlantic musical, visual and lyrical heritages. It is the first academic book to present analysis of Harvey's music videos and opens up fresh avenues into exploring what is at stake in the video work of one of Britain's premier singer-songwriters. It extends the discussion on music video to consider how to make sense of the rapidly developing digital environment in which it now sits. The interdisciplinary nature of the book should attract readers from a range of subject areas including popular music studies, cultural studies, media and communication studies, and gender studies.

Chapter 1
The Trouble with Polly

Mapping any disciplinary field involves a process of both selection and delineation. Deciding where to draw the map’s boundaries and to what scale is the role of any mapping exercise. When this ‘map’ is made up of a number of differing areas this process becomes more complex. To provide a foundational map of literature that speaks to PJ Harvey and music video performance means that we need to look at (feminist) popular music studies and music video studies and, in turn, to the philosophical and methodical works on which they have relied. Emerging from those enquiries, like spokes from a bicycle wheel, is a diverse literature at the centre of which is the connecting theme, ‘trouble’. Harvey is a troubling presence and positioning her music video performances within a body of work that might elucidate and provide a basis for analysis of what she is doing is itself troublesome. Ontologically and representationally, music video, too, is problematic; what it is and what it does, particularly with respect to sexuality and gender, continues to be contested.

Harvey as disruptive

In accounts of Harvey and many other female musicians, there is an emphasis on how images of femininity have been utilised and mobilised as a vehicle for subversive dissent, if not disruption (Burns and LaFrance, 2002; Whiteley, 1997, 2000; Rodger, 1994; Shugart and Waggoner, 2005; Leonard, 2007a). Whilst taking account of these interventions and being in agreement with the spirit of their findings regarding the nature of such challenges, this chapter argues against two of the premises inherent in much of this literature. Most, if not all, of the critical approaches under discussion have produced work that has mapped out a dissenting or disruptive feminine that draws on the mid- to late twentieth-century psychoanalytical work of Rivière (1986[1929]), Irigaray (1985[1977]) and Butler (1990, 1993) to do so. Perhaps inevitably, theorists in popular music theory, cultural theory and music video theory have engaged with a resulting debate that is couched within the binary of resistance versus recuperation on which these concepts are premised. This dialectic seems too rigid to account for Harvey’s work within music video performance. My initial premise is that Harvey’s video performances are somehow ‘archival’, first in so far as they are indebted to past imagery and a stockpile of stereotypes and, second, by existing as archivable digital artefacts. Positioning Harvey’s performances as archival – that is, how her performances are conversations with the past, specifically with visualised memories of archetypes of femininity – opens up a more flexible approach that is applicable to understanding her music video performances. These performances sit outside that rubric of resistance versus recuperation and are too ‘complex’ to be situated as a binary (Railton and Watson, 2011), which would not allow for nuance both in form and format or allow for the ambiguous spaces that Harvey opens up in her work. Harvey’s performances are ironic reviews of past stereotypes of femininity, which she then humorously and ambiguously reflects upon. They are a ‘miming’ and ‘displacing’ tactic (Butler in Kotz, 1992: 84) but cannot be easily accounted for within a binary dialectic. This is because they foreground a wicked sense of humour that allows her to subvert and challenge dominant tropes of femininity while also continuing to hold such archetypes in affection through the constant audiovisual evocation of the past. It is difficult (and possibly unproductive) to make any final claims for what Harvey is doing, whether her performances might be potential ‘tool[s] for social conformity or an avenue[s] for alterity’ (Shugart and Waggoner, 2005: 79), and this in-between space that refutes the dualism of an ‘either/or’ position can be read through Robertson’s (1996) ‘feminist camp’ because her theories of camp utilise parody and irony, linking camp to a reconfiguration of the past.

Much of the work on women in music who have been argued to push the boundaries of acceptability is imbued with the rhetoric of ‘progress’, or of the ‘positive’ (see Whiteley, 2000; Burns and Lafrance, 2002). This is understandable when many of these discussions are concentrated on the practical realities of the contemporary Anglo-American music business and related media discourses (Raphael, 1995; Kruse, 1999, 2003; Schippers, 2000; Leonard, 2007a). They address issues of presence and production, and of material progress within the industry. Whiteley’s work, in particular, has been foundational to thinking through gender in relation to popular music studies (1997, 2000). Her 2000 account maps out the ‘challenges’ that have faced female artists who have transformed ‘gender-related boundaries’ (2000: 9) by ‘mov[ing] the goalposts’ (2000: 1) of a male-dominated industry. Driven by an avowedly feminist agenda that is couched within a rhetoric of struggle, she also acknowledges the complexity central to a contemporary feminism influenced by postmodernism (2000: 2–3). This complexity is where Harvey sits.

The debates on Harvey, such as they are within popular music studies, establish that she is something of a troubling and provocative presence, a ‘problem’ for the ‘minimal interpretative resources’ (Burns and Lafrance, 2002: 176) of mainstream media. She has been described by feminist and non-feminist writers alike as ‘visceral’ (Whiteley, 2000: 5; Reynolds and Press, 1995: 339) and as ‘intellectual’ (Davies, 2001) – as someone who, through her ‘exploration of female subjectivity and angst’ (Whiteley, 2000: 18), has ‘challenged the extreme frontiers of gender and sexuality in the early 1990s’ (Whiteley, 2000: 207). The most detailed work on her to date discusses how she ‘disrupts’ ‘dominant discourses of sex, gender, race and creed’ (Burns and Lafrance, 2002: xi), but this disruption, for the most part, concentrates on her music. As I set out in the Introduction, this book follows Frith’s argument that music video is about the performance of music rather than the music itself. Seen in this way, much of the extant material on Harvey is not directly relevant to her music video performances, so it is important to work with the claims that are out there on Harvey, in particular those that mention her ‘self-presentation’ (Whiteley, 2000: 8; Reynolds and Press, 1995: 337) and self-exposure (Reynolds and Press, 1995: 337) and which feed those into what Burns and Lafrance have to say on Harvey’s ability to disrupt.

By positioning Harvey as a ‘disruptive diva’, Burns and Lafrance’s work establishes a suitable trajectory for this review with reference to what it means in Harvey’s video performances. To do this it is important to clarify how this book understands the term ‘disruptive’, particularly as there is no precedent for discussing it in relation to Harvey’s video performances. Burns and Lafrance establish it as a verb, used alongside ‘challenge’ and ‘disturb’ to describe women musicians ‘who, by means of their creative work, ultimately disrupt dominant discourses of sex, gender, race and creed’ (2002: xi). It is therefore a palpable ‘doing’ that somehow interferes or problematises the conventional ways of ‘being’ or ‘behaving as’ a woman. Further to this, one of this book’s key premises, in line with Railton and Watson’s reading of the function of music video, is to argue that Harvey’s video performances problematise the dialectical nature of disruption that Burns and Lafrance propose. This forces a rethinking of the key conceptual tools that have influenced current debates on how women musicians might disrupt. If we add to the term by positioning it not as one side of an oppositional model but as more radically deconstructionist of the very frameworks within which it has been placed, then we start to glimpse what Harvey might be doing in her performances. Disruption might not be a ‘rupture’ that operates within a model of resistance or recuperation but a wholesale reconsideration of the frameworks within which such a dialectic is seen to take place. This reading of disruption can only emerge from a dialogue with the interventions that are in place. It is to these that I turn now.

Burns and Lafrance’s collaborative work is feminist in its focus and intent. Published in 2002 it reflects back on a period in the early 1990s when, they argue, Harvey was one of four women working in a music industry (the others were Courtney Love, Tori Amos and Me’Shell Ndedeocello) who ‘impelled and disturbed the boundaries of “acceptable” female musicianship in ways both sociocultural and musical’ (Burns and Lafrance, 2002: xi). It is apparent from this that their arguments are premised on an oppositional rhetoric that positions the mainstream diametrically opposite a counterculture, since they frame Harvey’s contributions to music as part of a ‘feminist subversion through popular music’ (2002: 10) that enables a form of ‘resistance politics’ (2002: xi) within mass culture. They ally disruption with destabilisation, agitation and the ability to ‘appal’ (2002: 1) and so set out a terrain of conflict where creative endeavours and interventions are marked by the rhetoric of struggle and ascendancy. They choose female musicians who ‘adopt marginal countercultural positions in and through their creative work’ (2002: 2), those who perhaps are able to because of the genres within which they sit and the consequent industries within which, and the audiences to which, they are sold. These musicians operate outside of the strictures of the conventionally ‘popular’ and are able to experiment with identity through their music by offering up reworkings of femininity.

Versed in a poststructuralist conception of identity that comes from acknowledging Butler’s (1990) understanding of identity as socially constructed (Burns and Lafrance, 2002: 10), Burns and Lafrance seek to question how those identities are played out within the musical texts under consideration. To do this they set out four means by which the artists under discussion are able to disrupt ‘expectations’ (2002: 2), but there is nothing to explain how and why these may work when applied to Harvey’s music video performances. The four possibilities for disruption focus on the musical and the productive: first, there is the ability to interrogate dominant normative system through ‘a range of musical techniques’ and the ‘adopt[ion] of marginal countercultural positions in and through their creative work’ (2002: 2); second, they detail the use of unsettling lyrical/musical expression; third, they indicate how the manipulation of instrumental/vocal codes might be disruptive; and, fourth, they argue how presence at the point of production, in and of itself, is challenging (2002: 2–3). Theirs is a snapshot study offering a historically specific illustration of these four categories through the close analysis of one album, Is This Desire? (1998).

For Burns and Lafrance, Harvey has the ability to disrupt through her music and her position on the margins of culture. Whilst they refer to musical techniques (vocal range, timbre), most of their focus is on Harvey’s narratorial positioning and self-presentation. Using lyrics, media coverage and public image as exemplars, they argue how Harvey’s refusal to align herself with a heteronormative model is illustrative of a marginal position. This refusal to declare her sexual orientation is palpable in her lyrical work and becomes challenging through its reluctance to align itself within dominant systems of gender that even the 1990’s indie-rock scene relied on (Burns and Lafrance, 2002: 170, 178). The potential to upset in this way emerges from Harvey’s lack of clarity in delineating her characters’ sexual orientation and thus confusing the narratorial position. On one track Harvey sings odes to her ‘Catherine’, for example, and does so in a vocal delivery that is obviously female, opening up a space for an oppositional reading that may be queer-identified, or ‘lesbian-i-call’ ‘(Rycenga, 1997: 204 cited in Burns and Lafrance, 2002: 179). This has also been remarked on by Mazullo (2001) in a piece on Harvey’s 1991 album Dry, where he, too, notes how ‘Harvey enjoys playing at multiple selves, and in doing so … tells stories that are fuelled equally by the fires of female and male, hetero- and homosexual desire’ (2001: 1). This refusal to align herself firmly with a specific identity within the world of the track is a point that I return to when dealing with Harvey’s performances in MAN-SIZE (1993) and 50FT QUEENIE (1993), where I feed them into my argument on ‘serious camp’. It also surfaces across much of her work and might be seen to be a significant characteristic in its refusal to be aligned to any one position, be that sexual or, in her more recent work Let England Shake, political. Burns and Lafrance also note how Harvey’s appearance could be read as an interrogation of idealised femininity, writing how:

Harvey has forged a relatively unprecedented presentation of self and work. This signature presentation consists in representations of her body as bone-thin, gripped by skintight dresses, weighed down by high heeled shoes and smeared with lipstick and other makeup. Before Is This Desire? Harvey’s music was often hard to listen to – and her presentation-of-self often hard to look at – for Harvey’s musician and physical presentation dramatized the pain and torment associated with ‘proper’ womanhood. (2002: 170–71)

What emerges from this extract is the idea that Harvey’s presence is challenging because she documents the difficulty of ‘fitting in’ to femininity, highlighting the painful process of ‘becoming’ a woman. This has also been noted by Reynolds and Press (1995), who draw attention to Harvey’s problematic relationship with the body which, they say, is cause for conflict (1995: 338–9) and which functions as an object of both desire and disgust (1995: 337).

If Harvey’s work was hard to listen to and she was hard to look at, following Burns and Lafrance, then it was because she was ill at ease with the rubrics into which she had to fit. Musically and visually, her work was ‘difficult’, and this is key to understanding her music video performances in which she performs figures that do not ‘fit’. This difficulty in ‘fitting in’, Burns and Lafrance argue, results in Harvey surfacing in the press as problematic. They detail how she has been positioned within mainstream press discourse as ‘evil or supernatural’, as a goddess a ‘rock-spinster druid’, or a ‘demon stewardess’ (2002: 178). She becomes expelled from the ‘normal’ and is made abject (non-human, non-married) and belittled (steward-ess).

This pattern is also noted by Davies (2001) whose analysis of two specialist rock music papers, Melody Maker and The New Musical Express, suggests that Harvey’s position as a ‘credible artist’ does not exempt her appearance and sexuality from being continually stressed (2001: 308). In her study of the music press’s continued marginalisation of women, Davies detects a pattern of prioritisation of women musicians’ sexuality over and above their musical ability. She argues how an exclusionary discourse is in operation whereby women’s status as ‘real’ musicians is undermined by the repeated framing of them as ‘fake’, by diminishing them to epithets such as ‘girl’ [or ‘chick’ and ‘babe’] or conversely, placing them at the other end of such a discourse, as ‘too’ intelligent (and therefore pretentious), which is where we find Harvey.

As Davies, Whiteley and other women writers on popular music culture have noted before and since with respect to women’s status within such representational regimes (Leonard, 2007; Cooper, 1995; Clawson, 1999), this is part of what Burns and Lafrance term the mainstream media’s ‘minimal interpretative resources (that is, those based on a hegemonic and patriarchal conception of desire and romantic love)’ (2002: 176). They mention how the characters in Is This Desire? are ‘invariably viewed by mainstream critics as gendered cultural misfits ‘witches, hysterics, spinsters’ or simply confused and desperate women’ (2002: 177). Following on from this, they argue that her ‘presence [within press discourse] disturbs and disrupts … her persona is linked to evil and the supernatural … [and] she defies the many attributes commonly associated with female musicianship in late twentieth-century popular music’ (2002: 178–9). As already indicated, part of this book’s aim is to examine how cogent that claim for a disruptive ‘presence’ is when traced across to Harvey’s music video performances.

Burns and Lafrance also argue that the ‘seizure of both the creative and productive reins … constitutes a formidable and formerly inaccessible vehicle of gynocentred self-expression’ (2002: 3). This is an argument based on the guarantee that female presence and control ushers ‘female voices’ into popular culture; that female presence within a previously male-only bastion can be disruptive. Their argument rests on accepting that female incursion into a male realm is, by itself, disruptive (see also Lewis, 1993[1987]). This assumption is generalised and difficult to really evidence without recourse to a reception study. Burns and Lafrance also ignore the terrain and the heritage within which Harvey was working in the 1990s, an indie-rock domain indebted to a punk aesthetic both musically and socially, whereby punk had enabled more women to gain access to previously male-dominated studio space and engineering decisions (Reddington, 2007: 18; Bayton, 1998). Many interventions on punk draw out how the movement’s adherence to a DIY aesthetic and to a rebellion premised on anarchism enabled women to compete on similar terms to men (Savage, 1991; O’Brien, 1995; Sabin, 1999; Reddington, 2007), so that ‘[p]unk made women feel they could compete on equal terms to men’ (Savage, 1991: 184 cited in Whiteley, 2000: 108). Since being able to play was not a requisite (Reddington, 2007: 23) there was a level of (in)competence which both men and women could engage with and which liberated them from the expectations of virtuosity. Whiteley goes on to indicate how Siouxsie Sioux also established a precedent for ‘self exploration and self-invention, the two major strategies in the subversion of traditional images of femininity’ (2000: 123: see also Reynolds and Press, 1995: 306). So, as Reddington notes, punk offered a ‘unique context for changes in music-making’ (2007: 17) despite it perhaps being ‘temporary’ (2007: 16) and acknowledged in a ‘grudging’ tone (2007: 17). However, she dispiritingly concludes that punk’s promise of equality has not been a lasting legacy since ‘rock music [has] been the slowest of all recent cultural phenomena to incorporate the female creative producer’ (2007: 2).

Nevertheless, what is potentially useful to hold on to is the idea of an ‘incursion’ into an area previously not accessible to women, which is where there is a match to arguments emanating from music video theory (Lewis, 1992). Harvey’s music video performances showcase her using the studio (WHEN UNDER ETHER, 2007; THE LETTER, 2004), in charge of production technology (THE LETTER, 2004) and wielding her ‘guitar’ (THIS IS LOVE, 2001), which Sheila Whiteley argued could be seen as an attempt to ‘seize the phallus’ (1997: xx), so Burns and Lafrance’s intervention on this count is helpful in offering an initial route into assessing the potential disruption of Harvey’s performances.

However, Burns and Lafrance’s methodological reliance on the textual analysis of lyrics and scores and their argument that disruption is one side of a constant interplay between the forces of the dominant and the marginal played out within the parameters of capitalism are not sufficient to account for Harvey’s music video performances. Why their approach to disruption is so dictated by a dualist dialectic is perhaps because this is the ground upon which such concepts have been formulated and these are the battles that feminism has engaged in: primarily those concerning appearance and what it means to fit into femininity, and indeed what that might be. In order to understand why such a dialectic has been foundational to their critique we have to consider the heritage of such terms, and from there to comprehend how they have been so crucial an underpinning for much feminist cultural critique, including feminist popular music scholarship.

Many of the debates that have fomented around issues related to image, femininity and disruption that are marked in popular music scholarship have drawn on psychoanalysis and cultural theory that were first been taken up by feminist film theorists (Kuhn, 1982; Pribram, 1988; Gledhill, 1991; Swanson, 1991; Mayne, 1993; Humm, 1997; Lebeau, 2001; Kaplan, 1988, 1997, 2000; Doane, 1987, 1991; Thornham, 1997, 1999). The bulk of material that is foundational to an understanding of Harvey’s music video performances thus sits outside of popular music and music video theory (apart from Kaplan’s (1987: 93) brief mention of it in relation to androgyny). By disarticulating the disciplinary locations of this work and applying it to Harvey there has to be an acknowledgement that I am taking psychoanalytical work, in particular, away from its clinical origins and using ideas from it to think about Harvey’s music video performance. In this respect I am doing the same as feminist film theorists have done, but I want to trace out the historical provenance of the term to foreground how it has been used and why I think it is wanting.

Rivière’s work on the masquerade set the stage for debates on the ontology of femininity within feminist philosophy (Irigaray) and feminist film criticism (Doane) as well as also being fundamental to an understanding of Butler’s work, in which she insists that gender be disarticulated from sex. An understanding of Rivière’s masquerade is crucial to reading Harvey’s performances because of how her video work problematises and extends our understanding of the term.

Masks and mimes

Rivière’s work on the masquerade is the origin for numerous well-recounted debates on women’s relationship with the image(s) of femininity(ies) and has generated much debate and rebuttal (Irigaray, 1985; Fuss, 1989). These have formed the theoretical backbone for writers on women in popular music and their ability to challenge normative systems of appearance in particular (Doane, 1982, 1991; Schwichtenberg, 1992, 1993; Rodger, 2004). Although Burns and Lafrance do not specifically address the masquerade, their work on ‘incursion’ and ‘trespass’ into the realm of production indicate that there is a productive match with the term. The masquerade’s potential to upset and offer a space for critique is consistent with their emphasis on the challenges that Harvey mounts in her musical work. Here I set out what the masquerade is and how Harvey’s video performances recalibrate it. My contention is that Harvey’s masquerades are somehow archival; her challenges, in terms of her negotiations with femininity(ies), are concerned with the past. The masquerade becomes reframed as a possibility within a continuum of archived femininities, which is an extension of the original premise of the term. Harvey makes use of it but is not bound by it.

Rivière’s w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• General Editors’ Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Why PJ Harvey? Why Music Video? Why Now?
• 1 The Trouble with Polly
• 2 Harvey and Music Video in a Digital Age
• 3 Harvey’s Memorades
• 4 Harvey’s Serious Camp
• 5 Harvey as Deathly Diva
• 6 Harvey, Place and Englishness
• 7 Afterthoughts
• Bibliography
• Index