“Flânerie is a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness even though it is actually a final resignation to it…” (Keither Tester)
PJ Harvey's Sound posits an insatiable tension somewhere between musical flânerie and dialectical playfulness; a sound that is addictive to my generation’s ear. She pulls me from the infinite, finite, organic, city-bound, the body, mind, distilling them all. She ruptures the eternal from the transitory reaching up to those independent, intense and impartial spirits, conjuring that psycho-semantic world that runs down into my bones. Perhaps a bit much? Let me explain with a few fragmented lyrics.
Is This Desire?
“Catherine liked high places,
The hills
Chapel
Washing herself
Wind
Listen
Children’s voices
Women of the hills
A view of the city,
Now she sits and moans” (The Wind)
“Beauty of her
Under electric light
Tears my heart out
Every time…
waiting” (Electric Light)
Stories from the city, Stories from the sea
“Teach me mummy,
How to catch someone’s fancy
Under the twisted oak grove” (Grow Grow)
“The ceiling is moving…
Like a conveyor belt above my eyes
When under ether,
The mind comes alive…
Something’s inside me
Unborn and unblessed
Into this world and to the next” (When Under Ether)
Lyrically, the idea of the city seems to represent heartache, chaos, and the uncontrollable. Nature some place of refuge, where we only gain moments of culminate feeling when her odes to love climax, always being taken forward by her melodic narratives. The city is present more as a motif than a subject in the background, foregrounding all her undulating sound-concepts and nature-based imagery. This is one of the places where her music gains its dynamism and power from a movement and interaction of extremes, between desirous chaos, and romantic reprieve; city and nature; authenticity and deception; a sort of musical Flânerie, always imagistically tied to, yet anterior to the city. Her music is always bound by some sense of modern idealism and the abyss, yet some paradigmatic opposite is constantly bubbling up from an expression of her subjectivity.
Her music is in a perpetual state of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs, and fathomless points of silence crossing path ways and the nostalgic wilderness of feeling, from one great rhythmic throb to the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms. Overall, I feel like her music's taken me on “a turn from the seething bubbling fluid in a vessel consisting of solid materials of buildings, laws regulations and historical traditions,” (Robert Musil, 1954), and out into some ethereal other and for this I can't but feel that she has some quality as a quasi-heroic, journeying flâneuse, placing herself always in a liminality of being.
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