Happy 30th Anniversary to PJ Harvey’s second studio album Rid of Me, originally released May 4, 1993.
In March 1992, the PJ Harvey Trio released their debut album Dry to international acclaim in the rock world. And from the subsequent tours, fandom and general mania to follow, Harvey created Rid of Me, a scorching follow-up and one of the most iconic works of her long career.
Written in Dorset while recuperating from her first year as a rock star, and the last album from her eponymous trio, there are several themes in Rid of Me which Harvey would pick up on throughout her career. Recorded by Steve Albini, perhaps the most prolific engineer of ‘90s rock, Rid of Me falls within the pantheon of great rock albums of the grunge era, alongside other Albini productions like Nirvana’s In Utero (1993) and Pixies’ Surfer Rosa (1988). While at the time the production was controversial, too unpolished and loud for some critics, it has only gotten better with time, a crystallized moment in time of authentic rock and roll angst.
In retrospect, Rid of Me is widely hailed as a feminist work, despite Harvey’s insistence that was not her intention. Perhaps it’s just confusing to hear a woman be so angry, unless she is emboldened by something as virtuous as a political movement. Especially in the early ‘90s, the way Harvey shrugged off the expectation of speaking for all women was seen as dismissive and antithetical to the Third Wave ideologies of riot grrls across the pond.
But Harvey didn’t write with the patriarchy on her mind: "I don’t even think of myself as being female half the time,” she confided to The Sunday Times at the time of the album’s release. “When I’m writing songs I never write with gender in mind. I write about people’s relationships to each other. I’m fascinated with things that might be considered repulsive or embarrassing. I like feeling unsettled, unsure."
It’s an interesting problem: the knee-jerk reaction to label a woman doing something particularly unfeminine as an act of rebellion or a response to patriarchal values. Artists like Patti Smith and Yoko Ono were painted with the “feminist” brush for years, despite rejecting the title. Sometimes a woman just wants to rock. Aside from ridiculing the Freudian obsession with genitalia length in “50ft Queenie,” there really only seems to be one man who is the object of Harvey’s ire. It’s not universal. The song is classic punk, funny and mean, breaking into blues at the end, as if she’s unable to contain her glee. Even that track feels like a generalization, though, a metaphor meant to be weaponized against one person. “Snake” is another anatomical anthem, mixing sexual and Biblical imagery, not fully committing to obscenity but toying with the idea.
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Clearly, Rid of Me is, without question, an unladylike work of art. The dirtied cover photo of a topless Harvey, consistently throbbing guitars and her signature guttural howl—the Harvey of Rid of Me is the anti-English rose, raven-haired and dangerous. The title track is a perfect introduction to the mayhem. The repeated lyric, “you’re not rid of me,” is menacing—her love is a threat. It opens the album in a breathless, furious manner, demanding attention. From there, Harvey fluctuates between a sorrowful grief and hysterical rage. The melodic, almost emo guitars of “Missed” feel like a predecessor to American Football. But the lyrics are distinctively Harvey, far from the American midwest, full of authentic emotion tethered to literary references. A version of “Man-Size” with a spare string sextet (“Man-Size Sextext”) adds another layer of classicism, a reverence for history and canon up to this point only seen in her songwriting.
A cover of Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” is a nod to a kindred spirit, a misunderstood blues singer. Harvey’s version is harsh, dissonant and demented. Another influential man in Harvey’s life, she often cites Dylan as one of her earliest influences. He shows up in other moments throughout Rid of Me, alongside Captain Beefheart and Robert Plant, in her extreme, emotional lyrics and howling vocals. Like in “Rub Til It Bleeds”—the intimacy of her words and the raw production quality creates a discomfort that feels extremely punk. The track has Albini’s signature hands-off engineering style, like when the sound of Harvey clearing her throat is left in at the beginning of the track. Intentional or not, it adds presence, the feeling of being in the room with her, a quality hard to achieve in the over-stylized ‘90s.
Thirty years later, Rid of Me is still an impressive feat. Even the most abstract artists of contemporary music could only dream of making such an aggressive, uncomfortable album. But you can still see Harvey’s influence everywhere—from the borderline unlistenable sampling chaos of Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA, to the unrelenting, righteous emotion of boygenius. On Rid of Me, Harvey isn’t confined by genre or gender. Instead, she makes something so incredibly personal and insular in nature that it feels universal in its scope—a person feeling the full spectrum of their emotions, only able to express them through art.
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