She-Bop >> Final Girls >> Punk, Performance Art and PMT Pop
Written by: Lucy O'Brien
Source: She-Bop (book)

"I worked from the moment you met me to be competitive with the boys. We would like girls all over to form bands, indeed it's my fondest desire. But if you're going to pick up a wooden spoon and a saucepan and put out a bunch of crap, well, that's fine too - but I don't have to go down there with you and beat on that pot. I don't feel musically competitive with the Babes [In Toyland], or The Raincoats, or with anyone who doesn't understand the power of a GOOD SONG. Whether it's "Chelsea Hotel", "Temptation", fucking "Pretty In Pink" - I don't care. A good song's a good song. That's my politics. Please don't slice PJ Harvey in half - her assimilationist compromise has done more for us that 30 Grrrrrrls banging on a pot and spoon. I'm not trying to hurt other women. I'm just pissed that they pick on PJ."

This was written a year before the double tragedy of her husband Kurt Cobain's suicde and the death of her bass player Kristin Pfaff from a heroin overdose. The reality of being a rock queen living in the headlines was becoming too hard to bear.

PJ Harvey dealt with media approbation by ignoring it, holing up on the Dorset farm where she was raised, like a remote, scalding latter-day Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Digging into the mess and pottage of desire, emotion and perverse longing, her songs were an earthy kind of blues informed by childhood experience wringing chickens' necks and delivering still-born lambs bloodied and in bits. Polly Harvey, knock-kneed Queenie towering in her platform slingbacks, wardrobe feather boa and glitzy pop-star shades, was the nearest thing in the '90s to Patti Smith's authoritative androgyny. She played a trawling, bowdlerized version of swamp blues with an all-male band and her audiences were half and half men and women. Her 1993 hit album Rid Of Me covered everything from vaginal aridity to sodomy, culminating in the confusion of guitarist Rob's falsetto voice singing 'the girl's part', a plea to consummate fiery desire.

Despite the fact that one of her songs, '50Ft Queenie', was inspired by the film Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, in which a neurotic housewife meets spacemen, assumes giantess proportions and flattens her obtuse husband, Harvey had no truck with Riot Grrrl feminism:

"I saw Huggy Bear once and they were inviting people to have debates about feminism between every song. I just thought, What is all this fuss about? Why are we trying to separate men and women so much? I felt like getting up on stage and saying in a ridiculous accent, men and vimmen, men and vimmen... We're pretty much the same really. I feel very similar to a lot of men - I don't feel particularly different to them. What's the problem?"

The '90s girl bands began to readdress gender issues where '70s punk had left off. De-emphasizing difference has a particular kind of power. Sometimes this means assimilation, a buckling of the self of power. Sometimes this means assimilation, a buckling of the self to be 'one of the lads'. At other times it is an unconscious living out of power, a superlative state in which no particular gender has appropriation of certain kinds of behaviour. 'Shitkickin' rock' comes with a male-code label; eradicate that - no one owns those codes after all - and there is a sound, like Harvey, that speaks beyond gender, in some kind of mutant individualized territory.