1. PJ Harvey, Let England Shake
“You cannot get the news from poems”, William Carlos wrote. “But men die every day for lack of what is found there.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley famously declared poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Of course this was during a time when people actually read poems. Believe it or not, people used to write them as well. Poets, of course, are also the legislators for the unacknowledged: their observations and protestations are, aside from any and all aesthetic considerations, a shout from the silence; a candle for the dark places.
Throughout our time on this often-dark and occasionally silent earth, poets have cried out on account of the dispossessed, the least of our brethren who can’t or won’t speak for themselves: the elderly, the impoverished and those unfortunate souls sent out to fight our wars. These mostly undecorated and forgotten folks who are obliged to finish the fights started by people in high and heavily fortified places. As such, poems (and books, movies and songs) about war will always be relevant and timely because war is always with us. These days, it seems, we can’t find enough enemies quickly enough.
Enter Polly Jean Harvey.
The simple description of 2011’s Let England Shake is that it’s an album about war. The slightly less simple description is that it’s an album about war and the toll it has extracted on the people and land of England. The more complicated –and accurate—description is that it is an extended meditation on the conflicts England, its allies and its enemies have found themselves ensnared in, time and again. It is not an anti-war album as such; it dispenses altogether with sloganeering and simplistic appraisals. More, it’s not political so much as its personal: it concerns itself with the usually nameless soldiers and citizens who pay the ultimate cost, time and again. Another way to put it is that this is the album Roger Waters has always wanted to make.
What PJ Harvey is after here is slightly beyond ambitious. Let England Shake is a statement of purpose that strains—and succeeds—at articulating observations that are not unique to any country, party affiliation or language; in other words she is grappling with universal themes yet rendering them in ways that are deeply personal. Somehow, she manages to speak for—and through—dead soldiers, she weaves in her own (mostly dispassionate) reflections and, throughout, she embodies the voice of History, which does not render judgment so much as evidence of the events it has recorded.
This work would be a significant achievement just as words on paper, or recited lines. Adding the music and the full arsenal of voices Harvey can peerlessly conjure up, the results exemplify the distinctive and profound impact musical expression conveys. In addition to the crucial support of long-time collaborators John Parish and Mick Harvey, Harvey adds zither and saxophone to her usual guitar and piano. The resulting music is quietly forceful, and insistent yet restrained: like the lyrics, they are ostensibly simple, but reveal multiple layers after repeated listens.
The strategic touches, clever and cheeky, provide added depth, humor and pathos to the proceedings. For instance, incorporating a reveille into “The Glorious Land” is intentionally jarring; it’s totally out of place and should distract from the menacing undercurrent—but it doesn’t because it’s a sly and subtle commentary on the rush (literal and figurative) to fight that precedes and follows a declaration of war. “What is the glorious fruit of our land?” she asks. “Its fruit is orphaned children,” is the solemn response, making those trumpet calls both ironic and heartrending. On the title track she ingeniously incorporates the old chestnut “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” as a comment-within-comment about lost empires (real or imagined) and textbook epochs that ceaselessly recycle themselves. A similar effect is achieved on “Written on the Forehead” by sampling Niney Nine’s classic “Blood and Fire”: Let it burn, she chants, an avenging angel and/or the battle-weary lament of a scorched landscape.
The album comes out swinging and never stalls for a second, but there are three songs (the fourth, fifth and sixth tracks) that especially stand out, in the context of this work and everything else PJ Harvey has done. “The Words That Maketh Murder” uses a propulsive beat that would seem to belie the lyrics, until one realizes the tempo is appropriate for a battlefield scene, a racing heart or a shell-shocked brain. Harvey’s child-like voice is used to disarming affect (pun somewhat intended): in a sing-song cadence with a pleasantly chugging rhythm she recalls a unnamed soldier seeing “arms and legs…in the trees” and her repeated chant of the word murder is a declaration (this is what war is) and an indictment (this is what war does). As the song ends it invokes the throwaway line from Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” (What if I take my problem to the United Nations?): it is and, for the most part always has been, a sadly absurd, rhetorical query.
The centerpiece of the album is “All & Everyone” which, like many of the songs, concerns itself with World War I and the brutal Gallipoli Campaign. Of course this event literally invokes the aforementioned Constantinople, and still resonates as a particularly bloody and, arguably pointless conflagration. The pace is appropriately somber, almost funereal, with a languidly creeping tension that builds up to the moments that resulted in massacre: “Death hung in the smoke and clung/To four hundred acres of useless beachfront,” Harvey intones, employing a venom that is used judiciously, if strategically, throughout the work. As plaintive organ, sax and percussion march, like the helpless soldiers, into a resigned silence, her ethereal voice croons the preordained verdict: “Death to all and everyone.”
“On Battleship Hill” again invokes Gallipoli, albeit from the perspective of the present day. Naturally this calls to mind comparisons with current, controversial escapades that have left grieving widows and mind-boggling body counts. A whiff of thyme (a spice traditionally utilized in funerals for its pleasing scent and alleged spiritual properties) in the wind reminds the singer that “cruel nature has won again.” Commenting on the “caved-in trenches (and) jagged mountains…cracked like teeth in a rotten mouth”, Harvey once again uses the scarred land as an explicit reflection on the physical toll (on our countries; on our people) war inexorably extracts. The plodding pace of the song is like Nature itself: relentless, non-negotiable. After a propulsive introduction all sound ceases and it’s just Harvey’s voice: that siren wail, lustrous, fragile, immortal. Her voice, as those in the know can attest, is one of the miracles of modern music. Acquiescent and almost operatic, she sings out for the fallen soldiers, buried in the hard earth and rendered history by the unlucky circumstances of their ages and the age they lived in; the age we live in still. As the song spins itself out from the past into our possible future the doleful refrain “Cruel Nature has won again” is a requiem for our recklessness, which is unending as it is unnatural.
In the final analysis one is tempted to say that PJ Harvey has created a musical equivalent to Tim O’Brien’s celebrated collection The Things They Carried. Of course, being music, it’s different, and where O’Brien offers a first-hand account from the fields of fire, Harvey immersed herself in source material to give voice to people who never had a chance to account for themselves. Music and voices lend a solemn, ultimately beautiful import to words meant to shake and redeem.
In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock T.S. Eliot’s despondent narrator laments “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each/I do not think they will sing to me.” On Let England Shake PJ Harvey has willed herself to become one of those mermaids, and this elegiac cycle of songs is her lone voice crying out to all those anonymous spirits. It is an act of witness and it is a call of defiance: against folly, against forgetting.
