Femininity, vulnerability and sexuality in the work of PJ Harvey
For many, PJ Harvey defines the meaning of being a true artist. Emerging in the early 1990s with her debut album Dry, the musician has since released various solo and collaborative albums and soundtracks, never sticking to one specific genre. She has constantly evolved, drawing from classic blues to grunge, folk, punk, and indie rock. Yet, you always know you’re listening to Harvey, who can warp and meld her voice to meet her needs while also possessing an innate singularity that marks her music out as being unmistakably hers.
It’s her utter rawness and willingness to be vulnerable that makes Harvey’s music so special and captivating, subsequently resonating with many listeners, particularly women. From the start of her career, Harvey has imbued her lyrics with honest meditations on her experience of being a woman, often using language that blends violence, sexuality, nature, and primal desire.
In a musical landscape largely dominated by male artists and bands, Harvey asserted herself as a musician who disregarded all convention and explored whatever genres and themes she wanted to with little consideration for making radio-friendly hits. Her first single, ‘Dress’, encapsulated her penchant for singing about femininity from the very beginning, with her lyrics exploring the expectations of performance and pleasure placed on women. “It’s hard to walk in the dress, it’s not easy/ I’m swinging over like a heavy-loaded fruit tree,” she tells us.
That was just the start of Harvey’s lyrical journey through the ups and downs of womanhood, with songs like ‘Happy and Bleeding’ from Dry containing visceral imagery, paralleling the experiences of being a woman with the processes of the natural world and corporeality. “Fruit, flower myself inside out/ I’m tired and I’m bleeding for you.” On ‘Oh My Lover’, she shows us the lengths she’ll go for a man she loves, telling him, “You can love her/ And you can love me at the same time.” It is this boldness to explore yearning and desperation without fear that helped to make Harvey such a vital lyricist.
With her next album, Rid of Me, Harvey continued to explore the role of women, exploring dominance and power in ‘50ft Queenie’ and masculinity in ‘Man-Size’. Not afraid to use erotic allusions or twist her voice into passionate or desperate moans and wails, Harvey has always brought attention to female sexuality – something that has long remained a taboo in wider society. Yet, within her work, she has helped to break down these musical stigmas and allowed countless female listeners to find recognition in her words.
In Harvey’s world, there is no shame in expressing intense desire, even if that passion seems to border on being incredibly intense or unhealthy. On the song ‘Harder’, she lays out her needs plain and simple. “My man’s up all night/ Work me till I moan/ Drives me out of my mind,” she sings, “Why it’s so hard/ You’re taking me over/ Why it’s so hard/ My cold steel soldier.”
Harvey doesn’t just sing strictly about femininity and sexuality—on Stories From the City, Stories From The Sea, she often sings of happiness, while on Let England Shake, war and conflict take a central role. Yet, when she does, she taps into the feelings that many women experience—those that have rarely been articulated in music—with incredible poignancy.
With every dramatic and raw delivery of lyrics about the brutality that is often woven into the female experience of life and sex, Harvey communicates an unspoken language with her listeners. She can be powerful and vulnerable all at once, and over the past few decades, she has helped to redefine the experience of being a woman through her impressive body of work.
