“Ugly music”: The 1993 PJ Harvey album that scared her band
“I’ll measure time, I’ll measure height, I’ll calculate my birthright,” PJ Harvey sings on ‘Man-Size’, the standout track on her iconic 1993 record, Rid of Me.
A feminist anthem that sees Harvey toy with the perils of her own gender, ‘Man-Size’ envisions a scenario in which she plays the role of a man, navigating the world clad in leather and boasting about her “babe looking cool and neat”.
Rid of Me was an aggressive affair that saw Harvey exploring gender identity in ways that still stand as one of the most scarily honest explorations in modern music. As she later recalled, it’s part of why some saw her as an “axe-wielding, man-eating vampira” with a reputation for injecting her own anger at the world into her music and image. But really, it mainly signalled the birth of Harvey as an industry-leading auteur.
Led by ‘Man-Size’ and ‘50ft Queenie’, another charged feminist anthem about toxic masculinity and the narcissism of the industry’s overly machismo figures, Rid of Me was an entirely self-indulgent record that Harvey made solely for herself, so much so that she was “surprised” when she released it and people actually liked it, because, to her, it was a “very difficult album” to make and listen back to.
One person who had his work cut out for him because of this was Steve Albini. Although Albini was certainly no stranger to working his magic on some of rock’s grittiest and most aggressive recordings, and, in fact, knew precisely how to bottle the raw energy of that familiar rock aggression that spotlighted an artist’s deeper confessions, Rid of Me required a different kind of balance that allowed Harvey to shine through the production without being drowned out.
Some say he didn’t succeed in executing this vision, arguing that Albini’s production ventured too heavily into rough and abrasive territory and left little room for subtlety or nuance that would have better served Harvey’s voice and the broader themes. However, it’s difficult not to view this as a natural choice that actually enhanced the tone she was aiming for, making the record feel more self-assured and with a powerful punk-leaning attitude that essentially forced people to take it or leave it.
In essence, that’s the entire message of Rid of Me: it doesn’t pander to any expectations, nor does it attempt to dilute anything for the comfort of the listener. If anything, it’s intentionally jarring in a way that pushes you to make your own decisions about how to feel when listening to it, and those who understand and appreciate everything it set out to achieve are the ones who knew exactly where Harvey was coming from when she made it.
And this is also because it is, for all intents and purposes, what drummer Rob Ellis called “ugly music”, and it never shies away from living up to that label either. As Ellis explained to Spin, “[It’s] ugly in a good way. It makes me squirm in places, but the reason it makes me squirm is because it is quite close to the bone. Some of the vocals are literally hysterical, mad, crazy. It’s a difficult listen because you’re not sure whether it’s embarrassing or funny or scary or what. But you can’t ignore it. It’s a pretty un-ignorable record. I’m proud of that.”
The record thrives in its own honesty, but much of its power also comes from those subtle moments of respite when Harvey does seem to retreat a little, as if she’s toying with the expectations placed on being a woman, playing into her own satire in hauntingly thought-provoking ways. As she sings on ‘Man-Size’, “Silence my lady head / Get girl out of my head / Douse hair with gasoline / Set it light and set it free”.
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