d.a.walker wrote: I swear PJ Harvey gets it so right and does so few interviews it keeps her as fresh and exciting as she's ever been.
Yep. I don't always like what Polly does, but I have such huge respect for her as an artist who's managed to have a long career, and still keep her integrity and a sense of honouring her gift. By that I mean, pushing her creativity, exploring, putting out work that's worthy of her talent. She has never been distracted by the peripheral bullshit of the music business. She's done a truly admirable job of handling the whole 'woman in rock' thing, consistently playing with her image in an inventive and fascinating way, neatly side-stepping the negative aspect of being a woman in that business by taking control of the visual side of her work and challenging the stereotypes.
Contrast that with Tori, who even now talks continually about Fighting Da Patriarchy!11! and being a ballbuster and challenging male authority etc etc, but has gone the lengths of surgery and injecting poison into her face to make herself look 25 at 45, and who presents imagery in her artwork now that makes her look increasingly like an unreal plastic doll, a perfect male-fantasy Fembot, not a real woman. And she's doing this while saying that she's deliberately targeting young girls, to give them a feminist wake-up call! [censor]
Personally, if I was a teenage girl right now who was looking for an interesting, out-of-the-ordinary role model, I think Polly Harvey would be the one catching my attention. Her confidence in herself as an artist and a woman is hugely appealing. She is exactly the kind of role model this generation of young women needs - creative, highly intelligent, thoughtful, unquestioningly assuming her
right to be an artist and to be taken seriously. She walks the walk in her quiet way, while Tori spouts increasingly ludicrous, egotistical and deluded nonsense that nobody believes when they see her Stepford Wife imagery and hear the insipid, shallow music she's putting out.
Someone on @ put forward an interesting theory, recently. Namely that Tori is trying to re-create the kind of success she feels she
should have had with her very first album, Y Kant Tori Read. The fact that it's not really Tori Amos anymore, but 'the Tori Amos Band' - the bog standard rawk designed to appeal to the mainstream - the shallow, vapid imagery that's all about personal vanity. I actually think there could be something to it. It makes sense of her 'I want to get away from the girl-and-a-piano' thing. Maybe this is what she wanted all along, and the earlier piano-based music we all adore so much was simply a means to an end, for her? It's a shocking thought, but it might just be true. Maybe what she wanted all along was to be the rawk star lead singer of a mainstream rawk band.
I mean, take the fact that now she's gone independent, in her terms managed to get free of the 'controlling' record companies that she's always implied were putting pressure on her to make a certain kind of music - well, the new album is a continuation of what she's been doing for the last five years, so is it possible it was the record companies who were blocking that in the early years, and trying to get her to do what she does best? Remember that Atlantic rejected several versions of Little Earthquakes, kept telling her to go back and rework it. It was *their* decision to put it out in the brilliant form we know it, not Tori's. The mind boggles at the thought, but is that pressure from Atlantic the reason we got the Earthquakes/Pink/Pele version of Tori that we fell in love with? Is that maybe the real reason the problems started during the Choirgirl period - her first 'band' record?
What an astonishing thought. For so long we've believed Tori's version of the relationship with Atlantic. But it might just be because of their pressure that we got the early albums the way they were.
