‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: PJ Harvey’s Scary Movies

Grunge. Wu-Tang Clan. Radiohead. “Wonderwall.” The music of the ’90s was as exciting as it was diverse. But what does it say about the era—and why does it still matter? 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for 30 final episodes (and a brand-new book!) to try to answer those questions. Join Ringer music writer and ’90s survivor Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 97 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering PJ Harvey with our friend Yasi Salek. Below is an excerpt of this episode’s transcript.

The first thing you oughta know about PJ Harvey is that Natalie Portman is a huge fan and always has been. We got Natalie Portman on the cover of Seventeen magazine in November 1995. Natalie’s only 14 at the time, but she says, “I love girl singers like Juliana Hatfield, Björk and PJ Harvey. You can really relate to their lyrics, and they have such angelic voices. Most heavy-metal guys just scream.” End quote. MATCH CUT! COWS! In 2018, Natalie Portman played a pop star in this movie Vox Lux, and she told the Toronto Star, “I came of age in the ’90s and I was listening to Jeff Buckley, Juliana Hatfield, and PJ Harvey, the indie and alt-rock moment. I had my Doc Martens and little baby barrettes and baby-doll dresses. I don’t really remember who was ‘pop’ back then. But I started to listen to a lot of pop music for this movie, and I really have come to appreciate it.”

Songs That Explain the ’90s, the Book

If you’ve ever listened to 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s and thought, “I wish this podcast were a book,” do we have some news for you. Songs That Explain the ’90s is out now on Twelve Books. Order here.

I haven’t seen that movie, Vox Lux. Somebody I trust saw it and she was like, “More like Vox Sux,” and I thought, Well, OK, never mind. I will tell you I’m genuinely glad that 1995 Natalie Portman found PJ Harvey. I think the 12-year-old girl who made The Professional was primed to truly get PJ Harvey on a frightening and necessary molecular level.

That song is called “Dress,” from PJ Harvey’s debut album Dry, released in 1992. A quick litmus test for how you might interpret her lyrics going forward: Is the line “Must be a way I can dress to please him” entirely, viciously sarcastic? Is it humorously sarcastic? Is it only partially sarcastic? Or is it not sarcastic at all? The notion of Polly Jean Harvey doing anything at any time solely to please anyone else feels absurd to me, but maybe that’s just because I personally find her tremendously intimidating. That may be my failure of imagination. But then again, the snare drum here sounds like a shotgun to me, and I don’t imagine that’s an accident.

“You purdy thang / my man says.” That’s purdy and thang, T-H-A-N-G. That’s very funny actually. That explains some things. Polly Jean Harvey was born in October 1969, in Bridport, in the county of Dorset, in rural southwestern England. Our dear friend Yasi Salek, who hosts the mighty Bandsplain podcast, devoted two full episodes—like eight hours total—to PJ Harvey, joined by the great critic and author Ann Powers. They talk about Polly Jean Harvey’s childhood for at least one of those hours. It’s fantastic. I listened to that while I took my kids to the park. Here, I took some notes on the Bandsplain overview of Polly Jean’s childhood. Let’s see: “Wringing the sheep’s testicles.” “Mom carved headstones.” “Do I want to bone Paul McCartney, or be him?” “Favorite song: Soft Cell, ‘Tainted Love.’” (Excellent choice.) “Captain Beefheart isn’t just for boys.” (Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm.) And finally, “PJ Harvey’s Dry is like Weezer’s Pinkerton.” I love Pinkerton a whole lot, but Pinkerton ain’t got anything quite as rad as this slide guitar.

The backing vocals there, “Storm is gone.” The call-and-response, the eerie echo. Sometimes it’s Polly herself, sometimes it’s her bandmates, sometimes it’s both: The backing vocals are key there, and key throughout. The sense of an audience, of a choir, of a Greek chorus, of an army, of a ghost. The sense that she’s screaming into an abyss but a disembodied voice in that abyss is screaming back at her. This song is called “Victory,” and it gets quite victorious indeed.

Young Polly Jean Harvey learns to play saxophone and guitar, for starters. She studies art and sculpture at Yeovil College. She falls in with a Bristol-based band called Automatic Dlamini, a noisy percussive art-folk sorta deal, but she is destined to take a couple dudes from that band and form her own basically eponymous band, PJ Harvey. Dry comes out in 1992. Polly Jean is joined by Steve Vaughan on bass and Rob Ellis on drums and some other stuff. This is a debut rock record in 1992. It certainly doesn’t sound anything like the Replacements, but Nirvana has broken, punk has broken, alt-rock has broken, super-quiet verses and super-loud choruses have broken. It’s a great era if you like bombastic, subversive ominousness punctuated by snare drums that sound like shotguns.

Rock music, broadly defined, in the early ’90s, broadly defined, at its best (as defined by me), takes after the Pixies, narrowly defined. So here in ’92, PJ Harvey’s Dry fits into that zeitgeist. In the ’80s, in America at least, we called it college rock, but now here in the ’90s we call it “alternative rock,” and you maybe don’t even have to go to college to hear it. Dry is not quite high profile enough to get played on mainstream radio, but it’s certainly great enough to be an immediate massive influence on the high-profile alt-rockers who are getting played on mainstream radio: Kurt Cobain put both Dry and the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa on his famous handwritten list of his 50 favorite albums. What sets Dry apart—what sets PJ Harvey apart, to my mind—is this sense that she’s standing apart, that she’s this figure of grave, ferocious isolation. There is this singular, spectacular folk-horror malice to her voice, her lyrics, her stern aura. This song is called “Fountain.” To this day I hear that word, fountain, and I think of Björk singing, “I’m a fountain of blood,” and that’s the sort of fountain I’m picturing here, as well.

I can’t watch horror movies at all, man. Scary movies, bleak movies. I can’t do it. I’m too compassionate. I think it makes me sound cooler. I think the last scary movie I saw in the theater was Scream. The first one. From 1996. When I was 18. It’s pretty cool of me. But I do respect scary movies, as the spiritual twin to my beloved transcendent ultra-dumbass comedies in the Loaded Weapon, Ace Ventura, Cabin Boy vein. I respect that scary movies also trigger a visceral, honest, unguarded, delighted, rapturous, but also terrified response. So with apologies to Scream and Dr. Giggles and any other scary movies I saw in the theater at the time, let me tell you now about the scariest thing I ever watched as a teenager: the video for “Man-Size” by PJ Harvey.

This is the first time in my life I ever heard or saw Polly Jean Harvey. “Man-Size” is on the second PJ Harvey album, Rid of Me, from 1993. So I’m 15, I’m watching late-night MTV, and I fancy myself a tough, sophisticated, unintimidated, open-minded guy … but what the hell’s going on here? First of all, the snare drum sounds like a shotgun. Second of all, I am processing this song, correctly, as a 1993 rock song with quiet verses that will inevitably lead to a very loud chorus, but at 15 I am having trouble processing just how unnervingly quiet this first verse is. You have to lean in unnervingly close to Polly to even begin to make out what she’s saying—she just said “skinned alive,” by the way—and that’s how she’s gonna get you.

To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.