30 Years Long: Reflections on PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me
My favorite album turned 30 this year. 15 when I found it, 45 now, I'm still glad i'm not rid of her.
Part 1: Douse hair with gasoline / set it light and set it free
My favorite album started with a feeling of fear. It brought back the sensation of staring at the horror movie section in the video rental store I visited when I was young.
Not familiar with that feeling? Well, friends and I often discuss a familiar phenomenon from our specific generation, which is the later side of Generation-X. Whatever our label, whoever we are, we often bond over a handful of experiences. I submit the following sample:
We played Oregon Trail in school on big, bulky computers that were state of the art at the time. By the time we graduated from college, those machines and that game would seem as obsolete as the depiction of wagon caravans rolling through the American wilderness and dying of dysentery.
We watched the Challenger explosion in elementary school. The space program was trying to appeal to younger audiences and recruited a teacher astronaut. The original thought was to send Big Bird to space. School districts and teachers were encouraged to show us the launch during school hours. It felt like a judgment on our entire generation. You may reach for the stars. See what happens when you try, though.
We remember the glory and the terror of the horror movie VHS section at our local video store.
While we grew with the rise of Blockbuster video and later DVDs, VCR players became commonplace in most homes in the 80s to 90s, and so did video rental stores. My local one was in the back section of a small dance studio. It had saloon doors for the X-rated section and smelled like stale carpet and popcorn, courtesy of a mini-machine next to the register. It also had a wall all the way in the back full of the most horrifying depictions I can remember, the horror section, with box art all bunched together like a monstrous mosaic; vivid and violent, dark and twisted. It took courage to approach the wall, let alone rent one of these movies, which I was not allowed to do.
Still, the wall called to me. Before I had seen a single Nightmare on Elm Street movie, I’d seen the box art, with the charred face of Freddie Kruger looming over doomed teenagers standing on his massive bladed glove. When I gathered enough bravery to touch one of the boxes, flip it over, and read the description, I learned the concept was about a monster who invaded your dreams and made them so terrifying he killed you and stole your soul. The box art alone was enough to invade my dreams, bringing the concept closer to reality. Some of these designs were recreations of the original posters, some were not, but before the digital photoshopping and cropped cobbled-together DVD art was the the rectangles of revolution of the VHS box art, little ghastly gravestones depicting the horrors that lay inside the black caskets behind them if we just dared to pick them up and bring our $1.99 to the check-out counter.
I’ve always had an attraction to things that terrify me. Whether that started with the Horror VHS Wall or something before that, I don’t know, but I want to make sure I convey that the wall really did scare me. And yet I approached it always, tentatively. I never picked up a box. But I approached and I scanned. Sometimes quicker than I wanted, sometimes longer than I wanted, but every visit to the video store featured some kind of brave scan of the wall.
I relay this because I felt a similar sensation when I first saw PJ Harvey’s sophomore album Rid of Me, which turned 30 years old earlier this year. I spotted the album at the Sam Goody in the New Hartford mall, and the CD instantly made me think of that wall video horror. So much so that I hesitated to pick it up and did not purchase it until weeks later.
I didn’t know anything about PJ Harvey at this time. I wasn’t even sure if she was a woman from the image on the cover, or if the person on the cover was related to anyone in the band. Most album art doesn’t strike me as unsettling the way Rid of Me still does; metal albums, with their cartoonish sacrificial depictions or too-gritty-to-scare realistic edginess never bothered me the way Rid of Me did. Metal albums felt designed to scare in a cheap way, more artificial than even the horror movie box art, which at least sparked my young imagination.
It was the appearance of someone transforming through a baptism of pain; Harvey’s drenched hair curling around her like a demonic claw, her face too still, too serene, as if beyond content with the chaos her hurricane of hair was producing. Is there a ghost of a grin on her face? How does she somehow look pleased? Water droplets stain the drab wall behind Harvey. Just a hint of tile, just a hint of peeling paint, stark and colorless, everything reduced to bright whites and inky blacks. Before hearing the music, which this image somehow perfectly captures, you have to ask yourself - what could this horrorshow possibly represent?
In reality, the art was taken in the bathroom of Harvey's friend and photographer Maria Mochacz. The bathroom was too small for Mochacz to take the picture, so it was propped against the wall opposite of the tub and set to take a series of timed pictures. In total darkness, Harvey emerged from the water and whipped her hair back, the flash from the camera the only illumination. After receiving the photograph, Island records offered to touch up some of the more dire elements from the art, but Harvey refused. This was it. This was the album. This was its art.
It was my first impression of both the album and Harvey, and it was frightening enough for me to turn away, and alluring enough to stick in my mind and beckon me back, like the VHS horror movie wall popular around the same time.
I read a review of the album in Spin Magazine and subsequently saw the video for 50 Foot Queenie (also directed by Mochacz) on MTV’s 120 minutes. Like the album, the song frightened me. It was loud, fast, abrasive, and ugly - but most most importantly - boastful. As Harvey and her two bandmates strut around a room wearing sunglasses, the camera tries and fails to contain them, shaking around as Harvey taunts the viewer with a shouted tale of a giantess who can’t stop growing.
Tell you my name /
/ F-U and C-K /
/ Fifty-foot Queenie /
/ Force 10 hurricane /
/ Biggest woman /
/ I could have ten sons /
/ Ten gods, ten queens /
/ Ten foot and rising!
To make this even stranger was Harvey’s actual size; she’s 5 '4 and her bandmates (especially bassist Steven Vaughn) both tower over her, their heads often not even fitting in the shaky frame. Despite this, Harvey in the video - like in the cover photo for Rid of Me - seems larger than life. Wearing a bright red dress and matching sunglasses and a leopard print coat, she hits the floor at one point, nearly writhing on her knees as she approaches the song’s shouted, repeated chorus. You come on, measure me, Harvey goads. I’m twenty inches long!
In each subsequent chorus, twenty inches becomes thirty, which becomes fourty, which becomes fifty feet at the climax, and before the video ends with Harvey grinning at the camera like a satisfied Joker after a fresh crime, I knew I needed to face my fear and own Rid of Me. I needed more of this song. I needed to unlock all its strange contrasts, this short woman stomping around seeing about being monstrously huge and growing to gnarly sounding blues riffs and quite possibly the ugliest guitar solo I have ever heard. What the hell was this? I didn’t know, but I did indeed want to hear her song. I did want to measure her. I needed more Harvey, in inches, feet, or whatever unit of measurement she had to offer.
Part 2: He should not be hid / he’s just too big /
Before 1991, my musical taste was related to whatever pop music I connected to on the radio. I stole a lot from my sister, who received a lot from her boyfriend Todd. Todd had eclectic taste and never ending mixtapes he’d make for my sister included everything from Talking Heads to Yes to Eazy-E and De La Soul. I was happy that tastes like this existed because I would tape a wide variety of songs off the radio; Guns n Roses to Dee-Lite (the first cassette single I ever purchased with my own money? C+C Music Factory’s Gonna Make You Sweat, AKA, Everybody Dance Now). My eclectic taste remains until this day and I’m grateful to live in a time where I can safely say that I love prog *and* punk rock and believe that disco is one of the most important genres in the history of popular music, and one of the only few you can dance your brains out along with.
Back then though, liking music came with some intense social pressure amplified in the post-Nevermind grunge years, which found so many teenagers my age caring about this idea of authenticity, an impossible thing to gauge when it applies to musicians and their albums in general, but especially rock stars. Big, loud rock shows were scaled back to modest spectacle focusing on only the musicians as if to say “it’s about the music, man.” That few bands had the chops to make it all about them didn’t matter; adding pyrotechnics and big TV screens was something U2 or a huge metal act could do, but serious artists? Not in your life.
Our high school dances were a thing everyone said they weren’t going to but everyone always went to. There was a hilarious juxtaposition of 90s R&B, Hip Hop, and grunge, with bad awkward dancing punctuated by lots of jumping and headbanging. How do you dance to Self Esteem by Offspring? You just sort of stand still and yell the lyrics and occasionally pogo. And air guitar. Lots of air guitar and headbanging.
I hated going to these dances because I never felt like I fit in and was an awkward dancer, but I loved hearing the music played loudly, and all of our dances ended with the inexplicable choice of Stairway to Heaven, which meant a multiple-minute possibility of holding someone of the opposite sex close before the awkward hard rock crescendo. Our DJ was a high school math teacher who would not change this tradition and it somehow felt appropriate. Everyone knew the dance was over and to drag someone to the dance floor so you wouldn’t be watching by the sides of the gym as everyone swayed like twin trees for ten minutes getting the Led out.
There weren't many times I was picked for these dances, and I absolutely didn’t pick anyone. The reason for this was mostly because I hated my body. It was large, wide, felt too big, and while I wasn’t as overweight as I felt like I was at the time, that feeling was real, permanent, and damaging. My relationship with my body has been the source of other writing I’ve done previously so I won’t belabor it, only to say that I never felt right having a large body. I didn’t have the confidence to pull it off like I didn’t care what other kids or bullies said. Of course I cared. I cared too much about everything. My sensitivity made me acutely aware of how other people perceived me, and I couldn’t help but assume their perceptions were negative. I didn’t feel large in spirit. I felt small and constantly shrinking. That my body did not match this perception made the clumsy dissonance between heart, mind, and frame all the more difficult to reconcile the three.
What appealed to me about Rid of Me is that it’s an album in part about the awkwardness of bodies, particularly the tension between desire - to be a part of the dance, part of another person, of another body, of another gender - and the difficulty in feeling like your body belongs there. The lead single is indicative of this, but body parts and bodily functions are mentioned everywhere in the lyrics and some of the titles (Legs, Rub ‘Till it Bleeds, Dry, Man-Size, Snake).
In a 1993 video interview supporting the album, Harvey admitted that she was a shy and introverted child and that she still struggled with those feelings.
But you learn ways to adapt. You learn ways to make it look like you’re not like that at all. I lack confidence amongst other people and still have a fear of crowds. But I think if you suppress a lot of things in one direction - I suppress a lot of things I feel, if I feel angry or upset or hurt, I’m unable to communicate that to whomever is doing that to me. So instead it has to come out another way.
To say that Rid of Me is an album about tension is putting it mildly. Every track, nearly every lyric performs a razor-wire tightrope act set between the concepts kindness and violence, affection and derision, attraction and repulsion. The title song, with its introductory baseline chugging near-silent like a train in the distance, sets up the album’s dynamic, but also sonically underscores Harvey’s personality conflict. Most of Rid of Me’s lyrics begin benign, almost embarrassingly romantic and yearning.
I beg you, my darling
Don’t leave me, I’m hurting
Here, after a falsetto Harvey taunts this captured lover about her legs being on fire and demanding her lover lick them, the lyrics descend into stranger violence.
I'll tie your legs
Keep you against my chest
Oh, you're not rid of me
Yeah, you're not rid of me
I'll make you lick my injuries
I'm gonna twist your head off, see
Harvey’s performance at this point is seething, near-raging. And then the quiet pulse of the song explodes. Lyrics dripping with increasing menace match an all-out, distorted aural assault of drums and guitar as Harvey yells:
'Til you say don't you wish you never / never met her
The song and album start like Harvey’s innate shyness; quiet, withdrawn, panic stricken and claustrophobic.. But as Harvey stated, the feelings we suppress have a way of coming out in other ways. Steve Albini’s production compliments the raw, sudden sonic switch. The producer, who was initially hesitant to work with Harvey’s band (“I sort of felt they’d rather be having a bowl of soup than rocking”) is the perfect choice to underscore the aural assault. There is no hiding from these feelings. There is no real production to it, really. It’s live, raw, vivid, and violent. When the drums and vocals kick in, you feel like you’re kicked in the chest. You couldn’t be rid of Harvey if you tried.
And at the center of this; bodies, body parts, bodies growing, bodies changing. The lick-my-legs chanting taunt is the first lyrical sign that something is not right in Harvey-land, but that sentiment carries into Missed, the second track, deceptively calmer at first, rumbling with percussion and a hearty guitar riff from the start. But with the first lyric, Harvey sings:
He should not be hid / he’s just too big
Harvey’s tale of a relationship gone south takes on biblical proportions. Is this Mary Magdalene, longing for her former lover Christ after hiding his body in a tomb? Does the narrative take place after he’s ascended? In a later verse, Mother Mary demands to know where her son is, but all she receives in reply is that ‘he’s too big.’ Bodies, body size, spirituality, sexuality, all entwined together as Harvey admits that she’s missed him repeatedly, annunciating the emptiness of the sentiment until it echoes as if inside a tomb.
Legs and Rub ‘Till it Bleeds brings whatever violent subtext was lurking at the start of the record into overt perversions. Legs is a bloody break-up song where the protagonist threatens to cut-off the appendages of her lover so he can’t leave her. Later in Rub, Harvey again starts with a hushed innocence, shyly singing about how she’s listening and ready to be present for her partner, a “sweet thing.” Then, with just a touch of suspicion, she says she’s “not lying” when promises to rub his worries away. “God’s truth, I’m not lying,” Harvey sings, and then her voice rises into a mocking snarl as she shouts, “And you believed me!”
While it would be easy to chalk up these songs as a reaction to a bad breakup, Rid of Me isn’t just about an intense form of violence wrought from the end of a relationship. The album finds Harvey admitting that she can’t be the shy, quiet young woman suppressing everything all the time. She can’t be rid of that part of herself. When she tries, the result is an eruption of sonic malevolence. This is the aural thesis of Rid of Me rolled up into its title track, sins laid bare and shameless. The end of the song, where she screams “don’t you wish you never met her?” and then ends with her throaty screech of “lick my legs, I’m on fire,” previously buried in the mix in an almost cheeky falsetto, now raw, bare, for all to hear and fear.
Part 3: I’m sucking on the well / I’m sucking ‘till I’m white
It may seem strange that a young man growing-up in the middle of nowhere New York state would take comfort in an album like this. But to someone with a difficult relationship with his body, and who felt weighed down by that crushing shyness Harvey expressed, her release felt strangely like mine. I was also, to be blunt, an over-hormoned teenager coming of age during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when the very concept of sexual intercourse felt like Russian Roulette. Top 40 songs were about how you could get AIDS if you weren’t careful, and while the songs may have been well intentioned, many religious and parental groups seized on the crisis to push chastity and increased paranoia about how sex was evil and to be avoided at all costs. I’ll never forget a meeting held in my church basement where blatant misinformation was peddled as literal gospel by community leaders, speaking with the confidence of trained doctors.
From the same video interview in 1993, Harvey responds quickly when she’s asked if she considers herself sexy. “No.” She then repeated it, and when the interviewer expresses surprise she says the following:
“I never feel confident in how I look or I don’t feel particularly sexy. I feel like quite a dog most of the time. I don’t mind what people think about me, really. It is very uninhibited I suppose, [to] not worry about saying exactly what I feel. Because as long as I know why I’m doing it or why I'm getting pleasure out of doing it, if I say it’s doing the right things I want to get across, then it doesn't really matter.”
Harvey goes on to say that she feels more comfortable in the presence of men rather than women, an extension of her upbringing where she was surrounded by men and was self-described as a bit of a tomboy. This might also be one of the reasons Harvey often bristled at being labeled a feminist in the wake of Rid of Me’s success. While there may be some Riot Grrl-like examples of turning traditional gender roles on their head throughout the album, Harvey found that label patronizing and insisted that all she was doing was writing honestly rather than from any kind of feminist perspective.
If there’s any kind of narrative through line in Rid of Me, it’s the idea of embracing these insecurities and turning them on their head until they become something closer to strengths. The first of the two versions of Man-Size on the album sounds like it’s orchestrated by Bernard Hermann at peak Hitchcock. “I want to fit,” Harvey stresses, “I’m heading on handsome.” Here, Harvey’s vocal performance sounds stressed, nervous, tense as the violins and percussion dance up and down the scale around her, or hang in the air like raised blades.
In stark contrast, the version later in the album sounds far more confident, with strong guitar strumming kicking off the song and Harvey’s vocal delivery embracing her newly discovered giantess prowess (following 50 Foot Queenie). Even the ending, where Harvey threatens to burn the girl out of her own hair with gasoline, sounds like she’s setting herself free rather than a hint of self-immolation.
What happens in between these tracks is crucial; a cover of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, 50 Foot Queenie, and Yuri-G, an urgent anthem about Harvey’s desire to be like Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut who traveled to space. In these three tracks, the narrative switches from the nervous mixture of sexual frustration, gender confusion, and violent release to embracing it. Highway 61 takes Harvey’s themes into biblical and apocalyptic levels, ending with premonitions of a world war, as if drawing a line between sexual frustration and international violence while people sit on bleachers to take it all in. Queenie feels like the B-movie aftermath; a radioactive accident triggering the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, as Harvey embraces her new giantess role with dangerous swagger. And with Yuri-G, Harvey sets her sights on space. The giantess has conquered Earth and now bored, pines for the moon, plotting for international domination.
But post the second version of Man-Size, things take another turn. With album standout Dry, Harvey enunciates that she can not be sexually satisfied as her slide guitar climbs and falls up and down the scale, signaling her overt frustration.
You’ve come all this way /
No hair out of place /
You put it on the stage /
You put it right in my face /
You leave me dry
While these lyrics could be (and should be) taken literally, it’s also about Harvey’s own struggle with self-image, fame, and success, as are all the tracks previously. Harvey’s first LP (also named Dry) was an indie hit, and the band toured relentlessly to support it. As a touring performer, she became the 50 Foot Woman, something Sal the Promoter could drag the bleachers into the sun for fans to witness, and someone who after all that incredible success still wasn’t satisfied. who felt the loneliness that came with overwhelming positive reception, who pinned for the unreachable after achieving more than expected, and was left completely unfulfilled.
Dry resonated with me as the kid at the high school dance who didn’t feel comfortable approaching girls to Stairway to Heaven with me. While it may be a silly comparison, I wasn’t comfortable being the type of high school guy to behave in any kind of aggressive way. Asking women to dance isn’t inherently aggressive (one might call it normal high school behavior, even) but to me it was. Similar to Harvey, most of my friendships were with the opposite sex, so occasionally I would dance with a friend, and more than once strained that friendship when I misread an invitation to dance as potential romantic interest. This reinforced the notion even more; you don’t have enough friends as it is, you can’t afford to scare anyone away. So I wasn’t sucking ‘till I was white, but I sure was sucking in the ladies department, as it were.
Not surprisingly, Rid of Me was a big reason for my first high school crush. An older girl in the drama club said she didn’t like a lot of modern alternative artists, but loved PJ Harvey. When I raved about Rid of Me she flat out told me “you’re different.” It might as well have been as savage sounding as, “you’re weird,” but the truth was I felt different all the time, so being acknowledged for it by an attractive girl with good taste was enough to send me on, well, a Stairway to Heaven.
Part 4. Don’t Lord It On Me
At a certain point in my adolescence, I decided I no longer believed in God. Or in the very least, I no longer believed in the Catholic Church's idea of God and religion. My mother was a devout Catholic, and true to form, she still attempts to guilt me for not following in her (and the lord’s) sandy footprints. She’ll occasionally call herself a failure for not having more of her children - her proverbial black sheep - be a part of the Catholic flock.
It seems strange now, but in elementary school we would leave to go to Church for an hour of religious class. This seems to fall out of practice completely with separation of Church and State, but it was absolutely done. In High School, the classes took place at night, usually in someone's home. My mother sponsored the class for my sister’s group at one point, but thankfully she did not do it for me. I’m not sure she would have liked all the questions I asked.
Everything about Catholicism seemed anchored in fear, and not the type you’d glimpse on the cover of a VHS rental. One time, our religion teacher discussed a man who had been pronounced legally dead and described going to hell as being alone, confined, in a dark, cold space. The man had used to be abusive and mean, but when he came back to life due to the quick work of Emergency Room doctors, he changed his life, got right with God and his family. She used this story as a form of encouragement. Not only did it validate the entire sect, it also served as positive reinforcement. Learn from his mistakes. You can avoid this if you just believe and do the right thing. Of course, horrified and doubting Thomas as I was, I had to ask: “what if that’s just what happens when you die?”
Nothing about the Bible made sense to me and all of it felt like the Old Testament God was playing the types of tricks that a Devil would try to test people’s faith. The garden of Eden itself is paradise, but don’t dare yearn for knowledge or you’re damned? Why put the Apples in the garden if they’re not meant to be eaten? Why create life if they’re not meant to learn and grow?
Rid of Me completes with a trio of songs that feel biblical in their size, furor, and Old Testament trickery. Me-Jane finds Harvey trying to tame the titular Tarzan by begging him to “stop your fucking screaming.” In the chorus, Harvey slips into her higher range to demand Tarzan doesn’t lord it over her. The whole song is a frustrated stomp, as Jane describes the primal, animal behavior and concedes that Tarzan has her hanging from the ceilings too. It’s as if Harvey’s 50 Foot giantess has finally found someone who can satisfy her, drag her back to earth; someone brutal and barely human. But now that she has, however, she’s tired of it already, exhausted and spent. “Good lord, you never stop!” Harvey exclaims for a scuzzy burst of a guitar breakdown.
Snake casts Harvey as Eve, blaming the Serpent for the gift of knowledge, the rotten fruit now growing “inside” of her. Knowledge, experience, newfound fame, dancing the Stairway to Heaven dance? They come with their consequences, and Harvey fumes with fury at the tempting creature who sweet talked her into trying a bite. The titular serpent promises he’ll make Harvey Queen of Everything:
You want it all? / It’s yours, no bet.
No need for God / No need for him.
True to its Old Testament origins, Snake feels like a warning; be careful what you wish for, and fits with the theory that Harvey’s desire for experience has left her feeling angry, confused, and unfulfilled. Tarzan and the serpent have made their mark, but where has that left her? Why does she feel more alone than ever?
The album closer Ecstacy seems to have the answer, but it’s a bit of a mixed message. The simplest song on the album lyrically, it feels like the tension explored all along comes full circle. While the lyrics describe someone in, well, ecstasy, the music feels like the exact opposite. Beginning with a shaky struck distorted chord before busting out into a cascading blues riff, the song is all menace, and Harvey’s delivery casts doubts on lyrics boasting of “hitting heavens high” and being in Ecstasy.” Honestly, it sounds like she’s in hell more than ecstasy. The final verse nails home Harvey’s possible thoughts of her newfound brush with fame and what it’s brought her.
Singing /
I’m singing /
Sound it, hang it, breathe /
I’m begging you - look at me
And after another simple chorus, the drums pound menacingly, and Harvey’s guitar roars like a furious lion.
In a Spin Magazine article published shortly after the release of Rid of Me, Harvey discusses growing up as a tomboy and why she’s more than comfortable playing with ideas of gender and sexuality on the album. But later, when the interviewer asks how she feels comfortable showing her body off in her album art and publicity interviews, Harvey says:
“...I have a complex about my body! I don’t feel comfortable with how I look at all… I think that I like to turn it on myself and make myself feel more ridiculous as a way of dealing with it.”
A lyric like “I’m begging you - look at me” transports me back to those high school dances, and every experience in my life where I was desperate to be included while simultaneously feeling like my very bones and flesh and identity prevented those desires. My very own conflicted nature made me an outsider and the only way to change that is to change who I was somehow, mutate, become Man-Sized, turn yourself into a monster. But Rid of Me seems to be a warning about that temptation, and Harvey’s ecstasy may be referring to finally having the attention she’s always secretly wanted - and hating it. On paper, it sounds good. Musically, it sounds like she’s in the same fire referenced on Snake. As she pleads with you to witness her, you can’t help but wonder if she’s trapped within the confines of her body more than ever before. For an album rooted in tension, contrasts, and fear, the conclusion suggests that the biggest fear of all might be ending up with what you were pining for.
Part 5. Tie yourself to me / No one else, no
Thirty years later after Rid of Me’s debut, I’m left wondering why this album that had such a hold on me when I was fifteen still grips me in the same way. It’s widely regarded as one of the best records in Harvey’s impressive discography, all the more impressive considering that (for my money) the woman has never released a bad album and has released more than five excellent ones. When people discuss their favorite records, there’s usually something sentimental about them beyond the nostalgia and memories associated with its discovery; lyrics filled with peans of wisdom, walls of sound that could swallow you whole, production lush and songwriting so expertly crafted the world can’t help but pay attention.
Thirty years later and Rid of Me still sounds like the sound of someone going through a pretty goddamn tough time; something violent, tense, terrifying, and strange. Knowing that Harvey has had a long career after its release, and that every album she’s made sounds nothing like it (and nothing like anything else she’s released either) solidifies its importance even more. Nobody else could ever make anything like this, not even her. It’s a unique vision, a statement, a performance so singular I feel fortunate to be able to witness it endlessly on repeat. Despite its brutality, it brings me endless comfort with every relisten. It continues to challenge me, but I’m no longer that kid in the Sam Goody afraid of the cover, or the ugly tension in between the distorted notes, punching drums, screams and shrieks. Knowing every sound is like knowing myself better; even the ugly parts, the aspects I’m unhappy with, that still frighten me, can be somewhat celebrated if I drag them into the sunlight and set-up the bleachers like Sal the promoter.
As celebrated as Harvey is, I haven’t met too many people who share this as their favorite album. Most don’t even consider it their favorite Harvey album. That cements my relationship with it. There’s a bond there, a kinship that extends beyond nostalgia, beyond what initially connected me with it, body issues, sexual tension, adolescent confusion and anger. I feel like I’m visiting the person I was when I first discovered it and the two of us can discuss our mutual love; the bitter teenager and the weary old man having a beer over a monumental accomplishment.
The world has grown scarier in the last thirty years, or maybe I’ve just learned more about its inequities and injustices. Either way, Rid of Me never dulls its power, its fury, its rage. As hard as things get, it remains the soundtrack to match hard times. And while that may not sound comforting to some, knowing that Harvey is still waiting to howl that I’ll never be rid of her, forever tied to Rid of Me, is the exact kind of relief I need.