"The social pressure to sign up was overwhelming. In the early days of the [First World] War, this was policed by thousands of young women who went around handing out white feathers to all young men out of uniform in a gesture that implied cowardice. The idea had been dreamed up by a retired admiral, who created the Order of the White Feather specifically for this purpose, and it was backed up by poster campaigns asking 'Is your "Best Boy" wearing khaki? If not, don't YOU THINK he should be? If he does not think that you and your country are worth fighting for - do you think he is WORTHY of you?'"
-Jon Savage, Teenage
"I was wanting to show the way history repeats itself, really, and so in some ways it doesn't matter what time it was, because this endless cycle goes on and on."
-PJ Harvey on Let England Shake, 2011
In February 2011, PJ Harvey released the tenth, and greatest, album of her twenty-year career in music, Let England Shake. The album is almost intimidatingly good, an endlessly fascinating and rewarding listen, with as many layers, meanings and resonances as any record I have ever heard. As such, any quick discussion of it is liable to involve misleading and reductive generalisation. It is an album that is about so much; first and foremost, though, it is a concept album about war.
Part of the album's success lies in the fact that it does not obscure, or shy away from, the brutal, physical reality of war. Death and violence are not abstractions here - they are uncomfortably real. One of the first things to notice about Harvey's descriptions of war are how frequently and repeatedly the natural world is evoked. The album is full of earth, dirt, and trees. On 'Our Glorious Country' the earth itself is "ploughed by tanks and feet"; deformed and orphaned children are the "fruit of our land". On 'The Words That Maketh Murder', "arms and legs were in the trees". The album dwells, as Harvey puts it herself, "in the dirt and in the dark places" where the reality of war takes place. For the most part, though, the music is anything but earthy; it has a light, airy touch, and Harvey's vocals are delivered in a high register. This contrast between the relative quietness, lightness and softness of the music and the gory, dirty details of the lyrics seems symbolic of another duality in Let England Shake: between the specific and the general, between visceral immediacy and a more sober and detached big-picture view. Part of the album's genius is the way that it collapses the two together, building a big picture out of small details, spelling out those details in ways that suggest wider symbolism and resonances.
The album's final lyrics, from the song 'The Colour Of The Earth' are a perfect illustration of this:
"If I was asked I'd tell
The colour of the earth that day
It was dull and browny red
The colour of blood, I'd say."
The lines play off the double meaning of the word earth, suggesting both an up-close focus on the dirt and soil and an all-encompassing view of the whole planet, echoing and exemplifying the way that the whole album uses descriptions of specific times and places to paint a symbolic picture of the whole of human history. As Harvey says in the quote above, it doesn't really matter what time and place she is talking about in any given song or lyric - she is describing an "endless cycle". On 'The Colour Of The Earth', Harvey's description of blood-soaked dirt turns into a metaphor for the whole of the world, stained with the blood of ages, recalling both Hegel's description of human history as a "slaughter bench" and Macbeth's hands that will not come clean. And those are the album's closing words, Harvey's best attempt to draw an overarching conclusion from all that has been seen, even with that qualifying "I'd say" still refusing to speak from the universal perspective. What is the colour of the earth, the colour of everything? Dull and browny red; the colour of blood.
The colour of blood? Glaring at us from the cover of 'Wherever You Are' is a stylised red poppy, the flower that has been used a symbol of death since ancient times because of its 'blood red' colour, although the flower is rather brighter and bolder than the "dull and browny red" colour of Harvey's all-too-real blood-soaked ground. The connection is there, though, and it is proudly draped across this single, alluding slyly to the brutal physical reality of war that we see in Let England Shake. That brutal physical reality is something that 'Wherever You Are' is mostly keen to obscure, or at least make abstract and stylised; but a bright red poppy turned into a corporate logo still contains symbolic resonances of the literal bloodshed of war, as well as of the poppies that grew from the blood-stained earth of Flanders in the First World War. The poppy does have other symbolic resonances, though; the flower contains morphine and codeine, and its seeds have been used as painkillers since Ancient Egyptian times. So there's another way of reading that red flower staining the placid green cover of 'Wherever You Are' - as a numbing, placatory opiate for the masses.
'Wherever You Are', for any readers that don't know, is performed by a choir of women formed as part of the recent BBC TV series The Choir: Military Wives; all of the women are the wives or girlfriends of British soldiers deployed in Afghanistan. The lyrics of the song are apparently drawn from love letters exchanged between the choir members and their partners, and set to music by Paul Mealor, a professor of composition at the University of Aberdeen most notable for composing the choral music for 2011's royal wedding.
I have expounded before about my distaste for popular culture that romanticises and celebrates the military. Frankly, it's more than a little disturbing that I should have to be confronted with the topic twice in little more than a year simply by writing about number one singles. Suffice to say that 'Wherever You Are' is a repulsively conservative piece of establishment propaganda. The role of the British Army is to inflict (and, if necessary, sustain) violence in order to further the economic and geopolitical interests of the British ruling class. As the quote that opened this post indicates, it has long been necessary for the establishment to use propaganda to turn this role in the popular imagination into something noble, impressive and courageous. Obviously, then, the nasty and violent details of the soldiers' "task" are euphemistically masked in lyrics like "I hold you in my dreams each night, until your task is done". Addressing a soldier as a "prince of peace" is beyond Orwellian in its mind-boggling and insulting doublethink. And when the Military Wives sing "may your courage never cease", they may as well be handing out white feathers.
So, yes, the poppy evokes the bloodied earth and also the numbing haze of opium. The ghastly sentimentalism of 'Wherever You Are' serves to glorify and excuse the horrific and inexcusable, while simultaneously papering over the ugly details of war, carefully avoiding the "dirt and dark places" of Let England Shake. These really are - to employ a word that PJ Harvey is not afraid to use, which glares mockingly out of that blood-red poppy, but which everything in 'Wherever You Are' is designed to sidestep around - the words that maketh murder.
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