Twenty eight years ago PJ Harvey released her debut album. Dry is a vital part of the collective howl of early 90s feminist punk, a subgenre defined by women with loud guitars who demanded a seat at the musical table. Bands like Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, Hole, Babes in Toyland, Sleater-Kinney and L7 pushed against the erasure of women in punk and changed the landscape of popular music forever.
The songs on Dry are stripped down to their essence, the lyrics evocative with a wry vulnerability that may or may not be sincere.The driving guitar carrying raw sensuality, conflicted desire and wrath to a rousing stream of unfiltered feminine frustration.
Our punk chanteuses continue to give voice to the inevitable frustrations that resonate with most women’s experiences, and frustrations that feminists continue to struggle against.
Sheela Na Gigs are small sculptures of a woman exposing her gigantic vulca, and are seen around parts of Western Europe on doorways, some going back to the eleventh century. They’re believed to ward off demons and death, presumably because the vagina is both powerful and grotesque in the eyes of the church. Sheela Na Gig is hideous, by design, but on Dry, in the song “Sheela Na Gig,” the ward against evil is held up as sacred, rather than profane — baring all in a display of unabashed beckoning for the virile who fears not the pussy, or an amulet to protect us against those who seek to control it. As a teenager coming of age when this album was released, all of this was Very Important(™). See, this was before the internet, and the same year Madonna released her Sex book, the abortion debate was the great cultural schism, and the AIDS epidemic was still raging on. Frank talk about sexuality and feminist autonomy was vital, and was still fresh.
The echoes of the riot grrl bands and their affiliated acts live on through much of today’s music, but the sheen of the movement has faded and the cracks are glaringly apparent. One only needs to consider the movement’s lack of diversity – with or without the modern lens of intersectionality – to realize that white women singing to white girls can never be progressive. As good as the feel of loudness is in our mouths, and badly needed the messages of body autonomy and women in front, the stark whiteness of the feminism casts a long shadow on its true impact.
The whiteness of this feminism is so bright it fucking glows in the dark. Kathleen Hanna has spoken about her regret over erasing black women, and how women of color often didn’t feel welcome in the feminist spaces that she ran or influenced. Worse, PJ Harvey herself does not consider herself to be a feminist. Kimberly Crenshaw hadn’t yet come up with the concept of intersectionality, but surely, someone must have noticed. The women of 90s punk and rock carried on a long tradition of the music industry erasing those to whom it is most indebted. PJ Harvey has talked about her love of blues music, but rock guitar itself wouldn’t have been possible without black women who came before her.
Rock and punk wouldn’t exist without the blues, a musical style which rose from enslaved men and women singing together while being forced to work in plantation fields. From the evolution of blues came the first rock and roller, a queer black woman named Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who was groundbreaking in her use of distortion on her electric guitar.
Rock and roll became whitewashed when white people started “discovering” it, and when record companies, sensing higher profit margins, signed few black musicians who invented the genre, but promoted Elvis, who became known as The King, and was paid more handsomely and afforded more opportunities than any of his black forbearers.
The number of black women who’ve become known for rock or punk music is distressingly low. If you can think of one or two, they’re the exceptions that prove my point. The conversations around white supremacy have finally hit the mainstream media, and it’s time for us to examine and discuss our problematic favorites.
It’s impossible to look back authentically at our old favorites without allowing us to be critical of our heroes, and thus ourselves. Dry is a stunning album, in keeping with a chorus of howling sirens, all of whom are worthy of musical respect, and all of whom needed to do better at checking the gatekeeper of their musical clubs. White feminist women have white privilege, and if we prioritize the voices of white feminists above others to the benefit of our comfort, our feminism is self serving bullshit.
Dry is being reissued on July 24th, along side the first vinyl issue of Dry – DEMOS, a compilation of stripped down versions of songs from Dry. Preorders for Dry can be found here, and for Dry – DEMOS can be found here.
