Dammit

I had a whole long post written about PJ Harvey and the computer crashed. All gone. The worst part is that it was an experimental thing, the idea being that I had a real life friend pick the artist of the day and then stand over my shoulder telling me why they thought she was the bomb. My friend Chris had a bunch of insights, it was brillant and it's gone. *looking like Cheney about to have a heart attack*

Well, I can't retrieve all our brillant insights or the deathless prose they were written in, but here's a quick summary:

*I mentioned that I really liked her in high school.
*Chris suggested that he thinks her latest albums Uh Huh Her and Stories From the City are really the ones to get into.
*We both thought that it best to give a PJ Harvey album to the mopey teenage girl in your life. Chris would like to point out there is no reason to think only of girls--mopey teenage boys also would benefit from Harvey's music. I am abashed. He's right.
*Chris points out the sort of thing us non-musicians miss--Harvey exerts a good deal of control over the production of her album, which makes all the difference in how you come across to your audience. It's not easy, particularly for women, to stand up to producers, so kudos to her for that.

I promise, it was much more artful than that. But since Chris is a drummer, he would like to add a couple comments about women in music as a general rule. He says that he sees that it's hard to get in and get respect, so in his experience, if you get a woman to play with you she's likely to be twice as good as a guy in her position, 'cause a guy with the same talent would have gone farther. From his experience, he would describe many of the women he works with as more able to see the instrument as extension of their bodies. (That's how Chris plays--organically--and yeah, it works.) He theorizes that since playing is a form of sexual expression on a basic level and women express their sexuality more than men, they tend to fall into playing rock music more naturally.

(Yes, musicians talk like this. You can learn from it if you're open to it. Of even more interest to me was that he has some interesting stories about being brought up to believe that women can't play and then being schooled by female musicians. But he's a smart guy and instead of being defensive, he made the decision that the messages he had gotten must be wrong. Funny stuff, nice to hear that occasionally someone has an open mind all on his own.)