Consumption, Clarity, and 2011.

II. The World Eats The Music

“The next body of work, it’s an example of the whole album, really, in that i was looking outwards a lot more. I think a lot of my work has often been about the interior, the emotional, what happens inside oneself. This time I’ve just been looking out, so it’s not only to do with taking a look at England, but taking a look at the world and what’s happening in the current day world affairs. But always trying to come from the human point of view because I don’t feel qualified to sing from a political standpoint.”
~PJ Harvey, explaining the title track of Let England Shake to Andrew Marr

I always wonder about things like legacy when it comes to music. How albums will be remembered and experienced by the same people who, today, rediscover the Beatles and punk. While it’s easy to note a record as an artifact of the time, so few of the ones beholden to our generation really paint portraits of the world that surrounds them. Of general western discontent, maybe we’ll get a few songs, and then it returns to concerns of a world that really can’t be understood these days.

Herein lies a strength of Let England Shake. Where it could be so easy to get trapped inside of commentary of the wars happening thousands of miles away, the relevance will stay locked into a few years, and as time goes on, it will be luck that someone’s studying history at the same time as music, and could go “Oh, Fallujah!” or whatever battle was chosen. By choosing vagaries in language, a strange thing has happened to Let England Shake. Already, its lens shifted.

It was the first record I played when I heard about Tottenham, and as the footage rolled out it grew, pointing towards the leaks that let this dammed up anger out. Be it the vandalism for supplies they couldn’t afford, the media’s reductionist “mindless” narrative, the violent release of western despair, all set to a note-by-note highlighting in the flaws of thought that bring the people to such rage, that turn economy into autocracy.

“Let it burn, let it burn, let it burn, let it burn…”