The room, left ugly on purpose
The guitar is almost not there, a scrape, and then it is the only thing in the world. Polly Jean Harvey does not ask. She states the terms of an obsession so complete it has become a threat and a plea at once. Rid of Me, the title track of the 1993 album, starts at a whisper that is already violent. Lick my legs, I’m on fire. The line is not a metaphor you can tidy. The band, Rob Ellis and Steve Vaughan, wait in the quiet and then hit as if the quiet had been a dare. There is no chorus that rescues you. There is a demand, repeated, until the demand is the form.
They recorded it at Pachyderm Studio in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, in the winter of 1992, Steve Albini at the desk in the role he preferred, not a sweetener, a witness. The same rooms would hold Nirvana’s In Utero weeks later. Harvey had gone back to Dorset after the shock of Dry, and the songs she brought were not interested in being liked by the people who had liked the first record for the wrong reasons. Albini close-miked the room and left the ugly in. You hear the amp, the air, the voice at the edge of what a throat can do without becoming a style. The album came out in May 1993 and divided the listeners who wanted another pretty menace. This menace is not pretty. It is exact.
The lyric is about possession, the wish to be rid of someone and the wish to be inside their mouth, both true, neither resolved. She has described the period as one of isolation and of writing that did not flinch. On stage the song could be longer, the quiet longer, the hit harder. The studio version is the document Albini was hired to make: three people in a room, no gloss to apologise for the volume when it comes. Ellis’s drums are huge and then gone. Vaughan’s bass is a weight. Harvey’s guitar is a decision. Nothing in the mix asks you to find it tasteful.
I wanted it to sound like the room, not like a record trying to be liked. The songs were about wanting someone past the point of being decent.
(PJ Harvey, 1993)
The track has been covered, notably with more theatre, and the covers prove how much of the original is the refusal of theatre. She is not playing a character who will wink. She is playing the feeling until the feeling is embarrassing, which is the point of obsession. Rid of Me the album is a run of such feelings. The title song is the door you have to go through, whispering, before the rest of the house will speak.
What remains is the jump from almost nothing to too much, which is how want actually works. Rid of Me does not seduce. It corners. Albini kept the corner sharp. Harvey kept the lyric from becoming a pose. You can leave the room. The song does not believe you will.
