P.J. Harvey Gets Unmistakably Political

There are very few songwriters who can match P.J. Harvey when it comes to depicting human cruelty. And, as tales of human cruelty go, you probably can’t find many to outdo the life story of Guantanamo Bay detainee Shaker Aamer.

Aamer was detained in 2001, on suspicion of financing terrorist activity and recruiting for al-Qaeda. He was never charged, and he was cleared for release from Guantanamo in 2009. But he’s still there; he’s spent over 13 years there, as a matter of fact, and most of them have been spent in solitary confinement. He’s served as an advocate for the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, demanding that the detainees be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention, and broadcasting the details of the potentially lethal torture he and others have suffered. He’s currently on hunger strike, along with over half of his fellow detainees.

For more detail, you can consult ​“Shaker Aamer,” the song Harvey released on August 2 through her website.

Releasing this song is not just an admirable act, in and of itself; it’s a striking evolution in terms of Harvey’s writing.

Harvey’s earlier work was removed and literary. She played through a variety of fictional personas who inhabited strange dream worlds shot through with operatic emotion and horrific violence, but a close examination of the songs themselves revealed very little about their performer. We knew she wasn’t literally Eve in the garden, or Delilah seducing Samson; she hadn’t dismembered or drowned anyone, and she had never been 50 feet tall; yet her performances and her subject matter were so intense that they felt like something crucial was being laid bare. The screaming was real; everything else was open to interpretation.

Still, the bleak territory Harvey mapped out in her songs always felt essentially private, and mostly concerned power struggles between two people. Even when she turned to the outside world, and in particular to war, it was sometimes hard to tell whether she was making an overtly political statement or just expanding her ideas of violence and power. Harvey’s interest in war goes as far back as ​“Civil War Correspondent,” from her 1996 collaboration with John Parish. But it started to flourish in recent years, with 2009’s ​“The Soldier” (from another Parish collaboration), and, eventually, an entire album, 2011’s Let England Shake. This was the bloodiest Harvey album yet, filled with soldiers who ​“fell like lumps of meat, blown and shot out beyond belief” and people drowning in sewage. But it was sometimes hard to tell whether Harvey was appalled or just observing. She floated over the proceedings, crafting catchy pop melodies and maintaining ironic distance; ​“The Words that Maketh Murder” took part of its melody from ​“The Bird is the Word,” which in turn could have been a reference to the use of ​“Surfin’ Bird” in Full Metal Jacket. The layers of intertextuality were so deep that it was pointless trying to find Harvey in them.

By contrast, ​“Shaker Aamer” is naked. It’s a simple, unambiguous act of political commitment. There are very few instruments, one uncomplicated melody; even the lyrics are simple to the point of sometimes being clunky (“with metal tubes we are force fed / I honestly wish that I was dead”), which is perhaps inevitable in a song that bears the burden of educating its audience. Harvey’s trajectory, as an artist, is something like the reverse of Bob Dylan’s; rather than starting with politics and retreating into a shroud of confusing and self-contradictory personas, she started out as a willful mystery, and has grown into writing a flat-out protest song.

And it works. It’s powerful, and it’s harrowing, and it’s to be commended. If nothing else, Harvey must know that any new song she releases will spread through the Internet like wildfire, thanks to posts exactly like this one, and that the news of Aamer’s hunger strike will spread with it. The world needs more writers of Harvey’s caliber who are willing and able to step forward and speak about what they believe in. And her writing can only benefit from her commitment to engage with the world.