PJ Harvey - Dress
I’m not very comfortable with gender, at least as it applies to my personal life. I recognize that I’m male and that to all outward appearances I conform with mainstream standards for the gender role this requires me to fill in our modern society. Regardless of that, I’m not comfortable at all with that gender role, or really even with the idea that I am a “man.” It icks me out to be referred to as such, which is something I have to hide from most people. They just wouldn’t understand. What I don’t understand, though, is the way so many other people with XY chromosomes are so happy to fit right in with the gender role society sets for them. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life wondering if I’m the only boy who feels restricted by the sorts of clothing options that are provided for us males. Am I the only one who is tired as hell of wearing pants every day? Well, obviously not, because transgender people do exist, and I see them in the media, if not in the course of my actual life, on a regular basis. But for reasons I can’t explain, which are perhaps linked to social anxiety and/or lack of self-esteem, I’m not comfortable going that route myself. There was a time when I experimented with crossdressing, with being more “out” about my feelings on this issue, but I ultimately couldn’t handle it, and went at least partway back into the closet. I’m only talking about it now because the distancing medium of the internet makes me feel as if I have something to hide behind. And because it has a lot to do with my analysis of “Dress,” my favorite PJ Harvey song.
Harvey’s band at the time this single, her first, was released, was a power trio, in which she herself sang and played guitar. “Dress” has a stripped-down sound that is reminiscent of both rootsy rock n’ roll and the grunge sound that was just starting to gain notoriety in the United States at the time of this single’s release. Ultimately, though, it reminds me most of the Velvet Underground, especially some of the songs on their first album in which Lou Reed sang and John Cale played viola. In addition to playing guitar on this track, Harvey lays down a harsh, scraping violin track that creates a chaotic counterpoint to her straightforward, undistorted rhythm guitar playing. The dark ambience this gives “Dress” as a whole makes me think of “Black Angel’s Death Song” or “Venus In Furs,” and though it’s a much more standard rock song than either of those, the commonality is reflected not only in the sound but the darkness of the song’s lyrics.
When it begins, with a rumbling rhythm track that sounds calm but hints at a pent-up fury we will see unleashed before long, Harvey is singing quietly, in a conversational tone. “I’ll put on my dress,” she tells us. “I’m going out dancing.” Now, someone hearing this line from PJ Harvey now may not take it the way it seemed at the time, as she has a much more conventionally feminine image these days. At the time, though, most pictures of her depicted her without makeup, her hair pulled back, looking quite tomboyish. In fact, her image early in her career seems to me like an extension of what she was singing about in this song. At the time, pictures of her in a dress with makeup on made her look uncomfortable. She only seemed at home with a guitar in her hand and her hair pulled back, getting down to the business of rocking out. But in the context of the song “Dress,” she’s looking for love, and she realizes that there are certain aspects of mainstream femininity that she’s going to have to conform to if she wants the guys at the club to show interest in her. At 16 (my age in 1992), I knew what she was talking about. I was just starting to admit to my conscious self that I had a lot of problems with the things I had to do to fit into the “boy” role society had laid out for me. My discomfort with masculinity and PJ’s discomfort with femininity seemed of a piece.
As the first verse continues, Harvey shifts rapidly back and forth between the pros and cons of performing her female gender role, for which the dress acts as a synecdoche. “Starting off red, clean and sparkling, he’ll see me,” she says, thinking of the way the dress will look to the boys at the club. But then she tells us “It’s hard to walk in a dress—it’s not easy.” She feels the need to emphasize that fact, just in case we forget; these are the sacrifices she must make to get what she wants, which is not to say that she’s comfortable with it. The last line of the first verse is “I’m swinging over like a heavy loaded fruit tree.” This is obviously a reference to breasts, and to the way the dress accents her cleavage. The way it’s worded, it’s impossible to tell whether she feels this is a good thing or not—and that’s perfect, because it seems PJ doesn’t really know if it is or not. She feels exposed, insecure, and out of her element, but she feels this is necessary, so she puts up with it.
The chorus of the song is the first half of a sentence that is never finished. “If you put it on…” is the phrase Harvey repeats over and over. The rest of the sentence need not be spoken, though, because we all know what she is implying. If you put the dress on, you’ll get the attention of the man you desire. She sings the line, “Must be a way I can dress to please him” in both the first and the second verses, making it the only line besides the one-line chorus that is repeated at any point in the song. It adds further emphasis to the belief expressed by the narrator in the song, that this performance of gender that she is enacting is necessary to make her worthy of the interest and love of men. It’s important not to conflate PJ Harvey the singer with the character she’s playing within the song; it seems quite clear to me that Harvey recognizes the negative implications of the character’s thought processes. Then again, how hard is it to believe that PJ Harvey would at times find herself switching between these two perspectives, or perhaps even seeing both simultaneously? I’ve found that it’s common to encounter situations in which I both recognize the unhealthy patterns of my thoughts and find it impossible to break from those patterns.
By the time the first chorus rolls around, the tension in the song has increased, but only somewhat. Harvey’s singing voice increases to its full volume for the first time during the chorus, but she’s still singing rather calmly, not yet at the emotional fever-pitch that the song will eventually attain. When the chorus ends, her violin appears for the first time, sliding into the left speaker with a ratcheting hiss. This is where the song starts to turn dark, and the lyrics follow the music’s mood. “It’s sad to see, lonely, all this lonely,” Harvey sings now, turning from the mostly positive expectations of the evening she presented in the song’s first verse to the underlying doubts and fears that are running through her mind. “Close up my eyes,” she declares. “Dreamy dreamy music make it be all right.” This is less a description of what’s happening than an imprecation, a desperate demand for the evening’s course of events to bend to her will. It doesn’t really help, though. At the end of the verse, even as she’s declaring “Swing it, sway, everything will be all right,” she’s also telling us that the dress is “feeling so damned tight tonight.” This line is a literal expression of what it feels like to attempt dancing in a restrictive evening dress, that Little Black Dress of feminine yore. But it’s also a figurative reflection of how the gender role fits her. She can’t really be herself in the dress, can’t loosen up and stop worrying about ways that her natural personality might conflict with what her man will want to see from her. Though she may not realize it in the moment, this also dooms her chances for gaining longterm companionship from this encounter. In order to make the initial connection,she has presented a picture of herself that is far different from how she appears on a day to day basis. But if the man likes that picture, then she’ll either have to continue a performance as someone other than herself, or reveal herself as someone other than the role she played that night they met at the dance club. Either way, it’ll be hard to move from a shallow relationship established for immediate sexual gratification into an affair that could assuage her need for companionship for longer than just one night.
And let me pause here to state that this desire for companionship, as expressed within “Dress“‘s lyrics, is not just a girl thing. A lot of what I hate about the gender role I’m forced into as a man is this idea that all a man wants out of encounters with the opposite sex (or the same sex, if he’s gay) is the sexual contact itself, that we must be tricked or forced into any semblance of longer term companionship. Speaking strictly for myself, this is bullshit, and that’s a lot of why I relate so heavily to this song. The character in “Dress” is female, but she’s using casual social encounters as a way to find a connection, and (as we’ll see) having a less than successful time with it. I’ve been there many times myself. In fact, while internet dating and other such tricks I’ve used to get around my shyness have often proved to be dead ends, meeting people in social situations is usually just as much of a dead end, because when you meet someone in a bar or a dance club, they’re not there to make a connection—they’re there to party. I’ve been used for casual sex, then tossed to the side, by plenty of girls. This isn’t strictly a female problem, and the idea that men tend not to care about these things, while women do, may only even be as true as it is because we’re all raised to behave this way.
Back to the song. After the second chorus comes a short solo break. PJ’s track of violin is replaced by a lead guitar overdub, but eventually the violin comes back in, and the conventional melody played by the lead guitar dances around a more unconventional violin line, which, in Cale-ish fashion, sticks mostly with a high, keening note that it saws back and forth upon. Overtop of this relatively chaotic section, Harvey sings a short bridge in which we hear from the man in the narrative for the only time. “You purty thang,” she says in his voice. “I bought you beautiful dresses.” Considering the lyrics to the rest of the song, it is unclear whether this is a guy she’s been seeing for some time on a casual basis, or whether he’s projecting a potential future on the relationship that has begun that night. Regardless, though, it’s clear that the characteristics of our female narrator that have caught the man’s attention are the very ones she’s least comfortable with. The twang Harvey puts into her own voice when she sings the words spoken in his may be a parody of his relative ignorance on the subject. And though she doesn’t put her frustration with him into words just yet, the brief instrumental section that follows this bridge does so through the scraping of the violin, which has lost all semblance of melody and now sounds like she’s playing the strings with a hacksaw. Beneath this noisy break, Robert Ellis’s tom-heavy drum pattern underscores its chaotic elements with a heavy pound.
All of this instrumentally expressed frustration leads into a final verse in which PJ finally lets loose all of her negative feelings about the events of the evening. She begins with the declaration, “Filthy tight, this dress is filthy,” expressing a simultaneous frustration with the role she’s been playing and the discomfort it has caused her. Her declaration that the “dress is filthy” hints at possible self-directed feelings of loose virtue, and the rest of the verse leaves no room for interpretation. Its last line is “I’m a fallen woman in a dancing costume.” Perhaps her castigations of her own behavior are misplaced; after all, who’s to say that there’s anything wrong with going out on a weekend night, getting laid with no strings attached, and coming home alone in the wee hours of the morning? Well, there’s nothing wrong with it if that’s what you wanted, but when PJ howls, “I’m falling flat and my hands are empty” elsewhere in the verse, we know that it wasn’t all she wanted. The entire song has hinted at a desire for a real, lasting connection, and now, realizing that she’s missed yet another opportunity to make one, she’s devastated. “Clear it away, gotta get it out of this room,” she says, referring to the dress, which she can no longer stand the sight of. It started as a symbol of the restrictions she had to fit into in order to play the game, to get the man, and now it’s a symbol of her continued failure to do so. It makes her sick to look at it. The music reflects her sickness, and after one final chorus, the entire song begins to fall apart, with two different tracks of violin scraping at each other as her previously steady rhythm guitar riff slows down. She strikes the chords on the offbeats now, going against instead of with the rhythm section, and causing the drumming to eventually disintegrate under her will. Ellis ceases to pound on his toms in favor of single, spaced-out snare hits, which find the same slowed-down, sick-sounding rhythm the guitar is now playing. The violins scrape and scream, the bass drops out entirely, and the last 30 seconds of the song sound like one final, dying convulsion, perhaps mirroring the meltdown of our frustrated female narrator, lying alone in her bed, punching her pillow, kicking her feet, and crying.
