![]() ![]() ![]() It starts with, “Let England Shake,” a song about brotherhood and disillusionment in war and its aftermath ( lyrics and audio). ![]() Violent images are paired with tuneful, even upbeat, melodies. Throughout the album, militarism and masculine-coded brute violence juxtapose conflicting concepts: apocalypse and glory, patriotism and disenchantment. The fruits of it all, she quietly sings, are “orphan children.” England-and the US, in this song-has destroyed much to take much. Then the song asks, How is our glorious country sown?/Not with wheat and corn, the implication being that the country is sown with violence-indeed, that it owes its historical glory to violence rather than grain. It begins with the call-and-response assertion that the land is not plowed by farmers, but “by tanks and feet…marching” as to war. It touches on the agricultural history of England and, by default, the US, and foregrounds the way in which war can engender both prosperity and doom. Though the album touches on English militarism since World War I, this song seems to be a response to British and American interventionism in Afghanistan. Here is the music video for “This Glorious Land” (lyrics here). In the album, we encounter a crumbling empire beset by militarism. In closing out that discussion (at least for now), I use PJ Harvey’s February LP, Let England Shake*, as a jumping off point to think about about war as apocalypse. Last week, I wrote about apocalyptic themes and imagery in contemporary music. ![]()
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