Patti Smith vs. PJ Harvey

http://www.nme.com/news/pj-harvey/561

^^ ok this is hilar for the amazingly patronizing/wrong quotes from the activists on either side. good girl, polly!

Dry (1992) 9
Rid of Me (1993) 7
4-Track Demos (1993) 8
To Bring You My Love (1995) 9
Dance Hall at Louse Point (with John Parish) (1996) 6
Is This Desire? (1998) 7
Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000) 9
Uh Huh Her (2004) 4
The Peel Sessions 1991-2004 (2006) not heard
White Chalk (2007) not heard
A Woman A Man Walked By (with John Parish) (2009) not heard

Studio albums
Horses (1975) 10
Radio Ethiopia (1976) 7
Easter (1978) 7
Wave (1979) 5
Dream of Life (1988) 3
Gone Again (1996) not heard
Peace and Noise (1997) 5
Gung Ho (2000) not heard
Trampin' (2004) not heard
Twelve (2007) 4

On the basis of total scores, Polly. Out of devotion to "Horses", Patti.

Lolz @ this thread; hippies and fox hunting. Free Money, off Horses, is my fave Patti track and one of my all time fave songs. Probably one the songs of Patti's (of the ones that I've heard) that reminds me of PJs stuff (sonically/delivery-wise). End of the day though, I can pick up any PJ album any time and put it on an enjoy it, unlike Patti.

PJ Harvey's enormous B-sides collection is awesome.

kids these days

OTM.

They both peaked really early in their career (Patti actually before her debut, with "Hey Joe"/"Piss Factory," and then every album she put out was a step down from the one before), but Patti peaked a lot higher than PJ -- Dry is what, about as good as Wave, maybe? Nah, nothing as good as "Frederick" or the Byrds cover or maybe "Dancing Barefoot" on it. But close, probably. (And yeah, Patti's later stuff has been pretty embarrassing, but never as bad as that ridiculous song about "little fishies," for fuck's sake.)

Hang on to those opinions, gramps.

Anyway I agree with xhuxk about Smith up to a point (i.e. the higher peak and fall part) but completely disagree about Harvey who I find pretty consistent. I can pick up just about every Harvey album and enjoy it.

ongoing delusion that punk was super-special and not largely a marketing pheomenon

Why couldn't it be both? (And I say that as somebody who mostly thinks punk made rock worse.)

PJ

I distinctly remember the horror I felt when I picked up a copy of Gung Ho, pushed play, and heard Patti warble "In the garden of consciousness..." What a horrible start!

Still not heard The Coral Sea with Kevin Shields, but would probably pick that up sooner than the next PJ.

Yeah, but how much quicker would you pick it up a PJ/Kev collab over the latest Patti joint?

And let's be honest, the only time Peej sounds like Patti is on "Good Fortune", from Stories From the City..., so much so that I always assumed it was a tribute/pastiche.

(That was some kind of xpost)

I love this, Mark Lanegan and PJ Harvey duet "Hit the City":

Tom you should definitely check out White Chalk! it didn't really stick with me in the long run but it's definitely the least caricatured/most powerful/most connecting thing she's put out since the first two records. Everything since then (I really need to hear 'at louse point' in full though, I suspect it's way slept on by me) I get far too much artist-ic distance from. Whereas when she was really on fire there was a genuinely scary Hersh-like truth to it, even if she was always sort of a fascinatingly clever poser in her press shot (and she's still never descended to the depths of obvious emptiness someone like Bjork now has) communications....

Still disagree with anyone finding 8 track demos superior to Rid Of Me mind, thought it was a cowardly appeasement gesture back then and still do. Don't like the record 100%? Get a fucking bootleg and feel smug about it you wimps.

A demos album from her entire career would be fantastic though. Stories... is way more in need of unpolishing/unobscuring by appallingly thin-but-not-in-a-good-radio-way-sounding production than anything else.

pj harvey all the way. i only like a couple of tracks on horses (the title track, "gloria").

louse point is excellent, and i'm really hyped for the new album w/john parish - i think '95' through '98 was pretty much pj's creative peak, though i agree re: white chalk being a lot more powerful than you initially think, and i'm definitely still interested in where she goes next.

i grew up on pj and have only heard a bit of patti, so this could be emotional bias, but it definitely seems to me that pj pushed further in more interesting directions, and less self-consciously "important" as patti.

*than patti

I know what you're saying but PJ fans have more than enough "importance" to credit her with to close the gap with Patti though. I guess it's just a case of sticking around sometimes though.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Oooh old people beatdown.

I have never listened to Patti Smith. I love PJ Harvey.

PJ Harvey has yet to write a song as clueless as "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger."

i was listening to easter this week and wondering what would happen if somebody wrote "rock 'n' roll nigger" now. would a major label even release it?

(and i love pj, but patti totally got robbed in this poll.)

i saw both of them live within a few years of each other, in the late '90s. pj was good, but patti was one of the best things i've ever seen (and i wasn't even expecting much from her).

lol 90s

Still disagree with anyone finding 8 track demos superior to Rid Of Me mind, thought it was a cowardly appeasement gesture back then and still do. Don't like the record 100%? Get a fucking bootleg and feel smug about it you wimps.

that's fighting talk danny boy.

I think ROM irritates me because it's the one PJ record that feels compromised by its production. At the time I was disappointed because it was trying too hard to be fashionable - too much Albini, too much of the mute-mute-mute-powerchord!! guitar sound that was then ubiquitous. Listening back to it now, it sounds dated and I think it's the only PJ Harvey album that's very definitely "of its time" .

Releasing the 8-track demos was a canny move IMO - rather than appeasement, it helped create the myth that Rid Of Me was a difficult listen - which cemented PJ's reputation as a "serious. proper. artist." hence we're still talking about her now.

Pj Harvey by miles.

What Ross said