Patti Smith vs. PJ Harvey

(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