No Need for God: PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me Turns 30

Where do you want this killing done

“I don’t even think of myself as being female half the time. When I’m writing songs I never write with gender in mind,” quoth Polly Jean Harvey. The first part maybe; far be it for me to deny the young barnburner’s right to consider alternate-gendered power options when she bends over Casanova (or for that matter, when she eats out Robert DeNiro). But the rest, I mean. Three decades later sex and gender are more widely understood to not be essentially linked. But Rid of Me is one of three atom bombs that unquestionably (and perhaps uncoincidentally) evolved rock in 1993 by shoving both the female anatomy and the bullshit expectations of womanhood in its face.