The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers
Whore” by P. J. Harvey

Patrick Mackenzie, OP Contributor

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Often we are taught to think of the world as a cruel place.
Whether or not this is the case all the time is debatable.
However, this week I watched an excerpt from a documentary
that could only reaffirm the notion that we are living in a
totally fucked up world. The documentary was about the sex
trade in Cambodia. Out of desperation and worse, girls as
young as five are thrown into prostitution. What’s more tragic
are the “sex tourists” from the west who can operate with
impunity, using these children as proper-
ty. One such “tourist” from Vancouver
was recently and successfully prosecuted
under a Canadian law that allows
authorities from this country to prose-
cute men who engage in sex with
minors from other countries. That such
a predator can be taken out of circula-
tion is a good thing, but it is the unjust
social and economic conditions that
allow for children to be lost to prostitution that is the real
monster in the world. So, in order to complement an already
black picture (they’re always black aren’t they?), I give you P. J.
Harvey’s brilliantly dark, “The Whores Hustle and the
Hustlers Whore.”

Released in 2000 and appearing on Stories from the City,
Stories from the Sea, “The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers
Whore” begins with the steady rise of feedback and falls into
a thrashing of guitars, bass, and drums. It is a rock tune, but
there are no guitar solos; in fact there is no musical “virtuosi-
ty” to speak of: there are only three chords and yet the song
rocks like a city collapsing in on itself.

enough.”

Polly Jean Harvey’s song presents’a vision of the world
wholly at odds with any accepted notions of compassion or

 

 

 

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THURSDAY 7
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“This isn’t the first time

I’ve asked for money or

love / Heaven and earth
don’t ever mean

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kindness. Her city is given to us in terms of rape and greed;
no one is interested in anyone else beyond what they can get
out of them. In the chorus, P. J. Harvey sings: “The whores
hustle and the hustlers whore / Too many people out of love
/ The whotes hustle and the hustlers whore / This city’s
tipped right to the core.”

Even as the city is painted wholly as the site of predation,
a voice emerges from the darkness begging for some kind of
intervention into the lives of the people caught in
the city’s heedless machinery: “Speak to us, send us
a sign / Tell us something to keep us trying.”

But the one voice to stand outside the descrip-
tions of the rotten city’s machinations becomes a
desperate whore on the make: “This isn’t the first
time I’ve asked for money or love / Heaven and
earth don’t ever mean enough.” The necessity for
survival extinguishes the single voice of reason and
we ate left with an image of the junky’s wretched
survival: “Speak to me of heroin and speed / Just give me
something I can believe.”

In P. J. Harvey’s song, it seems that the surrounding city
determines people’s behavior; whether they will continue’ to
exist in the morass of violence, of spending and getting, or
sink underneath the city’s surface there to lay waste their
wares, is a matter of chance. (Thank you to Shakespeare for
that last line). But underneath all the despair and dark imagery
is a voice that recognizes the world’s awfulness. But is recogni-
tion enough? Is there anything that can be done to change
this state of affairs, or is the world forever doomed to be
divided between winners and losers? At the very least, Polly
Jean Harvey is troubled and we the listeners are‘likewise com-

pelled.

 

“>TUNE
TWISTER