Hope Six and a Bit

This photograph has brought me a peculiar degree of delight, not only because it has Polly Harvey at the centre of it but because of its circumstances. I will tell you the story. It’s a bit long, so make yourself some tea.

PJH is rather used to people not liking her work, but that’s generally either for musical reasons, or because they don’t like her as an individual – or for the latter reason dressed up as the former. Political objections have been absent until last year. The first track from the album The Hope Six Demolition Project, ‘The Community of Hope’, dealt with what the singer along with photographer Seamus Murphy observed on their trip to Washington DC in 2014. At one level, the song is a cynical blast against efforts to regenerate particularly run-down parts of that city: that is what the Hope Six Demolition Project was. It says something about the idealistic cast of US politics that the powers-that-be dared to include the word Hope in its title: such hubris invites disappointment, especially when grand initiatives like this rarely achieve their aims without ambiguity and loss. But that’s what America is like. People genuinely do hope, while in bitter old Britain we’re generally happy if things don’t turn out quite as bad as we feared. But in dabbling with all this, Harvey exposed herself to the fury of those who still wanted to hope, and of those who had an interest in them doing so.

She had long since decided that the keynote of the album would be reportage. In Afghanistan, Kosovo, and now in Washington, she had gathered the remarks and impressions of others and was weaving them into poetry and then into song; this is what she’d done with her previous release, Let England Shake, but this time the people she would quote from were not long-dead soldiers and veterans, but living: they could potentially have their own ideas.

As far as ‘Community of Hope’ was concerned, that original voice came from Washington Post journalist Paul Schwartzman: he tells the story here. Seamus Murphy identified Mr Schwartzman via a mutual contact as someone who could guide him and Harvey around the rougher end of Washington; first they toured the city districts as Harvey sat in the back of the car and took notes, and about a year later Murphy returned on his own and Mr Schwartzman took him out a second time to film the locations they’d visited earlier. The pressman had only a vague idea who Murphy was, no knowledge at all of Harvey, and the parameters of the whole project weren’t exactly clear either. ‘It’s awkwardly difficult to define’, Murphy had told him, because it was. By the time he returned for his solo trip, Murphy was able to give his contact a copy of the book he and Harvey collaborated on, The Hollow of the Hand; in that, and in the resultant video that accompanied ‘The Community of Hope’ early in 2016, Mr Schwartzman was able to read and hear his own words quoted verbatim. If I’d been as monumentally rude to my home city as he had (employing such choice terms as ‘shithole’ and ‘zombies’), my blood would frankly have run cold, but Schwartzman took it in good enough part to write it up: after all, a journalist tells a story, even if it’s against themselves. And neither Murphy nor Harvey had told anyone his name: he’d effectively outed himself.

In a digital age the vituperative backlash against ‘The Community of Hope’, released a month before the album, didn’t take long: Washington city politicians lined up to denounce the singer they’d never heard of. More pointedly Leah Garrett, who runs the not-for-profit local charity actually called ‘Community of Hope’ wrote to Harvey in a tone of sorrow that hid bewildered rage. ‘By calling out this picture of poverty in terms of streets and buildings and not the humans who live here, have you not reduced their dignity? Have you not trashed the place that, for better or worse, is home to people who are working to make it better?’ Of course, even such heartfelt criticisms missed the point that the words the singer used were not her own words, something she signalled very clearly within the song:

Here’s the Hope Six Demolition Project

Stretching down to Benning Road -

A well-known pathway of death

(at least, that’s what I’m told).

But some fans, who might have been expected to be more supportive, also found ‘The Community of Hope’ uncomfortable. ‘Poverty tourism of the worst kind’, was one comment I read, ‘in the end, she’s a privileged white woman describing someone else’s suffering that has no effect on her. It’s unforgiveable’. Yet in The Hollow of the Hand, the poem that eventually transmuted into the song is called ‘Sight-seeing South of the River’: it is itself a critique of exactly that remote, privileged viewpoint. Seamus Murphy released two photographs of Harvey taken during that 2014 trip, one showing her looking out of the window of a suburban bus, the other beside the River Anacostia, notebook in hand, presumably scribbling what later turns into the haunting lyric of that name. In the video of ‘The Community of Hope’ there are plenty of little vignettes demonstrating that Murphy, too, did a lot more than just sit in Paul Schwartzman’s car and stick a camera out of the window. But these are easy points to overlook (especially if you want to anyway).

My first contact with the contested song was the video: 

The lyrics detailed the baleful locations in the way Leah Garrett had complained, but degradation and misery was not the impression it left. In it I saw people going about the ordinary and yet profoundly grand work of being human: a young man has his hair cut in a salon with the Obamas on the wall; people go to work; a young woman is baptised in a white robe. There are more forbidding images, too: soldiers cross a landscape, military planes taxi. But around and across them the music soars, relentlessly upbeat. Without the visuals, the song has a bitter, ironic tang, culminating on the line lifted from Schwartzman, ‘they’re gonna put a Walmart here’ – the bitterness intensified by the knowledge that, after the song was recorded, Walmart, who had agreed to build a store as part of the Hope Six initiative in return for being granted commercial advantages elsewhere, reneged on the commitment. Harvey could not have known that, but it’s another example of a curious prescience that’s surfaced at other times in her life, too. But, put together with the video, the song’s sour notes move well down into the mix. It still makes me tearful: to me, it’s a statement of defiant solidarity with the people of Anacostia, not a swipe at them, and through them, to every battling battalion of human beings.

Yet you see what you want to. The church scenes were shot at the Union Temple Baptist Church in Anacostia, and partway through the video we see its director of music, Michael Scott, drilling the ladies of the church choir in accompanying PJH as the demo version of the song plays on his phone: by the end of the film, they’re singing ‘They’re gonna put a Walmart here’ in the church in lovely harmonies while Seamus Murphy films them from the side. The Washington Post chased Mr Scott down and asked him how this came about. Murphy, he remembered, had been ‘hanging out’ at the church and asked whether the choir might be willing to take part in the video. Now, UTBC isn’t an ordinary Baptist church: it majors on African-American aspiration as much as common-or-garden Christianity. The Jesus painted on its wall is black, and its version of the cross is an Afrocentric ankh. Of course something called ‘Community of Hope’ would fit in with that vision. Mr Scott liked the title of the song. And equally unsurprisingly, when the Post pointed him towards the video, he didn’t see what he’d expected. He’d thought the Walmart line was a bit strange at the time: now, watching the film, he admitted he was ‘highly confused as to what the message is’, and wondered why there weren’t more positive images of his neighbourhood. Even considering Walmart had ratted on the deal to build a store in Anacostia, he pointed out: ‘Somebody has to build a Walmart. Somebody has to work in a Walmart. A Walmart means jobs.’ So what I saw as the most uplifting image in the whole composition had actually been procured under something like false pretences. I couldn’t swallow the complaint that the involvement of UTBC in the song was ‘cultural appropriation’ – ‘an exhausted pop music trope’ – because I couldn’t see them as anything other than embodying the hope of the title, if hope was to be found anywhere, a typical Harveyan ambiguity. They are part of the religious motif that weaves its way through the album, and are, essentially, no more ‘appropriated’ than are the monks of the abbey of Decani in Kosovo whose chanting we hear at the end of another song, ‘Chain of Keys’. They both represent the presence of eternal truth in particular circumstances. But they should have known what was going on – should they? Perhaps it couldn’t have happened in any other way – PJH never explains herself, now less than ever, and how could she have explained a statement deliberately intended to be ambiguous and multivocal – but it left something of a moral doubt at the centre of a great work, a leaky valve in its heart.

She’d been booked to play at the Wolf Trap festival not far from Washington for a while, but it wasn’t until June that the stunning announcement came that she and the band would be joined at that concert by none other than the UTBC choir. First the news appeared on the Wolf Trap website, then on PJ’s own (her management are often a bit relaxed in their attitude to publicity), and then they were singing two days before the Washington date too, at Summerstage in New York. Finally they, and Polly, appeared on her Instagram feed. There is Michael Scott, there are the ladies of the choir who appear in the film, there is the singer.

How did this come about? How did artist and community move from estrangement to collaboration? PJH’s management said nothing, of course she said nothing, the church itself said nothing, without a mention of the concerts on its Facebook page, website or Twitter feed. For a while I toyed with the idea of getting in touch with Rev’d Willie Nelson at Union Temple, but, a couple of days ago, as the cursor hovered over the ‘send’ button beside my email, I decided not to. What could he say? ‘She asked and we said yes’? It’s not my business to pry just for the sake of a blog post: I’m not a journalist, and I’m not writing a biography. All we need to know is that some approach has been made, some explanation has been offered, some bridge has been repaired. There has been boldness and generosity, no matter what has actually happened. And this moral lacuna in the work of PJ Harvey has been definitively closed.