PJ Harvey and Björk’s duet cover performance of the Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction at the 1994 BRIT Awards challenges the gender politics of rock music but is undercut by their complicity in rock music’s racial politics. The respective careers and presentations of Harvey and Björk can be understood through the lens of 1990s “mainstream feminism” or “white feminism,” a brand of feminism that centered personal agency without consideration of race and intersectionality. Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones have their own complicated relationship with 1960s and 1970s race and gender politics with their performance of Blues-influenced, hypersexual rock. Harvey and Björk’s cover of Satisfaction begins with a deliberate avoidance of referentiality, eliminating the original’s guitar hook and replacing the driving rock texture with harmonic and rhythmic dissonance. Halfway through their cover, Harvey and Björk shift to a more recognizable cover performance, incorporating the original’s vocal melody, guitar riff, and rhythmic drive. By retaining the male perspective of the lyrics, Harvey and Björk effectively queer the meaning Satisfaction, building on Jagger’s own history of queer, androgynous performativity. By covering such a canonical rock song, Harvey and Björk insert themselves into the male-dominated history of rock. Their performance does not, however, address the racial aspects of Jagger’s performance and commodification of Blackness. Harvey and Björk’s white-feminist reading of Satisfaction centers gender issues, effectively supplanting any consideration of the racial politics of rock’s co-opting of Black music, exemplifying the intersectional consequences of intertextuality.

Works: PJ Harvey and Björk (performers, arrangers): (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (121-52).

Sources: Rolling Stones: (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (121-52).

Index Classifications: 1900s, Popular

Contributed by: Matthew Van Vleet