The 100: Sleater-Kinney, DIG ME OUT
Frank Zappa once said, perhaps apocryphally, that writing about music was akin to dancing about architecture. Like a lot of musicians, he felt that rock criticism was lame and reductionist and parasitic, but in the time before streaming services or file sharing or YouTube, I found great value in the written descriptions of new bands. In the ‘90s, I didn’t even have access to decent college radio or a Tower Records-esque superstore with a bunch of listening stations, so it was often impossible for me to hear new acts that were not in Top 40 rotation. All I had were the descriptors printed in Spin and Rolling Stone and the various connections my brain could make between stuff I already knew.
These publications were doing me a useful service, though this system did lead to a handful of hilarious misinterpretations on my behalf. I read references to various Pavement albums for years before I finally gave Slanted and Enchanted a spin when I got to college, and I was fully unprepared for what that album actually sounded like (in my head I assumed they were just a shaggier Weezer, which is not entirely wrong but also not accurate at all). I can’t remember how I got to this point, but before I heard the Strokes I assumed they sounded like Aerosmith. (They do not.) And I distinctly remember reading the review of Sleater-Kinney’s 1997 watershed release Dig Me Out and assuming the whole thing sounded like the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah.”
Dig Me Out doesn’t sound like that, though it does draw plenty from Joe Strummer’s obsessive mash-ups of agit-punk and New Wave frippery. It’s definitely a punk record at its core, and a definitive text for the whole Riot Grrrl movement even though it arrived at the tail end of that scene’s time in the dim indie spotlight. But on top of that three-chord skeleton, Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein add Led Zep musculature and the wiry sinew of a million lovelorn ballads. It’s a beautiful sounding album without ever truly becoming pretty, which is an incredible high wire act that solidified the women of Sleater-Kinney both as deft songwriters and uncompromising sonic architects.
As with all great Sleater-Kinney albums during their heyday, the secret weapon is Janet Weiss, who had only been in the band about a year after several false starts with other drummers. She adds a spry toughness and a confident swing to the proceedings that make tunes like the title track and “Words and Guitar” swagger and strut but also knows how to pull back on quieter moments like “One More Hour.”
I had a sense I would love Sleater-Kinney, but I had a hard time finding a copy of Dig Me Out at my local music stores, and it perpetually took a back seat to other titles when I was in Boston or New York. I eventually snagged a copy of it on cassette when I found myself getting slightly lost on my way to an audition in an unfamiliar Connecticut River Valley town. With no GPS to guide me, I ended up stopping for directions at a record store having a closeout sale and copped Dig Me Out on cassette for like two dollars. (I also took home John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and a third tape lost to the cobwebs of my memory; I think it was a rap record of some sort but I couldn’t even hazard a guess.) Dig Me Out did not match the sound I had conjured in my head. It was way better.