Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out (33 1/3)

A well-researched and interesting look at the evolution of a tremendous band and their struggle to play music on their own terms. Sleater-Kinney were often miscategorized using reductive labels like "riotgrrl" or "women in rock" by media that didn't quite know what to make of them. This book shows how they fought, and ultimately succeeded, in being taken seriously as a rock band.

Insightful and well researched. I learned a lot about SK, the album, and rock in general.

This is the most annoying book!On the one hand, Jovana Babović nails the social commentary, and puts Dig Me Out into the context of Sleater-Kinney’s career and the history of “Women in Rock”. Carrie Brownstein, in her autobiography also voiced her frustration at that whole attitude, although acknowledging that “Women in Rock” is a real thing is unavoidable in analysing the way it is perceived in different circles.Questioning the competence and morality of women musicians has a long history. Joni Mitchell struggled for years to find musicians who would take her musical vision seriously. It was only when she was advised to start working with competent (ie, jazz) musicians that she found she was able to hear in reality what she was hearing in her head. Previously she had just been patronised and more or less told to get on with the pretty songs and leave the serious stuff to the guys. In her early days, David Crosby, already famous through the Byrds, had to pretend to be producing one of her albums so that she had control over the content. In his execrable biography of Mitchell, Mark Bego spends more time panting over her love affairs than on her music. Rolling Stone once labelled her “old lady of the year”.Similarly, Sleater-Kinney were constantly questioned by the “experts”: the technicians who always knew best how to mix the sound, “musos” who laughed them out of court for not having a bassist, and people, for whom “creep” is likely the closest psychological term, who wanted to know why they wanted to be in an all-woman band or couldn’t wait to out them all as lesbians.Even so, having condemned all and sundry for not taking the music seriously, where is the music? Where is the commentary on the songs that other 33 1/3 books feature? What are they about, or at least what was the inspiration for them? Why choose the punky Dig Me Out over the jangly guitars of The Hot Rock or the Zeppy pulse of The Woods? In its own way, this book is as guilty as the people it vilifies for not giving Sleater-Kinney’s music the attention it deserves. Probably the best book about Joni Mitchell is Lloyd Whitesell’s The Music of Joni Mitchell, which treats its subject with respect and gravitas, as poetry set to excellent music. In Dig Me Out I wasn’t looking for anything that heavy, but a little more about the titular album would have been nice.I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy reading the book. Aside from interesting vignettes, not least the snow storm raging around Seattle at the time the album was recorded, there are pertinent discussions regarding the Olympia music scene and the way it performed as an incubator for women’s bands, the almost anti-competence stand taken by some of those bands, most notably Bikini Kill, and the contentions (disputes is possibly too strong a word, but I don’t know for sure) over fame, world tours and actually making money. Whilst sympathetic to the contrary view, it’s my opinion that, like predecessors which when I was younger I went to see such as the Slits, Raincoats, Mo-Dettes, Au Pairs and Delta 5, in going on the road, getting serious record deals and being interviewed, even by journalists from the lamestream media, Sleater-Kinney sent a message, particularly to isolated young women, in small towns and big cities, who were feeling like the “only one”, that it was all right not to conform, to think different, and to want to get the hell out as soon as they could.Unfortunately, just simply enjoying what’s actually there does not compensate for the disappointment of finding Babović has allowed the detractors to determine the trajectory of the discourse. As a normative act it would have been far better to discuss the music itself, and its merits, of which it has an abundance. Attack is the best form of defence.