Happy 25th Anniversary to Sleater-Kinney’s third studio album Dig Me Out, originally released April 8, 1997.
I was sitting in my navy-blue VW with my friend Kenya at lunchtime in our high school parking lot, smoking cigarettes and listening to music. It was 1994 or ’95, and Kenya, with her baby-blue eyeshadow, wild cat-eye eyeliner and spiked vest, was talking about Riot Grrrl, which had never really caught on at our high school on an American army base in Germany and was a phenomenon I thought was pretty much over at that point. She turned to me and asked, “Are you a feminist?” I laughed nervously. “Not…really?”
I knew about Riot Grrrl. I had seen the famous Newsweek article in 1992, and had probably even noticed the quotes by a young riot grrrl named Jessica Hopper (now a famous rock critic) who lived in my parents’ home state of Minnesota, where I scoured record stores and attended all-ages shows at First Avenue—including performances by all-women bands like Babes In Toyland—whenever we visited my grandparents in the summers. But Riot Grrrl wasn’t something that had called to me.
When a boy had grabbed my breast in the middle of class in junior high, I punched him as hard as I could and then forgot about it. I had always hung out with smart, confident, outspoken, maybe even confrontational girls, but I never felt like we needed a movement to move through school, or the world, and apparently neither had they. So, yeah, it was nix on the Riot Grrrl, even though I thought Kenya was cool and even though I liked Bikini Kill, and even though while talking to Kenya that day in my car, I realized she had had many more experiences, and now reasons, than I had ever had to politicize her anger toward boys and men.
It wasn’t until I heard Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out a few years later in college that I would change my mind about Riot Grrrl. I was attending Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA, and I would spend hours at Play It Again, a dusty, crammed-to-the-walls record store that sold both new and used albums. The CDs were cheap, and there was a cute, very nice guy who worked there—tall, lanky, with floppy dark hair and thick Buddy Holly glasses—who always complimented my taste in music and offered great recommendations. Later, I would figure out that he was Dave Weston, of the Descendents-style punk band Weston that ruled the Lehigh Valley punk-rock scene and had an amazingly catchy song called “Feet,” a hilarious ode to the foot fetish. But at the time, he was just a dude who figured out that I liked pretty much anything on Kill Rock Stars, and recommended Dig Me Out.
Bringing Dig Me Out home and playing it for the first time was very much reflected in “It’s Enough,” a swaggering song on the album about the power of rock ‘n’ roll, and the power of a woman making it—“Baby got a record / Taking me home / Play it loud / When you’re all alone / Hear me singing / Hear this song / Hear my voice / It’s your favorite song.” I loved Corin Tucker’s caterwauling vibrato, Carrie Brownstein’s more measured, even-toned co-vocals, and the two guitars—not “dueling” as dual guitars are so typically described, but complementary. And I loved Janet Weiss’ grounding, hard-hitting stomp.
I also loved the loudness, the dissonance, and the fact that in all that hard rocking, there wasn’t even a bass player—particularly because women in bands are so often unfairly stereotyped as only playing bass. There was also the ballsy fact of Sleater-Kinney closely replicating for Dig Me Out’s cover the exact design of The Kinks’ 1965 album The Kink Kontroversy, placing themselves among the classics of rock ‘n’ roll (where they deserved to be). Rolling Stone would later agree, placing Dig Me Out at a respectable No. 189 on its list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Dig Me Out came at just the right time in my life. With the birth of magazines like Bitch and Bust in the mid ’90s, feminism had evolved to include a shrewd analysis of pop culture—TV and movies—through a feminist lens. (It had once only been the niche endeavor of pioneering critics like Laura Mulvey, B. Ruby Rich, and Marjorie Rosen). I had recently enrolled in a graduate-level English-department course titled Feminist Film Theory & Criticism, and it was the first time I was learning about feminism in any sort of formal way, while watching everything from wildly avant-garde activist film shorts to old Hollywood blockbusters like the 1937 maternal melodrama Stella Dallas.
For the first time, I was really allowing myself to think about my eating disorder and its wider cultural implications, and about the fact that it had started getting worse after a boyfriend had creepily penetrated me one morning while I was lying in his bed sound asleep (something Amy Schumer talked about also having experienced at the height of Me Too; sleep cannot equal consent). I was also angry at the way young men thoughtlessly talked over me and other young women in all of my college classes.
So, I was at an age when I was mature enough to really engage with feminism, and to finally be able to see where and how, and just how much, I needed it in my life. “Dig Me Out,” the first song on the album as well as its title song, alternates between lament and ferocity as Tucker sings “Dig me out / Dig me in / Out of this mess / Out of my head,” and that’s exactly the way I felt about feminism at that point.
Sleater-Kinney was a kind of Riot Grrrl supergroup. While living in Olympia, WA, and attending Evergreen State College—ground zero, the birthplace of Riot Grrrl—Tucker had played in influential Riot Grrrl band Heavens To Betsy, while Carrie Brownstein played in Excuse 17. Riot Grrrl was very much a product of the regionalism, and localism, that played such a key role in the formation of music and culture in the ’90s, which is part of the reason we heard so much about the “Seattle Sound” in terms of Nirvana and grunge groups.
“Regionalism—and the creative scenes therein—played an important role in the identification and contextualization of a sound or aesthetic,” Carrie Brownstein writes in her 2015 memoir Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl. “Music felt married to place, and the notion of ‘somewhere’ predated the Internet’s seeming invention of ‘everywhere’ (which often ends up feeling like ‘nowhere’).”
Brownstein also writes in her memoir how witnessing her mother’s battle with anorexia at a young age led her towards feminism, and to Olympia: “Maybe she hoped that the smaller she got, the easier it would be to disappear.”
But Sleater-Kinney, having formed after the fizzling out of official Riot Grrrl, really didn’t seem like a Riot Grrrl type of band, which I had always associated with singsong-y vocals delivered in a bratty yell, and lots and lots of baby barrettes—very much a “girl” (or grrrl) aesthetic. Instead, in 1997, these were women with a developed musicality and mature, layered, authoritative vocals singing about the complexities of relationships and about adult survival. It was Riot Grrrl grown up.
My favorite song on the album, “One More Hour,” is a ferocious lament in a similar vein to “Dig Me Out,” in that it contains both angry, bombastic bursts and then more reflective sections of near-keening regret. Later, I would learn that it was about the breakup of Tucker and Brownstein, who had dated each other prior to Dig Me Out. “In one more hour, I will be gone/ In one more hour, I’ll leave this room”—back then it was a panging reminder of my own breakup with my first love, both of us knowing that I would have to leave and inadvertently counting the days and hours. My favorite part of the song is the interplay of Tucker and Brownstein’s voices, how they build and dissolve together and apart, how Tucker is nearly inconsolable— “I needed it” —and Brownstein is validating— “I know, I know, I know, I know” —and then soothing: “It’s so hard for you to let it go.”
Unfortunately, prior to the album’s release, Brownstein and Tucker were forcibly outed in a SPIN article that described the two musicians as “ex-lovers,” which they had never made public. Tucker’s parents were upset. Brownstein writes in her memoir, “I told my dad that Corin and I had dated but that we didn’t anymore, which was the truth. I said that I didn’t think or know if I was gay, dating Corin was just something that had happened, which at the age of 22 was also the truth.” Despite their awful outing, “One More Hour” leaves the listener with the sweet, moving realization that even though the two are no longer together, their love for each other remains, even if it has morphed into something different than what it initially was.
Like the aforementioned “It’s Enough,” “Words and Guitar” is another rocker with strut and swagger, whereby Tucker and Brownstein’s voices layer to exalt the glories of rock ‘n’ roll—“I want it all, I want it all, I want it / Can’t take this away from me / Music is the air I breathe.” Eventually, during my final year at Lehigh, my roommate Stephanie and I would form a band with a few friends from that feminist film class. We called ourselves The Tunics—a joking twist on “nix on tune” as well as a nod to the Sonic Youth song “Tunic” about Karen Carpenter. Stephanie and I decided to be co-singers, in the tradition of Sleater-Kinney, because it allowed for the narration of a multi-layered female experience, rather than just one woman’s voice, literally and metaphorically. Thus, we became contributing members of the Lehigh Valley punk-rock scene and, even though we didn’t rule it, it was the most fun all of us had had in a very long time.
My friend Ronnie was a DJ at a crappy little dance joint called TK’s Lounge in Allentown—he played killer sets and drew a big crowd—and some nights after practice or gigs, we’d all go out dancing together. “Dance Song ’97” with its infectious beats, punk wail, and fun, booty-shaking rhythm makes me think of those nights with those friends.
As for the rest of the album, “Not What You Want” is a careening fast-paced song in the tongue-in-cheek tradition of girl groups like the Shangri-Las (“Leader of the Pack”), in which there’s a breakup with a boy named Johnny, no doubt a bad-boy greaser, in a swerving car with pedal to the metal. Meanwhile, “Little Babies,” with its possible sardonic reference to the Rolling Stones’ “Little Baby,” deals with the unspoken expectation of maternity, of the seeming seamlessness in society between “woman” and “mother.” The remainder of the songs on the album, including my second favorite song, “Things You Say,” deal mostly with love and breakup, or both simultaneously.
Whenever I listen to “Things You Say” merely for its sound with its undertone of lament, I can’t help but wonder with a bit of regret if it had been better if I had said, “Yes, I am a feminist” the very first time I was asked. But Dig Me Out dug me out at just the right time, even if I was a little bit late to the Riot Grrrl riot.
LISTEN: