Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out

(Paperback)

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Description

Sleater-Kinneys 1997 album Dig Me Out is built on Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownsteins competing guitars, Janet Weisss muscular rhythms, and layered vocals that teeter between an urgent, banshee-like vibrato and a lower accompaniment. Dig Me Out was the bands third studio album, but the first one written and recoded with Weiss. It inaugurated Sleater-Kinney into a lineup that would span its two-decade career. This 33 1/3 follows the narrative of Dig Me Out from its inception in Olympia to its recording in Seattle and its reception across the United States. Its anchored in a short period of time roughly from mid-1996 to mid-1998 but it encompasses a series of battles over meaning that continued to preoccupy Sleater-Kinney in the coming decades. The band wrestled with the media about how they would be presented to the public, it contended with technicians about how their sound would be heard in clubs, and they struggled with pervasive social hierarchies about how their work would be understood in popular culture. The only instance where the band didn't have to put up much of a fight was when it came to their fans. The acclaim Sleater-Kinney received from their listeners in the late 1990s, and continue to receive today, speaks to a need for icons who challenged normative notions of culture and gender. This story of Dig Me Out chronicles how Sleater-Kinney won the fight to define themselves on their own terms as women and as musicians and, in the process, how they redefined the parameters of rock.

Reviews

Sleater-Kinneys Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic not only dives into the album, but it also dives into the culture surrounding women in music. While the book takes you through the album, it focuses on what it meant for the individual band members, the tour surrounding the release, and how the band was treated on the road. Babovic displays the toughness and the DIY attitude of Sleater-Kinney perfectly through her writing I cant recommend this book enough. * HiFi Noise *
[In this volume] Babovic makes the case that S-K are that alternative; a band that should be held in as high esteem as Bowie, The Beatles and the rest of rocks predominantly male superstars ... Though its strongly grounded with analytic arguments and sociological theories, its also hugely passionate; written with a similar excitement and frustration as the record itself. * Record Collector *
I loved Dig Me Out. It's about feminism and gender as much as it is about the three musicians and this one particular album. For SK fans, it's a must, but I also recommend it highly to people interested in media and sexism. * Lower East Side Librarian *

Author Bio

Jovana Babovic is an Assistant Professor of History at Louisiana Tech University, USA.