Sleater-Kinney - Dig Me Out (Remastered) (Édition StudioMasters) (2014) Hi-Res

On Dig Me Out — their third album, the one that turns 20 tomorrow — Sleater-Kinney said a whole lot. On “One More Hour,” staring down the very last seconds of a relationship and trying to savor them: “Don’t say another word about the other girl.” On “Jenny,” surveying the wreckage of what’s been destroyed: “Didn’t we almost have it all?” On “Heart Factory,” screaming against the very notions of forced categories and predetermined responses: “Find me out, I’m not just made of parts / Oh, you can break right through this box you put me into.” Dig Me Out was an album made under extreme emotional circumstances, and tension explodes out of it at just about every turn. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein found ways to pare what they were saying to the fewest words possible, delivering these tiny little daggers. But the lyric that struck me first and hardest — the one that still sticks with me the most — is barely a lyric at all. Instead, it’s a string of glorious, euphoric gibberish “Dum dum dee dee dee dum dum dee dum doo / All the little babies go unh unh I want to.”

For my money, “Little Babies” remains the best song that Sleater-Kinney have ever written. It has competition, of course; there are no bad Sleater-Kinney songs, and there are plenty of great ones. But “Little Babies” is the one, the burst of fiery joy and beyond-words excitement that turned Sleater-Kinney, almost instantly, into pretty much my favorite band in the world. The band attacked that song with the same rigorous fervor that they brought to everything, and Corin Tucker howled the feverish hook — “mother’s little helper!” — with enough force to crumble concrete. And there’s a point to the song, of course, since they always had a point. It’s powered by anxiety, something that’s true of so many Sleater-Kinney songs. They were singing about forced and stereotypical maternal caretaker roles, about wanting to break out of them. (In her memoir, Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, Carrie Brownstein speculates that Tucker was actually singing about her, about resenting always having to take care of her when they were a couple.) And yet the song is just so fucking fun that it somehow goes beyond all that, beyond language itself