Reassessing Dirty
 

I'll confess. This is the album that, when it was released, put me off da yoof for quite a few years. I just thought there were too many other great bands around at the time doing interesting things of their own to want to continue with one that seemed overly desperate to be accepted by da kids. (at least that's how it seemed to me then) Anyway, because I have a lot of free time on my hands at the moment, plus a coffee addiction that's playing havoc with my sleep patterns...

here goes. Dirty, fifteen years on.

1. 100%. A good opener but this is already a very different SY to the one found up to DDN, Goo even. And hey, this has maybe the filthiest bassline in the band's history - after Into the Groovey of course, which is borderline pornographic. So who knows, maybe different is good.

2. Swimsuit Issue. Great bass again and some fine agit-vox from KG. Guitars are supercharged umtil going into a slow sleazy stomp. God, you can already see why the album was called Dirty.

3. Theresa's Sound World. More restrained, a post-sex cigarette of a track. At least it is until those massive...MASSIVE waves of guitars kick in. God, why have I always hated this album? It's fuckin' GREAT so far.

4. Drunken Butterfly. Back to the grinding of 100% with some nice wall-of-blurriness guitars in between. Vocally, KG is showing early warning signs of horrors to come. Still, annoying chorus aside, nothing much to complain about here.

5. Shoot. Sleazy in a Ken Park kind of a way. Evokes images of strip malls, for some reason. The fact that KG is literally old enough to be the grandmother of the girl she's portraying in the song is, however, a bit disconcerting.

6. Wish Fulfillment. Lee gets all grown up and a bit dull by comparison. All very good but nothing to get too excited about.

7. Sugar Kane. A real party stomp of a track. God, if i'd been in my teens when this album came out I'd have been a total mess of adoration. The freak-out moment is a bit restrained compared with before, but fuck, this isn't designed for wiping out your head, it's designed for bouncing on the couch to. And why not?

8. Orange Rolls. Angel's Split. Fucking great. Dirty as fuck vox from KG. I'm really getting the sense that this is an album that's dominated by Kim. Fortunately this is a great period for her, before she finally regressed into some kind of autistic five year old.

9. Against Fascism. Sleazy bass to-tha-max. Thurston's lyrics are a bit too keen to make some kind of Minor Threat connection, but fuck...that bass. It's all about the KG in 92.

10. Nic Fit. Did I already mention Minor Threat? Great all the same. If a little too long.

11. On the Strip. Swirly guitar psych fest, with KG reinventing herself momentarily into a sort of Grace Slick in DMs. Most obvious link to SY's past is probably Starpower, but just in case you miss that link there's the whole noise thing in the middle just to remind you what band you're listening to. Not one of the best moments on the album, but not at all bad either.

12. Chapel Hill. Ewww, shockingly bad lyrics from Thurston. The melody is a bit too sacharine sweet and even a gear up at the end can't really save what's probably the worst track on the album so far.

13. JC. On paper this track should be a disaster, but somehow it works a treat. Simple but affective.

14. Purr. Fairly unremarkable noise-punk by numbers that I know I'll forget again the minute it stops. Another miss-fire from Thurston.

15. Creme Brulee. Another one of those sketchy last tracks that could've just as easily been left off. Nice enough in a come-down kind of way, but not really necessary.

I can still see why I hated this album at the time (it's about as far away from 'The World Looks Red' as it's possible to get) but listening now, it's a great pop-punk album that bands like Green Day would've done well to have absorbed. This really was the point when KG was at full creative strength and she really dominates the record. I'm also guessing that Lee might've HATED this new direction; he certainly seems quite marginalised on most of the album. It's also perhaps the least NY album they'd made up to that point, maybe ever.

the only song i don't like in this album is creme brule; shoot and theresa's sound world can get really heavy (like in dire, not in metalness) in parts but i think they add to the experience.

what most people don't realize is that this album is noisy as hell, had someone else produced the album instead of butch vig, it would have been one of their most difficult; but i think it helped them because that helped them gel their noisy, spiky guitars with actual, completely realized melodies and great classic yet ambitious song structures and arrangements.

and, they did their share of noise break improvisations on it, but every note has a place in the album, it's like it was composed that way. it's also one of their most emotional albums.

as i said on the mille follie thread, this is part of my triumvirate.

oh yeah, and it has my favorite cover they have ever done.

this is my favorite SY album for sure.

I'm guessing that Goo is part of it too, but what's the third/first? DDN or EJTNS?

nope, it's dirty, confusion is sex and syr4: goodbye 20th century

i love wish fulfillment no matter how bad some people say it is

can you reassess goo? i love that one.

I'm a bit cheesed ou say Minor Threat for Nic Fit, considering it's actually by the Untouchables (Ian MacKaye's brother's band hehe). Silly guy, you!

But I love this album, yet never give it the credit it deserves... JC is one of the saddest songs ever written, heavy subject matter and inspiration...
And Shoot is honestly one of the most intense songs ever. I listen to that and go like, "Shit! Augh! EEf!" Like rawdick said, it's fucking dire.

Whoah! wasn't expecting that!

I was being sarcastic with the Minor Threat connection, and about it being too long, of course.

oddly, I love all the tracks individually off this record a lot but have almost zero affection for the album as a whole, which makes no sense. I guess it just don't work as an album for me, too long, though how you would choose what to leave off I can't even begin to imagine.

When all is said and done, this album might be one their most criticised, but how many musicians do you know who would make one that sounded like it or had the same type of songwriting? I don't think I know a band that could at all, and that's why I love Sonic Youth so much. Yes, it has its flaws, but the quality of the majority of the songs on it is very, very good indeed.

yup, I think most of the criticisms of this period for the band are people judging albums from the point of view of their own anxiety about corporate rock or alternativeness or whatever the fuck people were fussing about at the time and the quality and straight up awesomeness of the songs from this period gets pretty short shrift. all the opinion in the world goes out the window whenever they play any thing from this period live though, absolutely every fucker will absolutely lose all of their shit. eg 100% at ATP, I had no idea how rough they played it until long after because i was too busy going YYYYEEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!
(I will be doing the same for the entirety of tonights show)





YYYYEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Totally. One of the things that bugged me about that sort of criticism is the fact that they always cared for delivering the goods much more than so many other bands, and let's face it, a bad Sonic Youth song is worth millions of songs by many other bands. Another thing that i never got was the fuss about them having a song like Youth Against The Fascism on this album, which is lyrically coming from an intelligent artist with a rational perspective on feelings of anger, rather than just the ranting of some anarco-punk or whatever these people usually call themselves.

You can if you turn it into exasperation, which the song in question is the prime example of.

Mybe yes, maybe not. Who knows?

may I just ask, sir, are you deceased???

COME ON! HEH-WOH??? Youth against fascism is stupidly good, I imagine this song as the soundtrack to the administration of the lethal injection donald rumsfeld so richly deserves. lyrically it recieves all of the development necessary when those uber loud guitars kick in for the last verse.

fact

I didn't like Dirty much when it came out either, so much so that I skipped seeing them on that tour.

But you know how we all have one song that we'll go particularly apeshit if it's played at a gig we're at? Well, Sugar Kane is my bouncing around like an idiot song. It is, to my mind, the closest to perfection that Sonic Youth ever have been and ever will be. Even if I still thought that the album was too "rock", which I did at the time, I'd love it anyway because it gave that one song to the world.

Dude...sorry I disagree with you here, but agree with almost everything else you said. Especially Orange Rolls, very cool and underrated song.

BY FAR their worst album. Boring, generic, predictable, plodding, sub-grunge bullshit. Full of lame riffs, uninteresting moments, and the slickest production (in a bad way.. drum samples!) ever. Just embarassingly bad. The worst moments that weren't on Goo. "wish fulfillment" is a nice enough song, and "Chapel hill" is one of the few sy songs with a guitar solo (and it's surprisingly good -- and i hate guitar solos!). all in all, it's just too long and hard to listen to. some girl tried to get me to buy this instead of confusion is sex, my first sonic youth album -- can you IMAGINE if this was someone's first SY album?! damn...

Just a very, very unfortunate album.

definitely, i agree.

it's also the culmination of their transition into a band that wrote songs instead of dirges, a process that started with sister.

and dirty was my first sy album, it took me a bit to like it but by the second listen, i was into most of the songs.

sy's worst album, mostly because it sounds like rushed demos, is rather ripped, by far.

touche! to be fair though I didn't say i didn't like it, just that its a bit dull in places.

yeah rather ripped is also horrible.

this is the only "reassessing" thread where i didn't listen to the album while posting about it, which kinda defeats the purpose, but ... my thoughts on this album are pretty clear. i've heard it about 4 times. it's better than i had heard people saying it was , but worse than i wanted it to be.

One person's "shockingly bad lyrics" are another person's "incredible, stirring lyrics - some of the best Thurston's ever written." I like how Thurston brought together SY's experience of playing in a redneck cop bar in Chapel Hill with the conflict between the fringe/radicals and the Bush administration. And I find it very touching that Bob Sheldon got a good tribute. (And I think musically it's also a great song.)

As for the rest of the album, I find most of it utterly fantastic, except for Nic Fit, which is so obnoxious I have to instantly hit the forward button on the CD player.

Wish Fulfillment is a catchy song and I don't mind hearing it, it's just that it's far too conventional for SY. It sounds like a song another band could write, and I prefer it when SY puts their own unique bit into songs.

And I'll agree with the love for Orange Rolls--it's one of the occasions when Kim has put her unique voice to excellent effect.

This album's another one of their 'meh' albums.
i love chapell hill and purr, though.
they're songs that sound like the band was having fun.
but shoot is cringe worthy, and wish fulfillment is lee's worst song, should have been genetic.

I agree with both of you.

Dirty rules......eat my ass.

That's called rimming. That was easy.

But this album is my favorite, this is what turned me on to SY.

Dirty is such a beautifully crystallized sounding album to me....I'm kind of partial though because of the time and place that I heard the album etc. etc.

I'm kind of there with you. I really like listening to songs off of the record, but rarely want to listen to it all the way through. When it came out, I was thrilled to get so much new Sonic Youth all at once that I played it to death straight through, but these days I don't do that very often. It sound more like a big collection of songs than an album too. A lot of really great songs, but not a cohesive song cycle. I feel that way about EJST&NS too. Aside from those two records, nearly all Sonic Youth albums are albums first, collections of individual tracks second, so it does make me less into them.

Though of course "less into" a Sonic Youth record for me usually means "really like it" just not quite to "love it".

I don't get why the production is so bashed. In my opinion the record sounds great.

agreed!

Okay, Dirty is not Sonic best, but it is maybe because of this album that you can find all the Sonic discography everywhere in the world... it opened a lot of doors to a different music and this is good...
Moreover there are great songs in it ! 100%, Shoot, Orange rolls, Youth against fascism or On the strip... and the great guitar solo of Chapell Hill !
You can enter in Sonic Youth with it and then go further, there's no problem with that...

mmmm

scarlett.

well... belotte

I love Dirty, it is a great album. Kim totally dominates.

It would have been a much stronger album if Shoot, Creme Brulee, Chapel Hill, Youth Against Fascism, and Nic Fit were taken off though.

My main complaint about the album is it starts to teeter off on the 2nd half.

you know, actually, this one MIGHT be better than the one before it because it doesn't have "my friend goo" on it.

okay, wait.. looking at the tracklisting.. every song on here is worse than "my friend goo". how is that even possible?!

haha i know, i was kidding.

"MY FRIEND GOO JUST SEZ P.U." (lee/thurston/steve: "hey goo what's new") "MY FRIEND GOO JUST SEZ P.UUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" wasting such a good bass line. hmph.

This is true, but it was so the point. So I'll agree with "most annoying", but not "worst" since I think they achieved exactly what they set out to do. The video is actually pretty fun too as it's even more sophmoric than the song on it's own. The song is dumb enough to pass for new wave on an '80s night, which led for a bonding experience between me and Scotty the now deceased drummer from KARP back in Oly when I was djing at the dance club there.

karp. word!