Dig Me Out by Sleater-Kinney

I think: the first time I heard about Sleater-Kinney, I was in a car. But then I think, I must not have been. I was looking at them in Seventeen magazine, the photo of them taken from above so their faces look normal and their amazing chunky, frumpy shoes look tiny. I was always attracted to their shoes. I realize my memory of being in a car is on the corner of Pacific Avenue and Sleater-Kinney Road, and I probably thought of that intersection the moment I learned about them. There is a band, from here, called Sleater-Kinney, my friend Liz says. We are 13.

Later, I am reading a Time magazine at the library in a nearby town where my parents own a print shop. The library is a Carnegie library, glorious and old-smelling, set back from a park with a war memorial. It’s a couple blocks from my parents’ print shop and I go there alone all the time. I wish my sister would tag along and be an annoying pest like little sisters in novels are, but she is attached to my mother, so I go to the library alone. The Time magazine has either Hanson on the cover or Ellen saying “Yep, I’m Gay!”, or maybe it’s that an article about Hanson is in the Ellen-coming-out issue. And Sleater-Kinney are in it, in a tiny blurb which makes some reference to their potential lesbionic ambiguity, along with the photo of them with tiny shoes, again. I could be making this all up, but that’s how I remember it, and that sounds about right for 1997.

Sometime in the summer of 2003 I do a whip-it and my body remembers exactly how my body felt the first time I heard about Sleater-Kinney. (Another time, the two different shaped lamps with matching shades are my eyes and I realize that Kim Gordon is god).

Once I hear them on the radio, in my room on a Saturday afternoon. The song is “Little Babies.” It sounds exactly like I think I think it would sound. The production value is different than I am used to hearing; I think it is what an "indie" record sounds like. I know the first line is "I'm the water", but I still want to say it sounds wet, Northwesty.

The space between being 13 and 15 is vast, and the next time I think about Sleater-Kinney is when The Hot Rock is coming out and I read about them in The Olympian. On Saturdays, my mom has me “volunteering” at an art gallery owned by a couple she knows. When I take a lunch break, I walk over to Phantom City Records for the first time. I’m wearing khaki pants and a sheer black blouse interwoven with gold sparkles, my “nice” clothes, and I feel terminally uncool. This record store contains the entirety of my as yet unimagined potential futures. Every band name and CD cover image is a peep into this secret world I suspected existed but previously had no proof of save the Kurt Cobain memorial compilation of Rolling Stone articles and the band name Bikini Kill I saw on a CD in my cousin’s room. He was 15 years older than me. Many years later he started listening to Sleater-Kinney at my recommendation, and he took his future wife to their show on a first date.

I have to buy something at Phantom City Records in order to feel like I belong there, like it is OK for me to be in this dark, dusty, dare I say punk record store. I just read about Sleater-Kinney in the newspaper, so I find their CD, Dig Me Out, and I buy it, equally out of obligation as interest.

Cover art is so small on CDs, but of course this is not a problem when it’s what you’re used to, same as we don’t mind looking at tiny pictures of paradise and cats on Tumblr on our phones now. I look at the front and back CD covers of Dig Me Out intensely and frequently, but it is burned into my mind the first time I leave the record store with it. For me it starts with the shoes, the sensible shoes. I always cared a lot about shoes: the black mary janes on Molly the rag doll from a Saturday morning cartoon; Gwen Stefani’s vinyl steel toed Doc Martens; every Chuck Taylor Converse All Star in every music video, ever. The shoes are followed by legs, thick ankles and curved calves that I stare at. I’ve not experienced my sexual awakening yet, I don’t even masturbate, and I have never started at a body part besides a face like this. I’ve never even seen a woman in a photograph who doesn’t have skinny ankles. It’s absolutely exotic to me, a photograph, on a piece of media, of a real person. The photograph is taken somewhere that looks like my aunt’s driveway in Tacoma. It reads Northwesty to me. I would say up to 60% of the fashion direction I take right now is influenced by what Sleater-Kinney wore in this era.

I don’t know the Kinks record, so the organization of the front cover just looks non-referentially cool to me. I still think it’s cooler than the Kinks record cover. The colors and patterns hidden in the cover - 70s curtains and wood paneling, Corin Tucker’s ball-chain necklace, their dirty hair, the Black Sabbath poster, the big headphones. Basically, it’s where it’s at. It’s everything I have suspected about what is cool. And it’s right here.

The CD is blue. Later on when every friend in my life also had this CD, I realized there was a big variation in shades of blue. I still think my copy was the best shade.