The band’s third album “Dig Me Out” was a breakthrough, from the cover to the last chord
The cover of provides a lens into how Sleater-Kinney imagined themselves as the album was about to be released in April of 1997. At first glance, it’s a simple cover comprised of four photographs: three small portraits of the band members line the top and a larger close-up of a torso playing a guitar occupies the rest of the frame. The portraits are snapshots taken during a practice session in Weiss’s basement: Brownstein is looking up from her red SG Gibson, Tucker is looking away, and Weiss is drumming with headphones. In the portraits, each woman appears to have been caught in the middle of a thought, not having welcomed the photographer’s gaze; they seem almost annoyed to have been interrupted. Weiss took the large photograph that shows Brownstein’s headless body playing [producer John] Goodmanson’s Jerry Jones Danelectro guitar in the live room at John and Stu’s Place; a Black Sabbath poster peeks out in the back. The name of the band and the album crown the very top in all caps. At first glance, the cover simply declares that this is a group of musicians who prioritize playing over elaborate sleeve art and logos. It almost feels like a haphazard assemblage of image and text. But, as with so much else with Sleater-Kinney, nothing is arbitrary. The cover of makes a supporting claim in the band’s case against gender hierarchies implicit in music making. In its design, it’s a take-off of The Kinks’ 1965 album. The layouts are identical, with the exception that The Kinks had a fourth member and thus a fourth portrait lining the top. Weiss had thought of the idea. “The Kinks are one of my all-time favorite bands and they were revered, ” she said. “It was fun to play with that idea of what makes a revered band. And we could be that, too!” On the cover of, where in place of The Kinks they substituted their own portraits and their own guitars, Sleater-Kinney suggested that three women could embody a rock band (and play guitars and drums) all the same. While they had presented a similar challenge to rock stardom on ’s “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, ” the cover of declared that Sleater-Kinney saw themselves as musicians on a par with The Kinks. “I liked toying with the idea that we didn’ t have any limitations, that we could be that band, that people could talk about us like we matter, and that what we’ re saying is important, ” Weiss elaborated. “But the idea of being heroic is often not presented to women. Women are often seen as motherly and nurturing. We wanted to be heroic, scary, edgy, and challenging.” Heroism is important and, for Weiss, it’s a trait ascribed to the legions of esteemed rockers like The Kinks—most of them men. To place Sleater-Kinney among them was to question women’s exclusion from the canon, an exclusion that female musicians had long been pushing up against but that nevertheless continued to prevail in the 1990s.
