I love it very much and don't actually want to listen to it very often. As a whole album listened to in one go? More than the sum of its parts. Every song on "Dirt" is impressive and sounds great and in the right frame of mind can be fun. 5 on the Billboard 200, Black Gives Way To Blue proved Alice In Chains' comeback was less a reformation as it was a creative resurrection. To me it's a very different thing as a whole than it is one song at a time. The album remains a masterclass in how to effectively come back after a long absence, its mixture of songs sure to please AIC fans of all stripes. It's visceral in a way that doesn't depend on a particular time and place. It tries to bury you up to your neck in mud. It doesn't feel like an argument that's meant to convince you the narrator is right to have the emotions they do. But it feels like an effort to transmute the feelings it's about into something that lets the listener sit right there in the feeling. It drags the listener along with it, and they probably wanted it to. "Dirt" is deliberate and perfectionistic. And seeing people praise the authenticity and artistic sense of a literal giant TV corporation and how much they loved its very deliberate marketing to them and felt betrayed by it continuing to hustle for money instead of keep them company as they grew up. "They said things that I felt too, but I hadn't really heard a lot of people talk about, and it was really special to me" warps into "raw honesty! universal truths about the human condition! back then music was REAL because we didn't have PHONES!". But I find it so jarring sometimes to read the kind of things people say about it. There's nothing wrong with that, and a lot of music I'd think of this way is fucking great. The performance is just directed at a specific scene or subculture that values its own separation from the mainstream. they end up talking about the musical time/place and the legacy at least as much as they really talk about the album.Ī lot of "raw, emotional, authentic" iconic Gen X art, as a listener who was too young for it when it actually came out, feels like a very self-conscious performance of authenticity. Yeah, I feel like doing a mini-career-retrospective is just kind of the standard music writing format for "reviews" that are looking back on albums everyone accepts as influential.
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