I love a well-curated movie soundtrack almost as much as I love a good slow-walk scene, and choosing "Dirty Work" placed the film immediately in a certain time and tone. Because not only is "Dirty Work" completely '70s, it's sleazy and sad and sordid, but in a way that's far too silly for you to take seriously.
"Dirty Work" is a song from the perspective of a woman's side piece, who's upset with being strung along and only used for sex when her husband's away or--if I'm reading the first line right--she can't scrape together the money to hire a prostitute. Which raises all sorts of questions about why she's still in a relationship where she's sneaking around behind her dude's back. Or maybe she's not, and I'm just revealing my Victorian attitudes about sex.
Maybe "Dirty Work" is actually an ironic but revolutionary finger in the eye of the modern American conception of romance, which for all the evolved, liberal game we talk, is still bounded in a medieval tradition to which we're still for some reason enslaved.
Or maybe this guy--the handyman, I assume--is just sad that he actually likes this woman and all she wants to do is fool around and discard him when it's inconvenient. And yet he keeps coming back whenever she calls.
I feel ya, big guy.
But it's hard to feel too bad, because again, this song, for being kind of a downer and really slow, is such a fuckin' jam. I mean, the instrumentation alone makes it fun. There's organ, and then there's really laying on the organ, even by 1972 standards. Add on the kind of drowsy horn section and it feels like what I imagine being stoned and horny was like back then.
There's one song to come on this list that I find myself absentmindedly singing the first two lines to over and over, then stopping. I sing "Dirty Work" to myself probably more than any other song in the world. Just because it's what you do when you're kind of loping around aimlessly and want to have a little fun.
