About the Album:
“The Stones’ music has sniffed at every trend from psychedella to disco, yet it’s…still basically the same warped Chicago blues they started with…plus a little reggae.” RS “This is the Stones album for the yuppie era, defining – and defying – the complacent nastiness of the mid-1980s.” RS Dirty Work is “more like a product than a statement.” RS “At its best, Dirty Work captures the friction between Mick and Keith during the album’s recording; at its worst, it’s simply a competent collection of hard rock, spiked with some unnecessary synthesizers.” AMG
At least part of the friction grew out of Jagger recording the solo album She’s the Boss. Keith Richards resented him recording an album outside of the band. Giving the next Stones’ album the title of Dirty Work “may have been code for the Glimmer Twins' then-strained relationship.” CD
The title cut is “addressed to some hypothetical ‘you’ who will ‘sit on your ass till your work is done’ by someone else, the song runs, ‘You’re a user, I hate ya.’ Is the song about the audience that depends on the Stones for its sleaze quotient? About the record company? Or the Stones themselves, well-documented users of people and substances?” RS
“As a whole, the album's music and lyrics just don’t stack up against Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street or Undercover; it’s solid, not spectacular…It sounds like it was made on deadline.” RS “Unlike most Stones tracks, which give the illusion of a live band bashing away, a few songs sound cobbled together on tape.” RS
This was the first Stones’ album from their lucrative deal with CBS Records. It “openly advertises its corporate character with art-directed MTV colors on its cover, the band’s first lyric sheet ever in the United States and a name coproducer, Steve Lillywhite, who joins Glimmer Twins Jagger and Richards.” RS He keeps the album from sounding “overly slick like Tattoo You; it’s got the old raunch.” RS
“Lillywhite doesn’t give the album the booming drum tone he’s known for, but the beat sometimes gets more metronomic than Charlie Watts’ usual bedrock thump.” RS The album also featured cameos from Don Covay, Jimmy Page Tom Waits, Bobby Womack, and Kirsty MacColl, Lillywhite’s wife.
There were a pair of covers on the album. Harlem Shuffle was originally a minor hit by Bob and Earl in 1964. The Stones released it as the lead single and it reached #5 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song “leers in the finely jaded tradition of ‘Stray Cat Blues.’” RS The band also continued their “love affair with reggae” CD in covering Too Rude, a song originally by Half Pint.
“Fight and Had It with You seem left over from 1983’s Undercover, the Stones’ rudest, bleakest and most political statement on how sex meets violence. That album made connections between private S&M and public power madness; by contrast, Dirty Work< just plays its punch-her-out songs for shock value, taboo breaking by the numbers.” RS “One Hit to the Body, the album’s second single, repeats the ever popular equation of love and addiction.” RS Those three songs, as well as the title track, featuring Ron Wood collaborating with Jagger/Richards. “It shows in the wondrous snarl of guitar parts all over the album.” RS
Then there’s an anti-World War III number, Back to Zero, which features Chuck Leavell’s swaggering keyboards [and] a ballad for Keith Richards to sing, Sleep Tonight.” RS The latter, “which may be addressed to a drug casualty (or is it an ex-lover?), is just about as creepy as Keith Richards intends it to be.” RS
Overall, “Dirty Work could be better – more unified, less posed. But that’s judging it against the Stones catalog. On its own terms, Dirty Work has its share of memorable moments.” RS
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