I didn’t like Dirrrrrrrty when I first heard it. Indeed I probably heard it about twenty times before I finally got it. And that is when I saw it. I remember exactly where this was. In a hotel room in Brussels, Belgium.
How many moments of your life do you remember vividly? I remember watching EuroMTV with Tom as we were running late for breakfast in our nice swank hotel (the Metropole). We were there for Tim’s thirty-third and a third birthday and celebrated this in our usual fashion by drinking SHED LOADS. But it was Sunday morning and after a baby shed load the day before, we were warming up to an out of town B&Qload later that day. This required a formidable breakfast, but it also required getting up in time for it. Running late as we were, laughing at EuroMTV had made half sore head sless grumpy. And just before my finger pushed the button to release the little German gremlins in the TV, Redman happened to cry out “If You Ain’t Here to Parrrrty”.
“I don’t much like this,” I said to Tom.
“Its good,” he said back.
I watched. With growing increduilty at this grubby dwarfen lady being lead into some sort of mud wrestling boxing match, along with syncopated rhythmn and then THAT chorus. What I had previously pigeonholed as some lame attempt to grasp credibility by a sugapop singer, was instantly discarded. I already knew that Dirrrty was silly. I had just assumed that this was the force of my massive critical brain which had made this assumption. Rather than everyone, including supercamp Redman, throwing themselves wholeheartedly into this piece of mocking flummery. Perhaps previously i had really believed the song to be earnest. Perhaps I really thought it was a call to arms to get Dirty. Whilst I am no neat freak, i don’t want to get dirty for nothing, and am aware of how much certain things (say mud) can stain.
It was so silly, so funny* that my later reaction to the song seems justified. “I wanna get, mucky, wanna get a little bit: grubby, wanna get filthy” are the words which go though my head, and the words that got us to the end of the song, running late for breakfast. “What held you up” Tim asked. We were getting Dirrrty, I luckily did not reply.
*And okay, despite the ridiculous hair, make-up, and silly dancing it was appropriately hot.