The Dry Cleaning song that was meant to be “insulting”
It’s not always easy to understand what Dry Cleaning are getting at in their songs. Frontwoman Florence Shaw is notoriously non-linear and surreal in her lyrical approach, pairing bizarre and borderline psychotic imagery with the banalities of everyday life. If you’ve been able to figure out what a disco pickle is or why Shaw considered herself a hardy banana, you’re more advanced in the game than most of the rest of us.
‘Unsmart Lady’, from the band’s 2021 debut New Long Leg, has all the makings of a classic narrative… if not for the fact that Shaw makes radical left turns at every chance she gets. Whether it’s drolly intoning basic responses or deliberately leaving out necessary information, ‘Unsmart Lady’ follows the classic Dry Cleaning path of never laying anything out to be too obvious. As Shaw observed, the song’s lyrics came from a personal place.
“The chorus is a found piece of text, but it suited what I needed it for, and that’s what I was grasping at,” Shaw told Apple Music. “The rest is really thinking about the years where I did lots and lots of jobs all at the same time—often quite knackering work. It’s about the female experience, and I wanted to use language that’s usually supposed to be insulting, commenting on the grooming or the intelligence of women.”
“I wanted to use it in a song, and, by doing that, slightly reclaim that kind of language,” Shaw added. “It’s maybe an attempt at making it prideful rather than something that is supposed to make you feel shame.”
“Sometimes you just can’t be fucked with a lot of topics,” Shaw told Rolling Stone about her lyrical approach. “You’re like, ‘The only thing I care about right now is baked beans.’ Or, ‘The only thing I care about is Star Trek: The Next Generation. That is my interest, and everything else can fuck off.’ And I’ll write whatever I can think of about that, and all my feelings about it. Sometimes it’ll go off into another subject. It’s just a way to make me go.”
The songs throughout New Long Leg and its follow-up Stumpwork are riddled with strange thoughts, wonky imagery, and startling everyday occurrences. Whether it’s simply getting out of bed or making a phone call, Shaw knows how to squeeze every last bit of interest out of the things that most of us do without ever thinking about.
