The Standells weren’t actually from Boston, but their 1966 classic “Dirty Water” had a bigger impact on this city’s shove-it-up-yours-and-like-it identity than any other song in popular music. “Well, I love that dirty water,” the band shouts over a spritely organ line. “Oh Boston, you’re my home!”
I doubt those L.A. garage rockers knew it at the time, but these lyrics mocking the notoriously polluted Charles River would come to serve as a proud Bostonian mating call at sporting wins and dive bars, where we puff ourselves up as meaner than New Yorkers and fouler-mouthed than Navy SEALs doing standup. But “dirty water” can also be used to describe something else we swear by in this region, something so engrained in our daily routines that we never stop to question its quality, or to ask ourselves whether we deserve better:
I’m of course talking about the coffee at our beloved Dunkin’, which tastes more like the melted ice water at the bottom of an actually good cup of coffee. As of writing this, there’s one of those cups sitting beside my laptop — a medium cold brew with whole milk and three sickening pumps of unsweetened vanilla syrup — and it’s taking every ounce of strength to not dump it in the sink and go to Starbucks…