I met Ari Up a few years ago, in June 2003 to be precise, when she played a gig at Glasgow’s Stereo.
At the time, I mainly wrote about music, politics and social issues, trying to carve a niche for myself in a local scene saturated by essentially useless male journalists.
Totally wild, yet in total control, Ari had an extraordinary energy: she sang, jumped and danced around the stage shaking her massively long dreadlocks that made her look like a reggae Medusa while recounting us stories about her life in Jamaica.
I couldn’t somehow believe that I was finally seeing playing live the front woman from post-punk band The Slits whose album "Cut" I had left behind in my record collection in Italy.
The Slits had been a huge inspiration to me, they were atypical girls with radical styles who tried to destroy through dub and reggae rhythms female stereotypes in a world dominated by men.
Largely forgotten by the official music “historians” (that is mainly deluded men who think they know better than women…), the band first toured in 1977 with The Clash (at the time the band line up comprised Viv Albertine, Palmolive, Ari Up and Tessa Pollit).
After getting a record contract in 1979, the girls released in the same year the album “Cut”, produced by Dennis Bovell who added to it a special dub reggae edge.
The album was followed by "Return of the Giant Slits" in 1981, the year the band split.
Rejecting all the rules, proving they were probably more about the message than about being the best band around music-wise (none of them was musically trained), The Slits' manifesto was pretty simple: develop their own music and clothing style and speak their minds.
I spoke to Ari Up at the end of the Glasgow gig, she was approachable and fun and then I rushed home to write my review in which I stated: “The real fun comes when it’s Ari Up time. She gets on stage warning us to get ready for the whole ‘Ari Up experience’ and from the very first track of the set, the classic ‘Love Und Romance’, people are jumping, dancing in every corner of the pub or literally dragged on stage by Ari to sing with her. Slits hits such as ‘Newtown’, ‘FM’ or ‘Shoplifting’ follow, all interspersed by Ari telling us stories about the Slits being the best girl band of their times (and who could deny it?), her urge of killing people (in ‘Kill Them With Love’) and the tragic death of her partner shot in Jamaica (‘Baby Father’). There's not enough time for ‘Typical Girls’, but Ari and her vocalists give us impeccable versions of other Slits’ singles, John Holt’s ‘Man Next Door’ and Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’.”
I was saddened to hear about Ari’s death this morning. On her stepfather John Lydon’s site there is written she died yesterday “after a serious illness”.
Ari and The Slits always represented for me the triumph of a radical style that opposed to a plastic and fake society.
In the 70s bands like X-Ray Spex with head singer Marian Elliot-Said AKA Poly Styrene sang against consumerism, while one of The Slit's tracks on "Cut" was entitled 'Spend Spend Spend' (remember its lyrics: "I want to buy/(Have you been affected?)/I need consoling/(You could be addicted)/I need something new/Something trivial would do/I want to satisfy this empty feeling...").
Rather than fighting against consumerism, most contemporary bands are consumed by consumerism.
They do not even try to make a commentary about the society we live in, while there are very few girl bands ready to say something that may be considered even remotely feminist.
In fact, I guess that nowadays, it’s even more difficult for women to rebel.
It’s amazing how young women are indeed being told that freedom is being taught by a magazine how to match a top with a pair of trousers/a skirt and a pair of life-threatening shoes (because we are too stupid to be able to match things by ourselves…) or that feminism is a carefully assembled pop star clad in silicone and plastic, re-vomiting old hits digitally filtered, chopped and remixed and cleverly repackaged for a younger generation of listeners.
Funny how we have recreated a generation of “typical girls” who think feminism is a bad word and living outside the boundaries implies wearing a designer jacket covered in metal studs that make you look fakely aggressive (impossible not to think about The Slits' lyrics: "Who invented the typical girl?/Who's bringing out the new improved model?/And there's another marketing ploy...").
In the booklet of the 2000 re-release of "Cut", Ari Up stated: "I'm really proud of what we did with the Slits. The only thing that depresses me is that hardly anyone knows what an influence we had (...) We were 20 years ahead of our time. The Slits did a lot for fashion and for women in general."
My review of Ari Up’s Glasgow gig closed with this final paragraph: “There’s a sense of loss when Ari sings the last line of ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’. As she pronounces the words ‘I’m just about to lose my mind’, we suddenly feel we're missing real punk and reggae, true rebels and true warrior princesses like her. Glory to the bassline. Glory to the rhythm and glory to The Slits. Amen." Guess now we'll really going to miss our warrior princess.
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