Typical Girls: Women in Punk/Post-Punk/Underground Music (Circa 1975-1980s)

[lsmith <yelmo2000 AT yahoo.com>]

Great article. Interesting directions and connections.
Connection between, across and especially with ideas, cultures, 
sounds...people. Creation of communities and communal sounds.
Thanks for renewing my connection to "Earthbeat, Daichi No Oto".
Playing it in my head, I can almost feel the possibilities that having such a 
relaxed, open state of mind makes possible!
- Lani


--- On Tue, 9/30/08, WWWhatsup <joly AT punkcast.com> wrote:

> From: WWWhatsup <joly AT punkcast.com>
> Subject: [TypicalGirls] imomus - Return to the Giant Slits
> To: "Typical Girls" <typicalgirls AT lists.ibiblio.org>
> Cc: "ari-up AT egroups.com" <ari-up AT egroups.com>
> Date: Tuesday, September 30, 2008, 6:14 PM
> http://imomus.livejournal.com/403645.html
> 
> Return to the Giant Slits
> 
> On Saturday I wrote my next Playground column. It won't
> appear on the
> Spanish music site for a couple of weeks yet, but it's
> about Matsuri-
> kei, a music movement that doesn't really exist outside
> my head. Or
> it's about my hypocrisy in declaring genres in record
> shops useless
> whilst continuing to make up new ones myself. Or it's
> about the fact
> that a genre is both artificial and real, fiction and fact,
> arbitrary
> and binding, meaningless and meaningful, useless and
> useful.
> 
> Anyway, part of the essay is about choosing a starting
> point for this
> Matsuri-kei genre. If OOIOO's Umo is central to what
> I'm calling
> Matsuri-kei, the ur-ancestor of the whole genre must be --
> I've decided
> -- The Slits' second (and last) album, Return of the
> Giant Slits
> (1981). More specifically, the Japanese-language version of
> Earthbeat,
> Daichi No Oto (which translates, roughly, as "Field
> Sound"):
> 
> The Slits: Daichi No Oto (stereo mp3 file)
> http://imomus.com/slitsdaichinooto.mp3
> 
> 
> It might seem odd to choose a track by a Western band as
> the origin of
> a Japanese genre, but Daichi No Oto has so much else going
> for it.
> Matsuri-kei bands are generally all-female. They have
> eco-boho-baba
> lyrics over tribal beats. They look to Jamaica, wear
> dreadlocks, and
> love dub, without actually being Jamaican. They shout in a
> primal,
> tribal way. The Slits did all this (with Yoko Ono-esque
> warblings and a
> German accent) long before OOIOO, and even sang in Japanese
> for the
> Japanese release of their album. I can't think of a
> better origin.
> 
> I re-acquired Return of the Giant Slits digitally this
> weekend -- it's
> a record I listened to and loved in 1981, just before
> dropping out of
> university (for two years, anyway) to become a musician
> myself. It's
> also a record that's undeservedly unloved and
> un-celebrated -- there
> are no YouTube clips of tracks from it, for instance, and
> until its
> late 2007 re-release on Blast First it was available on CD
> only in
> Japan.
> 
> Return of the Giant Slits still sounds fantastic to me;
> reggae
> producers Dennis "Blackbeard" Bovell and Dick
> O'Dell gave the record an
> amazing feel, an ambience which can switch from wet to dry
> in a flash,
> a sound full of space, twangling with exotic instruments,
> reggae horn
> arrrangements, chuckling syn drum hits, brittle early 80s
> synth lines,
> funky, schizo guitar chops, tribal beats. Everything's
> apart and
> together at the same time; it's tight and loose, clean
> and dirty, song
> and dub.
> 
> I can understand why the record had a limited audience,
> though. You can
> see quite substantial British crowds responding to the
> punky shouts of
> early Slits, as (supporting The Clash) they ranted about
> shoplifting
> over power chords. I remember Peel expressing
> disappointment with Cut
> when it first came out -- they'd gone reggae, recruited
> Bovell, and the
> power chords of the early sessions were suddenly replaced
> by more
> delicate, spacey, tentative guitar stabs from Viv
> Albertine. Tessa
> Pollit's bass became the band's anchor (if such
> flighty music can be
> said to be anchored anywhere). I remember Peel advising his
> listeners
> to stick with the new reggage Slits, though; they'd be
> rewarded in the
> end. Reggae was good for you, it widened your horizons.
> 
> Return of the Giant Slits is nothing if not wide -- tracks
> like Animal
> Space, Earthbeat and Walk About made you feel you were
> wandering the
> outback with Jenny Aguter in Nic Roeg's Walkabout. The
> exotic warmth of
> it was important to me in the Aberdeen winter of 1981. I
> remember
> listening to it on Baker Street, sharing a flat with my
> communist
> friends Babis and Catherine. I made a Matisse-like mural of
> a
> reclining, gaian woman out of cut coloured paper. The room
> was
> furnished with books -- Ivan Illich on radical education,
> Erich Fromm's
> "To Have or To Be", "How the Other Half
> Dies" by Susan George, Mary
> Daly's "Gyn/Ecology", poetry by Brecht. But
> my main memory is of
> sitting there in low light -- possibly candlelight,
> possibly just an
> anglepoise close to the wall -- listening to The Slits.
> 
> I saw The Slits live at this point -- they came to Aberdeen
> and played
> in a little club off Union Street. I was completely in awe
> of their
> bohemianism, they seemed like 50-feet women. Not many
> people came to
> the show, and I remember Ari Up sitting in the middle of
> the empty-ish
> club on a chair, rocking back and forth in a strange, sexy
> limbering-up
> movement, her dreadlocks flopping around wildly. She might
> have been
> some sort of dream girlfriend for me, but I wouldn't
> have dared speak
> to her; she seemed to live in a different dimension. And
> yet it was a
> dimension available in Aberdeen's indie record shops
> (they were all
> gone when I visited last year) for the price of an album.
> 
> The Wikipedia entry on The Slits describes them as getting
> "increasingly experimental and avant garde" at
> this point (they managed
> to sound like a dubbed-up Red Crayola while being signed to
> CBS), and
> collaborating with Bristol's Pop Group (the Bristol
> line later carries
> this sound through to Massive Attack and Tricky in the
> 90s). But -- and
> this is getting to the nub of what I really want to say
> about The Slits
> today -- it's what undoubtedly alienated The Slits from
> people in 1981
> which attracted me most to them; the way that their scatty,
> quirky,
> baba-boho radicalism led you, wherever you actually were in
> space, to a
> core of hip, post-materialist districts. Places like
> Notting Hill,
> Kreuzberg or Koenji. Places where people were united in a
> common,
> shared left-wing bohemianism; exactly the atmosphere I was
> to encounter
> the following year when I went for the first time to Rough
> Trade's
> Blenheim Place warehouse, with its notorious brown rice
> atmosphere, its
> egalitarian staff policies (everyone earned the same at
> that point),
> its right-on-ness.
> 
> Of course this ambience left -- and continues to leave --
> most British
> people behind; geodemographics show that only a tiny
> fraction of
> British people actually tick the baba-boho boxes
> (alternative lifestyle
> progressives, tolerant of diversity, into being rather than
> having);
> just over 1% of UK households embrace these core values,
> according to
> the Mosaic survey. Now, obviously if you're signed to
> CBS and your
> values -- increasingly in-your- face values -- of
> bohemianism and
> embrace-of-the- other only appeal to about 1% of your
> target market,
> it's a problem. Not The Slits' problem, but the
> record label's, and
> sure enough, they dropped The Slits after the Return album.
> Ari Up
> formed the New Age Steppers with Adrian Sherwood, but
> basically went
> off to live in Jamaica, a place much more to her taste, for
> twenty
> years. (She married a black man who was later murdered, it
> seems.)
> 
> After writing my Matsuri-kei piece on Saturday, I went to
> see my friend
> Tomoko Miyata play her water bowls nearby, and the
> atmosphere was bobo-
> baba; a studio laid out with floor-candles, with a small
> audience of
> artists, mostly exiles from other countries, people who,
> like me, adore
> Berlin because it's significantly more radical and
> leftish and bohemian
> than the places we left behind. Tomoko played her bowls
> installation
> with Fluxus-style radio over the top, then a sax player
> blew one
> continuous low note for twenty minutes, then an improv duo
> interpreted
> a chart from the New York Times (a plummeting money graph
> from the
> meltdown) as if it were a music score.
> 
> Now, just like The Slits, this kind of thing could easily
> be pilloried
> by people who feel vaguely blamed, excluded or threatened
> by it -- the
> 98% of British people, for instance, who don't share
> those values
> ("don't create, don't rebel, don't make
> eye contact sleeping down the
> streets", as Ari put it in her songs). Personally,
> though, I love it,
> and I give prayers of thanks every day that Berlin is the
> kind of place
> where the bobo-baba thing continues to happen. I trace this
> feeling --
> like Matsuri- kei -- back to that room in Aberdeen, and the
> magical
> connection that record gave me to a world where people were
> somehow
> more free and more radical than the people I knew.
> 
> 
> Joly MacFie 
> 212 608 1334
> http://wwwhatsup.com
> http://punkcast.com  
> http://pinstand.com 
> 
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