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

[Joly MacFie <joly AT punkcast.com>]

> Hello,
>
> I wrote on the Slits for the September issue of V magazine. I've
> attached the pdf below, since it's not yet available online. I hope
> you like it!
>
> Best,
> Blythe
>


That's great. I visited V with Ari about a month ago and they were
very nice to us as she gave them every pic she had -
the one they've picked is good.

I've transduced the writing to plain text for the technically challenged:

joly



GIRLS LIKE US

PUNK ICONS THE SLITS DRESSED, SANG, AND MADE MUSIC HOWEVER THE
HELL THEY WANTED, SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY HAD NO OTHER CHOICE. THIS
FALL, THEIR FIRST ALBUM IN 3 DECADES SEALS THE BAND’S STRIDENT
ROCK LEGACY AND ADDS A CHAPTER TO IT.

The Slits are sort of feminist. "Not in a politically correct
sense, more in a lifestyle sense," says Ari Up, the lead singer
of the first female punk band, whose new album, Trapped Animal,
is out this fall. "We were in an explosion where we didn’t have
time to follow rules. We were too busy fighting for our
identity." That explosion was the British punk scene of the late
1970s, which centered around a gang of spike-haired amateurs
raising their fists against corporate culture. Their ammunition:
a style of shocking non sequiturs and an unprecedented degree of
nihilism. Because the movement erupted quickly and was relatively
small, Up and her cohorts thought more about everyone involved
and less about themselves as the only girl group. In spite of
touring with punk royalty like the Clash and the Buzzcocks, they
never attained the same iconic status. "We were written out of
history," she says.

Up and her crew were among a handful of female artists (Patti
Smith and Chrissie Hynde among them) who broke with pop
archetypes, wrote their own songs, and played music that captured
their experiences as distinct from men. Women in the punk
movement either fell into the lot of stupid girls or gained
respect by acting like one of the guys. The Slits mocked the
former category, but didn’t conform to the latter. Their name
served as a taunt, both a reference to genitalia and an
intimation of violence. Where the Sex Pistols’ "Bodies" detested
the human form because childbirth and abortions are a "fucking
bloody mess," the Slits’ "Love und Romance" satirized how men
ridiculed love. "Call you every day on the telephone, break your
neck if you ain’t home!" yelped Up. On "So Tough," they mocked
Sid Vicious’s failing, junkie posture, "He is only curious, don’t
take it serious," then delivered the knockout, "Don’t fuck things
up by getting sick...again!"

The Slits don’t sound like other punk bands. Up’s voice possesses
the pitch and clarity of a manic opera singer, ranging from a
quavering bray to a Nico-esque drone. At 15, the German
expatriate pushed her way to the center of reggae parties in
London, and, with guitarist Viv Albertine, bassist Tessa Pollitt,
and then-drummer Palmolive, incorporated those sounds into her
music. The band swapped reggae mixes while on tour with their
friends the Clash, who are credited with inventing the hybrid.
But where the Clash browsed the genre, covering Junior Murvin’s
"Police and Thieves" and recounting nights at the Hammersmith
Palais, the Slits forged a singular mix. Speaking with an
inscrutable accent of German, British, American, and Jamaican, Up
insists, "We invented world beat without knowing it." Their
second album, Return of the Giant Slits, delved into African
rhythms and free jazz.

The Slits were, and continue to be, instinctive arbiters rather
than visionary plotters. As the first punk girl group, their
ethos of caring about not-caring was complicated by the gender
barrier: they had to work harder than their male counterparts to
gain recognition, which meant caring more intensely about being
apathetic. This paradox is explored in their hit "Typical Girls":
"Don’t create/Don’t rebel/Have intuition/Don’t drive well," a
lone imperative flanked by admonishments. At a time when Farrah
Fawcett’s tawny look defined beauty, the Slits wore lace gloves
and tutus and socks in their matted hair, paving the way for ’90s
riot grrls and fashion eccentrics like Madonna, Björk, and Chloë
Sevigny. On the cover of their 1979 debut, Cut, the band appeared
topless, slathered in mud and dressed in loincloths. Some
feminists maligned it as a primitivist pinup, while others lauded
it for the same reason. The editor of the British music magazine
Melody Maker said of them, "They look terrible. They’re fat, they
look disgusting." But Albertine contends that the image’s sexual
nature was an afterthought. In Zoë Street Howe’s book Typical
Girls? The Story of the Slits, out this September, she says, "We
didn’t think of ourselves as sexy at all. I mean, my little
girl’s 8 and she’s aware of sexuality and how to flounce and
flick. We weren’t aware." Though theoretically liberating, she
added, "You can see...we’d eaten quite a lot."

Punk delights in a conspicuous pastiche of the outlandish (rubber
tights) and unremarkable (safety pins). Likewise, the Slits
assert they had no choice but to play by their own rules. Malcolm
McLaren and Island Records labelmate Bob Marley were apprehensive
of them because they were the first self-created girl group, not
an industry concoction. McLaren wanted to outfit them as a disco
troupe. Marley initially name-dropped them on "Punky Reggae
Party," but took them out when he discovered they were women. As
a result of such prejudice, the band’s sloppy determinism
persists today. They still insist that they knew how to play,
when most punk bands didn’t know, and celebrated the fact.
Albertine offers Howe this apologia: "We couldn’t play what men
could do, those sort of 4/4 times, never speeding up, never
slowing down, couldn’t do it! I don’t know if women really can."

The years of attacks, bouncing between labels and managers, and
various creative differences took their toll, and the band split
in 1982. Up resurfaced in the ’90s as a dance-hall queen in
Jamaica under the name Madussa, and has shuttled between Kingston
and Brooklyn since 1987. She and Pollitt reunited as a new
incarnation of the band in 2006, with the Sex Pistols’ drummer
Paul Cook’s daughter, Hollie, on keyboards, drummer Anna Schulte,
and a guitarist named No. They released an EP the same year, and
Trapped Animal, their third full-length, continues their funky
punk-dub, with added elements of hip-hop, electronic music, and
dance-hall. Up is now 47, and the shrieks of her youth have
mellowed into assured raps. But she remains as paradoxical as
ever. "I am the essence of punk," says Up. "But I’m uncomfortable
calling myself that. It’s unacceptable to shock today. If I did
now what I did back then, I’d be thrown in jail." Blythe Sheldon

Trapped Animal is out in October 2009 from Narnack Records.
Typical Girls? The Story of The Slits is out in September 2009
from Omnibus Press
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