"Terrorizing the music"
Ari Up, founder and frontwoman of all-girl punk band The Slits, died this week aged 48.
The singer, also known as Arianna Foster was step-daughter to The Sex Pistol’s John Lyddon (aka Johnny Rotten) on whose website the news was announced on Wednesday that she had sadly passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer.
Foster was an inspiration to musicians and women alike with her tough but fun feminist attitude and seemingly inexhaustible desire to shock audiences and critics alike.
At the tender age of 14 she was already “terrorizing the music” (her own words) fronting The Slits who were busy inventing the original ‘Girl Power’ while the Spice Girls were still in nappies.
Perhaps her youth is why The Slits’ early work has such a feral, playful power to it. Videos showed them frolicking in tribal paint in the bushes, and they shocked the establishment (and what was at that time a fairly male-dominated music industry) with their un-ladylike behaviour and brazen sexuality – the perfect example being the cover to debut album 'Cut' (1979) on which the band appeared topless and daubed in mud. It's a look that's been emulated by many festival goers since, but arguably never carried off so well.
“Our people accepted us,” Foster once said in an interview with Clash Music “But the world, it was very dangerous at that time for a girl. The rest of the world was dangerous…” and it is for this fierce punk attitude in continually challenging the perceived roles of women, especially in music, that she will be remembered by so many.
With roots securely in punk, The Slits’ music was infused with the dub and reggae that Ari grew up listening to: “We did hybrid type of music long before people really did that…I had heard everything but nothing touched me like reggae…That was the thing I could relate to most out of everything,” she once told journalist Robin Murray.
After releasing their second album 'The Return of The Giant Slits' in 1981, the band split up. Foster went on to release a solo album 'Dread More Dan Dead' in 2005, but reformed The Slits later the same year with a slightly different line-up to release the EP 'Revenge of The Killer Slits'.
Their most recent album, 'Trapped Animal', was released last year but the video for one of its singles, ‘Lazy Slam’, which features Chloe Sevigny, was to be released a day after her death, according to Ari’s wishes.
When asked about the universal appeal of The Slits’ music that meant their comeback was such a success Ari was quoted as saying: “That’s good, it’s supposed to be like that. We’re like that. We’re ageless and timeless, a multi-cultural hybrid. Universal creatures. We’re all Jah’s animals!”
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