The Slits
Return Of The Giant Slits

The Slits, led by Ari Up and Viv Albertine, were one of the most striking examples of transcending English Punk in the late '70s and early '80s. The urbanity of Thatcherite London turned the melting pot into inclusion, and where there were anarchist squats, it wasn't improbable to find Reggae soundsystems.

With this scenario in mind, the evolutionary dynamics of what, in hindsight, is considered the greatest female band of that era/epic aren't too obscure. The starting point, whether willingly or not, is the same: the dualism, neither ethical nor programmatic, it must be said, between the figures of Lydon and McLaren. The former had the merit of popularizing, as a precursor, the culture of Jamaican bass and soundsystems in a predominantly Punk context, with his Public Image Limited, while the latter tried to turn the girls, at the time (1977) an honest Punk group with no particular distinctions, into a feminist epic capable of filling the gap left by the Sex Pistols. This latter hypothesis remained just that.

From here, the evolutionary process of The Slits would find its cementation in minimalist and sparse Dub Punk dynamics, with the aid of mastermind Dennis Bovell, the true hand behind the knobs, in the least metaphorical sense possible, of England's bass culture. And it is in this historic context, the year 1979, that "Cut" is attributed. The split with The Pop Group and the related interaction (Bruce Smith replaced the departing Palm Olive on drums) were merely the consequence of a parallel yet similar approach between the two groups, converging on ethno-futurist contamination. With "Return Of The Giant Slits," the album dated 1981, the quartet crafts what is ultimately their most frontier-pushing and constructive work. Having completely abandoned the aesthetics of Punk, but not its ethic of maximization through minimization, this album shifts the compositional center of gravity closer to a skewed Dub-infused World Music, riding the tension. The momentum offered by Bruce Smith's hyper-tribal dynamism here highlights increasingly fractured and fluid structures, tending towards schizophrenia rather than song composition, contrary to what occurred in every previous release. No longer "Typical Girls" or supermarket tales—citing a track by The Raincoats, their equally important extension in terms of non-rock reconstruction work—but primitive introspection and alienation from urbanity.

In light of events in those years and what transpired around the 2010s, where every musical container has become both a microcontainer and a macrocontainer (consider Not Not Fun's naturalism around 2008, the most noteworthy case), it is a work in need of posthumous reevaluation and historical relocation within that Punk deconstruction process, carried out using the same tools and interpretative keys.