The Slits "Slits Tradition"

The Slits have one of the more thoroughly misunderstood pop music legacies. Since attempts have been made to properly canonize the punk and post-punk eras of pop music, there have been more awkward translations of the band’s importance than carefully nuanced dissections. For instance, All Music Guide’s article on Cut actually offers that “One listen to Up will demonstrate that Bjork might not be as original as you’ve been led to believe,” and that British-produced public television history of rock documentary series from a while back awkwardly shoehorned Ari Up in with Patti Smith, the Ramones, Talking Heads and The Clash, the latter being the only group they have anything at all in common with. It was until Simon Reynolds’ post-punk book last year that the band, the first all-female punk band that is, was properly contextualized as a “feral girl gang” with little actual musical talent but clear pop ambition. They were confrontational and boldly feminist, and wallowed in anachronistic tribalism like contemporaries The Pop Group. But their legacy, already reflected in ESG, Chicks on Speed, Le Tigre and Bikini Kill, is still showing itself through the likes of M.I.A., Peaches, and to a lesser degree Erase Errata and the Rogers Sisters. So it seems fitting for the band to release a song like “Slits Tradition” (mp3), where they try to place themselves in the canon, rather than allowing future Bjork comparisons to go unchallenged. It’s a fitting update of the band’s M.O.—dark, rumbling electro-reggae rhythms, handclaps, trilling, atonal synths and a howling horror score have taken over for the primitive dubbiness of Cut, and frame what is essentially a rapped, vaguely Rastafarian manifesto that makes as much sense as you want it to make. There’s really no underlying rationale here apart from the band demonstrating to whomever cares to listen that they’re back after a quarter-century (with Ari and bassist Tessa Pollitt coming back from the original group), and are nearly as able to adapt to prevailing trends as they formerly were to start them.

Buy Revenge of the Killer Slits here.