Ari Up, the lead singer of punk legends The Slits, passionate avant-garde reggae mix-master, and an icon for women in rock, has passed away, according to a statement released by her step-father, Sex Pistol and P.I.L frontman John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten.
"John and (mother) Nora have asked us to let everyone know that Nora's daughter Arianna--aka Ari Up--died today after a serious illness," an announcement on Lydon's website said. "She will be sadly missed. Everyone at JohnLydon.com and PiLofficial.com would like to pass on their heartfelt condolences to John, Nora and family. Rest in Peace."
I've spent about forty minutes trying to figure out the best way to memorialize her. The writers at NME or Rolling Stone are obviously much better at summing up her impact on music: she and her fellow bandmates--many who went on to form the pivotal band The Raincoats, said to inspire everything from The Pixies to Sonic Youth--were one of the most primal, raw punk bands to emerge from the seventies British music scene. And they were all teenagers.
I still remember being thirteen, reading Jon Savage's England's Dreaming and writing down a list of bands that I'd never heard but knew inherently I'd love, trekking to the record store and getting them to special order the Slit's 'Cut' from the UK, since it was no longer in distribution in America (this, of course, has all changed with the internet boom). As soon as it came, I listened to Shoplifting about ten times in a row and thought 'this is new. This is different.' Which isn't something I have ever thought about most bands, even ones I really like. The Slits may have been lumped in with their punk contemporaries but they had teir own completely distinct sound.
Ari Up started the Slits at fourteen because she couldn't see any reason why not, even the fact that she and her bandmates had absolutely no idea how to play any instruments. Ari Up admitted in Savage's book that some of her motivation initially to start a band wasn't just from being inspired by the rawness of the Sex Pistols, but by her own crush on Johnny Rotten--who in turn married her mother. So here you have this relatively unattractive, weird, frizzy-haired fourteen-year-old in no pants and a t-shirt spastically releasing everything pent up inside her teenage brain, accompanied by a cacophony of sound behind her, and it's all incredibly perfect because it's so flawed. This was the reason my best friend and I thought maybe we could do it, too, despite the lack of musical skills, despite being ugly and weird, despite not being boys who were encouraged to funnel their teen angst into rapid drum beats or loud guitars. Ari Up was the first person for me who really drove it home that you didn't have to be conventionally pretty or conventionally talented to be awesome as a female musician. Men have a lot of those icons: women do not. Female pop stars and rock stars, for the most part, tend to have their looks promoted and their music tolerated.
In a world where most of us will never look like Debbie Harry or Siouxsie Sioux or even Joan Jett, Ari Up served as evidence to how ultimately insignificant that all really was, as long as we're brave enough to stand up and rock out. She helped me care a little less about what anyone else thought of me. And what was so awesome about people like Ari Up, Patti Smith, Poly Styrene, and Lydia Lunch is that they were poets who weren't suicidal trainwrecks like so many of my writing icons. How refreshing to have strong, defiant women actually promote ruthless survival.
Ari Up was a regular around the L.A underground scene, so I had the pleasure of talking to her a few times when she would DJ reggae nights at La Cita or trolling around Amoeba records for whatever was new and exciting. She was one of the most enthusiastic people at any event she attended. She will be missed. And the weird-looking, frizzy-haired social misfit fourteen-year-old in me thanks her.
Since I can no longer figure out how to embed videos on here, here's one of my favorite clips of The Slits in 1977.
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