Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds Page A
Authors: Simon Reynolds
Tags: Non-Fiction
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saw the music as just a vehicle, a platform for messages.” Stewart, in turn, found it increasingly “difficult to sing on the abstract stuff.”
Stewart was also becoming increasingly involved in organized protest during 1980, spending three months working in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s offices helping to coordinate a massive antinuclear rally to be held in Trafalgar Square. After almost withering away in the early seventies, CND’s membership resurged as cold war fears intensified in the wake of the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. NATO’s December 1979 decision to install American-controlled cruise missiles in the U.K. convinced many Britons that their country was degenerating into little more than a U.S. launching pad. The Trafalgar Square rally in October 1980 was the last time the Pop Group performed together. “We did a version of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem,’ because I’d wanted to do a rallying cry for all the different age groups there,” recalls Stewart. “That song is a real socialist anthem, but visionary and idealistic too, Blake being this real prophet.” After this high point—playing to 250,000 people—the Pop Group fell apart. “An organic disintegration,” says Stewart. “There was no ill will.”
Meanwhile, the Slits drifted along, with Ari Up succumbing to a Rasta-infused mystic pantheism. “I just see the Creator in everything,” she told an interviewer. Proposing a kind of cosmology of rhythm, “In the Beginning There Was Rhythm” hymned all the pulsating patterns that structure reality: “…God is riddim…Riddim is roots and roots is riddim…SILENCE! Silence is a riddim too!” She and Neneh Cherry had encountered the early underground hip-hop scene on a trip to New York, and hearing rap for the first time inspired her percussive, chanted delivery on “In the Beginning There Was Rhythm.” “Every sound that you hear is rhythm,” the singer explained. “Fucking is rhythm and so is the earth going round and every footstep and every heartbeat. The way you go about your music is the way you go about your life…. Rhythm and life go together.”
As a sideline to the Slits, Ari Up formed New Age Steppers, a collaboration with dub producer Adrian Sherwood and his session musicians Creation Rebel. Another white reggae fanatic, Sherwood shared a squat in Battersea with Ari and Neneh. “Adrian was a hustler in a true sense,” Ari says. “He managed various reggae artists and toasters, distributed reggae records and sold them out of the back of his van, taught himself how to do studio engineering. We partnershipped and I came up with the name New Age Steppers. ‘Stepper’ as in dancing to reggae, and ‘New Age’ as in representing the new millennium.” Released in the first week of 1981, the group’s debut single, “Fade Away,” features one of Ari Up’s finest vocal performances, but its trust-in-Jah fatalism (the power-hungry and money-minded will all “fade away,” leaving the righteous meek to inherit the earth) seemed disconcertingly passive, suggesting a retreat into hippielike serenity.
One more Slits album, Return of the Giant Slits, saw the group abandon the independent scene for a major label, CBS, even bigger than Island. Influenced by African music, Sun Ra, and Don Cherry (Neneh’s father and a pioneer of ethnodelic jazz), the record’s diffuse, low-key experimentalism fell into a hostile marketplace. In songs like “Animal Space,” Ari Up’s pantheism took an ecomystical turn. “Earth-beat,” for instance, was a lament for a sorely mistreated Mother Earth (“Even the leaves are wheezing/Even the clouds are coughing”). After the band finally fell apart, the singer fled Babylon (aka the industrial First World) in search of any remaining havens of unspoiled Nature. Flitting from rural Jamaica to the jungles of Belize and Borneo (where she lived with tribal Indians), she became a real earth mother with a
Stewart was also becoming increasingly involved in organized protest during 1980, spending three months working in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s offices helping to coordinate a massive antinuclear rally to be held in Trafalgar Square. After almost withering away in the early seventies, CND’s membership resurged as cold war fears intensified in the wake of the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. NATO’s December 1979 decision to install American-controlled cruise missiles in the U.K. convinced many Britons that their country was degenerating into little more than a U.S. launching pad. The Trafalgar Square rally in October 1980 was the last time the Pop Group performed together. “We did a version of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem,’ because I’d wanted to do a rallying cry for all the different age groups there,” recalls Stewart. “That song is a real socialist anthem, but visionary and idealistic too, Blake being this real prophet.” After this high point—playing to 250,000 people—the Pop Group fell apart. “An organic disintegration,” says Stewart. “There was no ill will.”
Meanwhile, the Slits drifted along, with Ari Up succumbing to a Rasta-infused mystic pantheism. “I just see the Creator in everything,” she told an interviewer. Proposing a kind of cosmology of rhythm, “In the Beginning There Was Rhythm” hymned all the pulsating patterns that structure reality: “…God is riddim…Riddim is roots and roots is riddim…SILENCE! Silence is a riddim too!” She and Neneh Cherry had encountered the early underground hip-hop scene on a trip to New York, and hearing rap for the first time inspired her percussive, chanted delivery on “In the Beginning There Was Rhythm.” “Every sound that you hear is rhythm,” the singer explained. “Fucking is rhythm and so is the earth going round and every footstep and every heartbeat. The way you go about your music is the way you go about your life…. Rhythm and life go together.”
As a sideline to the Slits, Ari Up formed New Age Steppers, a collaboration with dub producer Adrian Sherwood and his session musicians Creation Rebel. Another white reggae fanatic, Sherwood shared a squat in Battersea with Ari and Neneh. “Adrian was a hustler in a true sense,” Ari says. “He managed various reggae artists and toasters, distributed reggae records and sold them out of the back of his van, taught himself how to do studio engineering. We partnershipped and I came up with the name New Age Steppers. ‘Stepper’ as in dancing to reggae, and ‘New Age’ as in representing the new millennium.” Released in the first week of 1981, the group’s debut single, “Fade Away,” features one of Ari Up’s finest vocal performances, but its trust-in-Jah fatalism (the power-hungry and money-minded will all “fade away,” leaving the righteous meek to inherit the earth) seemed disconcertingly passive, suggesting a retreat into hippielike serenity.
One more Slits album, Return of the Giant Slits, saw the group abandon the independent scene for a major label, CBS, even bigger than Island. Influenced by African music, Sun Ra, and Don Cherry (Neneh’s father and a pioneer of ethnodelic jazz), the record’s diffuse, low-key experimentalism fell into a hostile marketplace. In songs like “Animal Space,” Ari Up’s pantheism took an ecomystical turn. “Earth-beat,” for instance, was a lament for a sorely mistreated Mother Earth (“Even the leaves are wheezing/Even the clouds are coughing”). After the band finally fell apart, the singer fled Babylon (aka the industrial First World) in search of any remaining havens of unspoiled Nature. Flitting from rural Jamaica to the jungles of Belize and Borneo (where she lived with tribal Indians), she became a real earth mother with a
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