Title:Cut By: The Slits Released by: Island Released on: 1979 Rating (out of 10): 7 Date: 08/15/2001
Quirk XPress
Björk was cute for approximately 5 minutes. She has outlived her usefulness. Quirk for quirk gets you nothing. But Ms. Gudmundsdóttir's greatest asset, back when she was cute, was her unabashed indebtedness to Ari Up, singer of The Slits.
The Slits were a double-edged quirk-sword, too: At their best, their music was so jubilant and different that it made the quirky vocals a friendly complement to it, rather than the driving force behind it. At worst? I'll get to that momentarily.
The music on their 1979 album, Cut, is rooted in punk rock and a progressive, bass-driven, mixing-board-dominated form of reggae called dub. (A serviceable history of the genre, mentioning founding father King Tubby and pioneers such as Lee "Scratch" Perry, can be found at http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=J326)
Cut (along with albums by bands like Public Image Limited, Gang of Four, XTC, and The Clash) is now considered an important part of the history and development of the punk-dub hybridization as a fairly prominent style of late-'70s English youth culture. On the American front, Cleveland band Pere Ubu also dabbled in the subgenre, on Dub Housing and other early (post-Peter Laughner) releases.
To me, the best "punk" bands have been the ones who tried to push the musical style beyond its boundaries. The most punk thing about The Slits was the creativity they employed in spite of their inability to, as the old saw goes, "play the way the pros play." And their look—slutty, vaguely gnome-like Shakespearean cauldron-stirrers on a St. Vincent de Paul thieving spree—seemed to pave the way for '80s thrift-store tarts like Bananarama and Danceteria-era Madonna.
Lesser all- or mostly-female bands without proper training might have been satisfied just to make a point of their sucking. After all, wasn't that what the early '90s Riot Grrrl movement gave us—chick bands content merely to be up there doing it? The Slits' talent was always bubbling under, and once they picked up their instruments, these ladies were able to express the innovative sounds swimming around in their weird little heads.
Very few singers before or during the peak of Ari Up's career had a style like hers (if we're talking after, there's the necessary Björk comparison, and there's an uncanny similarity to Katell Keineg on "Love und Romance"—but she may be going for Marlene Dietrich, given the "und").
There was, um, Yoko Ono, and Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson of the B-52's, and, um, probably some enthusiastic-yet-amateurish kid playing the Artful Dodger in a community production of Oliver. Really, there's nobody else.
OK. There's more. At the very tippy-top of her range (the soprano part), she has a Tiny Tim affectation (a fluttery-yet-comedic coloratura). Contemporaneous to second-wave punk, there's a slight flip o' the wig to Regula Sing of Kleenex (the all-girl Swiss band that would soon be known, more in/famously, as Liliput).
Less imaginative critics can mention other girly-timelies such as X-Ray Spex, The Au Pairs, The Raincoats (who would record Cut's "Adventures Close to Home" for their 1980 debut, with former Slit Palmolive on drums), or Sex Pistols groupie Siouxsie Sioux, but I won't dwell on those names. Ari's voice sounds more like Johnny Rotten, who often added a touch of hucksterist vaudeville to his nihilo-Situationist sensibilities.
The record is sloppy, though. There are two or three songs, and a few parts of songs, that click into place, but Cut mostly meanders. Teresa Pollitt's bass is the paste to Ari's, guitarist Viv Albertine's, and (male) drummer Budgie's art-macaroni.
Look: Three sexy, sass-tongued British girls (minus Palmolive, who wrote all of Cut's drum parts and contributed lyrics, but quit to join The Raincoats before the album was recorded); a taste for jungle beats and the freshly thrown sucker-punch called punk rock; friendships with can't-get-more-right-bloody-authentic-than-that first-wave, household Brit names like The Sex Pistols and The Clash. The influence of those friendships bled into The Slits' music, too: Track 2, "So Tough," is based on a conversation guitarist Viv had with Johnny Rotten about Sid Vicious ("Don't fuck things up by getting sick—again").
"Typical Girls" is Cut's strongest cut, and I'm open to debate over whether "Newtown" or the cover of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" is the weakest.
The latter shows a change from The Slits' sound as one might have heard it in the appropriately titled Punk Rock Movie—it's barely a few steps to the left of traditional disco fodder. In this vein, The Stones' "Miss You" and Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" fare much better as genre-mutations with career longevity. And then, speaking of career longevity, there's the entire punk subgenre nebulously known as "post-punk," which had a symbiotic relationship with English dance-club culture (in the early '80s, we'd know it as "New Romantic" and "Goth").
Covers are a good way for bands to legitimize themselves and prove their sound's uniqueness as litmused against well-known material. It's common for A & R people to encourage young bands to record covers; when people hear songs they know placed in new contexts, they take notice. So a new version of a song as beat-to-a-ruddy-pulp as "Grapevine" at least breathes a little fire into the dead dragon's mouth.
However, it doesn't make for more than half a good listen. It's a dull recording, it sounds unrehearsed and only adequately played, and Ari sounds like she's trying way too hard to give an "over-the-top" performance (like everything Björk has done since leaving The Sugarcubes—but we all know Einar was the real talent in that band).
"Newtown," my other choice for worst track, fails for more than one reason: the plodding melodylessness of it, the strained vocals, the rather uninspired lyrics ("I-yi-yi/Need another fix," among others). "Ping Pong Affair" follows, and saves Cut from drowning, but the song needs a buoy of its own—which arrives as an unexpected harmonic twist during the fourth (maybe fifth?) chorus.
It makes me realize The Slits are more about moments than entire songs. As musicians and songwriters, they're too restless to stick with ideas that bore them (although, in fairness, certain songs on Cut can be quite boring).
One of the only un-boring things about "FM" (for example) is that I like to mis-hear the chorus ("Frequent mutilation. . .") as "Frequent urination." Hee hee. Hee. Hee hee hee.
"Shoplifting"'s best moments: the incredulously English "10 quid for the lot/We pay fuck-all," and the Blondie-esque, aliens-ate-my-boyfriend's-brain drive-in screams over Pollitt's jolly bass line.
"Typical Girls" is the convergence of the pop instincts, the reggae instincts, the punk instincts, the Grease tough-broad gum-snapping instincts. After Ari's laundry list of everything that typical girls are and aren't, can do and can't, she and her band of Pink Ladies squeeze a pomp-and-circumstance sing-song through their collective raised eyebrows, like a Greek chorus of saucy Wonder Women:
But she's a femme fatale!
It's saved from its intrinsic cuteness (". . .who caaahhn't deee-cide what clothes to wear") and fake anti-feminism (". . .stand by their men"), because it turns out to be significantly darker, more mean-spirited, and more misogynistic than it appears from way up on the surface.
Is the narrator commenting on stereotypes of "typical girls," or is she including herself in an earnest putdown? Is she the atypical girl to some other, typical girl, one of those girls who "worry about spots, fat, and natural smells" and "don't wreak hell"?
Satire works best (as David Byrne's early lyrics did) when you can't tell if the author is kidding, putting you on; by that definition, "Typical Girls" is terrifically unsettling satire.
Cut would have been a magnificent EP—the first minute or so of "Instant Hit," half of "So Tough," the B-movie screams (and the mumbled toss-off "I'm pissed to my knickers") in "Shoplifting," the Brill Building harmony part of "FM," a few choruses of "Ping Pong Affair" (and that breathtaking harmony), the parts of "Love und Romance" with the awful attempt at a German accent, "Typical Girls" (the whole thing), and a few seconds of "Grapevine," so we get the idea.
It's good. It's seen as a classic. I'm not sure it deserves that status (don't mind me; I also think The Clash are somewhat overrated).
But in spite of its flaws, Cut is pretty original—while being fully a product of the time and culture from which it emerged. If you're a punk (or girl-band) completist trying to fill out your collection with all the Important Records, you'll look stupid if you don't own Cut. That's not my opinion, it's a Virgin Megastore-verified fact. My opinion: You'll like it, but I can't guarantee you'll love it.
