Fighting crime in the streets together

Been meaning to write this for a minute.

A little more than a year ago, I had the idea to interview Ari Up, partly because the revived Slits had an album coming out and partly because I’d just realized that we’d only interviewed white men for the nascent 5-10-15-20 feature. The interview was an easy enough one to set up, and a very difficult to end. The idea of 5-10-15-20 is that you ask the subject about her favorite pieces of music from five-year intervals, but Ari said right away that she couldn’t pick just one song for any of these ages, and she proceeded to just regale me for about an hour about all this music that she’d loved throughout her life. Then, after a while, she had to go do something with one of her kids, so she said she’d call me back the next day. She did, and we talked for another hour. Then, after that, she kept calling for a week or two to tell me about stuff she’d forgotten. It was a whole big thing.

Ari talked in this amazing German/British/Jamaican kind of fusion of accents, and she got real, real excited about everything. When she couldn’t remember a song title, she sang the song to me. Or asked me to sing the song to her. She told me about the period when she was listening to nothing because she was raising her twins naked in the jungle. She told me about sharing an apartment in Brooklyn with Neneh Cherry. She seemed amazed that I knew who Mavado was, even though Mavado is totally this big star. She invited me to stay with her in Brooklyn. She told me that she’d had a bunch of kids but that everything was still “tight”. I’m pretty sure she hit on me once or twice. Every time I got off the phone with her, I felt like I’d been on that Gravitron ride at the state fair that just spins you around a bunch and pins you to the wall. I loved talking to her, and I’m really sorry she’s gone.

Also, the Slits’ cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” is something you need in your life.