Okay, so I don’t actually hate music. As a teenager, I played the oboe for two hours a day, and if that spit-riddled, physically painful effort isn’t evidence of some ritualistic devotion adjacent to love, I don’t know what is. I love music to an extreme that is perhaps ill-advised (don’t take up the oboe; it cannot be done casually). What I don’t love is what comes with it—the dry inaccessibility of classical, everything about Coachella, and punk’s hypermasculine posturing under a patina of socially progressive politics. To paraphrase Chumbawamba, a band I adored without irony in sixth grade, I thought the MUSIC mattered.
So when Music Editor Ciara Dolan asked me to write about British punk band the Slits for the maiden voyage of this column, I was delighted. Despite having loved all things remotely feminist and proto-Riot Grrrl since my dad gave me my first copy of Bitch when I was in middle school, I had never actually listened to the Slits. When I did, I was transported to a time when my greatest concern was obtaining two things: at least a B+ on my Chaucer final, and a text from a Clash-loving boy with a godawful bicep tattoo of (I am not joking) HAMLET TALKING TO A SKULL.