The Slits / In the Beginning / 1997
In the Beginning
bleak, searching, quietly apocalyptic
A terse, elliptical meditation on origins and endings, where cosmic imagery of creation collides with personal regret and disillusionment. The song moves from a flat declaration of violent conclusion to a cosmological question about beginnings, suggesting that the singer's emotional collapse is as vast and elemental as the birth of stars.
disillusionment cosmic origin vs personal history loyalty and betrayal heroism and its limits emotional collapse
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing someone who has moved on, oscillating between intimate confession and cosmic address; the voice is reflective rather than reliable, more interested in posing questions than answering them.
What happens
The song opens with a flat prophecy of doom, then catalogues the people and places the narrator has failed or left behind. It pivots on a question about origins, tracing the relationship or the self back to an imagined cosmic birth, before landing in a present where the heart is failing and the weather itself seems to echo that failure.
How it's built
Short, almost aphoristic lines accumulate without a clear verse-chorus division, giving the song a fragmentary, incantatory quality. The turn from personal catalogue to cosmic question functions as a volta, and the final image of storm and fire loops back to the title phrase, closing the song on repetition rather than resolution.
Section by section
Opening lines
“This story ends in bloodshed”
The song starts past the point of climax, announcing catastrophe before any context is given. This reverses conventional narrative order and signals that the song is less interested in plot than in aftermath and reflection.
Catalogue of loss
A quick list of a face, a city, and people met and failed establishes the emotional wreckage the narrator is sifting through. The brevity of each item keeps the tone clipped rather than sentimental, as if the speaker can't afford to linger.
Hero line
“a hero never turns around”
This line reads as both self-justification and self-indictment. The narrator invokes a stoic ideal of moving forward without regret, but the surrounding lyric shows someone doing exactly the opposite — dwelling on everyone left behind.
Cosmic question
“where did we begin in a ball of fire”
The pivot to asking about origins recasts a personal relationship or life story as something with the scale and inevitability of a cosmic event, suggesting the speaker feels powerless against forces set in motion long before the present crisis.
Closing image
“my heart's caving in”
The storm imagery and the collapsing heart converge in the final lines, tying the cosmic framing back to a very physical, personal sensation of breakdown, and the repetition of the fire image at the end loops the song back to its own title without offering closure.
Craft
- cosmic metaphor
- Describing an origin in fire and stars elevates a personal or relational beginning to the scale of planetary creation, framing emotional events as elemental forces beyond control.
- irony
- The line about heroism not looking back reads as self-aware irony — the narrator clearly is looking back, cataloguing exactly the people and failures a hero would supposedly leave behind without regret.
- pathetic fallacy
- The storm and rain in the closing lines mirror the narrator's internal collapse, making weather a physical correlate for emotional rupture.
- circular structure
- The song ends by returning to the image it used for its own title, suggesting the ending is really another beginning, reinforcing the theme that origin and conclusion are entangled.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a breakup or estrangement narrative dressed in cosmological language — the 'beginning' in fire and stars is a metaphor for how overwhelming and seemingly fated the relationship or life situation felt, making its ending feel equally vast and uncontrollable. An alternative reading takes the cosmic imagery more literally, as the narrator genuinely searching for existential origins rather than relational ones, using personal loss as the occasion for a broader question about where anything — selves, stories, catastrophes — actually begins. The text supports both; it doesn't resolve which is primary.
Context
I don't have reliable information about the specific circumstances of this 1997 release or its relationship to the band's earlier, more widely documented punk-era work; the sparse, non-rhyming, almost spoken-word lyric style differs notably from the aggressive, syncopated vocal delivery the Slits were known for in their late-70s material, which may reflect a later or different phase of the group, but I can't confirm details with confidence.
Listen for
- the shift in vocal tone or pacing when the song moves from the opening declaration to the cosmic question
- whether the delivery of the 'hero' line carries irony or sincerity
- how the instrumentation responds to the storm imagery in the closing section
- any repetition or loop in the music that mirrors the lyric's return to its title phrase
About The Slits
The Slits were an early punk and then post-punk band based in London, formed there in 1976 by members of the groups the Flowers of Romance and the Castrators. The group's early line-up consisted of Ari Up and Palmolive, with Viv Albertine and Tessa Pollitt replacing founding members Kate Korus and Suzy Gutsy.
1976 - 2010 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue