Bikini Kill Singer Kathleen Hanna Reflects on Her Memoir ‘Rebel Girl’: NPR

“When I started working in Bikini Kill, I thought of myself as a feminist performance artist who was in a punk band,” says Kathleen Hanna.

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“When I started working in Bikini Kill, I thought of myself as a feminist performance artist who was in a punk band,” says Kathleen Hanna.

Rachel Bright/Ecco

Activist, musician and punk pioneer Kathleen Hanna has always been a force. With her band Bikini Kill, she pioneered the “riot grrrl” movement in the 1990s, challenging the misogyny of the punk scene and society in general.

“When I moved to Olympia (Washington), there were all these kids making music and releasing records on small independent labels,” Hanna says. “And they sort of defined punk not as a genre or a…loud, angry, aggressive sound, but as an idea…that we don’t need to wait for corporations to tell us what good music, art or writing We can do it ourselves.

And that’s what she did. Along with Tobi Vail, Billy Karren and Kathi Wilcox, Hanna formed the feminist punk band Bikini Kill. The group urged women and girls in the audience to take center stage, write political zines and speak openly about sexual violence. Emboldened by the music, fans came to Hanna to talk about their own experiences.

While on tour, Hanna and her bandmates faced abuse and disrespect from male fans and club employees. At one point, a soundman threatened to stab her while she was on tour with another of her bands, Le Tigre.

“It was our workplace, and every night there was a different group of angry and threatened men… who treated us with complete disrespect,” she said. “One of the things that stuck with me was this phrase: ‘In punk rock, there is no HR.’ “

In his new memoir, Rebel girl, Hanna looks back on her childhood and her experiences in the punk scene. She also writes about discovering that an undiagnosed case of Lyme disease was the reason she could no longer physically perform.

Since her diagnosis and treatment, Hanna has returned to performing with Bikini Kill and her other bands, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She says there’s still a lot of anger in the shows, but there’s also “a lot more joy.”

“The songs really go from joy to sadness to rage very quickly. And I find nuances in them that I didn’t know existed,” she says. “It’s joyful to explore our anger in public.”

Interview Highlights

At the beginning of the feminist punk riot grrrl movement

(There were) girls at riot grrrl meetings who were crying just because it was the first time they were in an all-female atmosphere, and they were just like, “Whoa, that feels really weird. I’m confused.” . “And then it’s like, “Wait, why haven’t I ever made this a priority before? And just that feeling of changing rooms. Just sitting at a crappy plastic Office Max table with a bunch of young women who were relegated to the back of the room at punk shows for so long, finally saying, “I’ve always wanted to start a band” or ” Hey, does anyone know how to play guitar? I’d like to learn.” It’s an incredible feeling. It really transforms the room into this beautiful place of possibility.

While writing the 1993 Riot Grrrl anthem, “Rebel Girl”

We wrote that one in the basement of this house called The Embassy. It was a punk house, and punk houses often have names. And this one was called The Embassy because it was pretty close to Embassy Row in Washington DC. And I just remember how sweaty it was and he was very small. And I’ll always remember writing that song because it was one of those moments where I was writing it while we were playing it. So they started coming up with the music, and as it got more complete, I started hearing the first few lines in my head and I just walked up to the mic, and then they kind of blurred out. I stepped back and started thinking: OK, what will the chorus be? …And then I went back to the mic and I just sang and “Rebellious girl, rebel girl, you’re the queen of my world” came out. And it just happened. It was like the scene of punk women that I hung out with and became friends with really wrote this song and I just like catch it out of the air or something.

Hanna (fourth from left) poses with Joan Jett (center) and Bikini Kill members Tobi Vail, Billy Karren and Kathi Wilcox in New York in 1992.

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Hanna (fourth from left) poses with Joan Jett (center) and Bikini Kill members Tobi Vail, Billy Karren and Kathi Wilcox in New York in 1992.

Steve Eichner/Ecco

On how she made her concerts a safe space for women and girls

We did things like handing out lyric sheets with the lyrics on them so other girls and women would know what the lyrics were and what the topic was, because a lot of times you couldn’t understand what I was saying to because of these shitty words. While I was singing, and sometimes even talking between songs, you couldn’t understand what I was saying. And so it’s a way for us to give them a souvenir to take home and read and think about and maybe disagree with that, so they start their own groups or it encourages them to write their own poetry or their own zines.

We also had zines that talked about many of the political issues of the time that we sold at our shows. We prioritized girls and women being front and center, because in most of the shows we were playing at the time, straight, cisgender white men were predominant and taking up all the space in the room. And we really selfishly wanted to build the community to have more girl groups to play with. And what’s going to happen if they’re all stuck in the back? …So I started inviting girls to the front. “Hey, do you want to come up front?” And then it became a thing. …It was like, what if we just rearrange this room a little bit? What’s going to happen? And what happened was a lot of men were really angry and hated us. But it was also an interesting experience.

During a drunken evening with Kurt Cobain, she graffitied a phrase that inspired the title of Nirvanathe first big success of

I took out a Sharpie marker and I just wrote “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” because me and Tobi (Vail) were in a grocery store and saw this new deodorant (it says) “Smells like teen spirit”, and we were like, this is hilarious. What does the adolescent mind smell like? …Sharpie marker and bulletin board? Does it smell like Mod Podge? What does it smell like? So we were just goofing on that. So it was in my head. And when I was drunk, he came out and I wrote, like, 10 other things on his wall – and he was renting, so it was a bad decision on my part. Not very nice or caring. And then he called me on the phone several months later and asked, “Can I use this in a song?” I didn’t even know that was going to be the title of a song. And I was like, “Yeah, sure, that’s great.”

Thea Chaloner and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.