About a Grrrl
The riot grrrl pioneer behind Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin talks bedroom culture, mentors over idols, and what she tells the women storming the stage after her.
Feminism is a hate movement.” When we first ran this story, that phrase was the third most searched result on Google for anyone typing “feminism is a…” Plenty of people still believe gender equality is about hate. We like to pat ourselves on the back and say we’ve come a long way.
But how far have we really come since 1990? That’s the year Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox and Kathleen Hanna formed Bikini Kill, an Olympia, Washington band on a mission to carve out space for women in punk. Ask Hanna to sum up her music and activist career in five words and she doesn’t hesitate: “Feminist theory meets punk rock.”
So what is feminism?
Like a lot of -isms, it gets misread. So we asked her.
“I think it means fighting to end the oppression for all people,” Hanna told Meets Obsession. “For me it starts with challenging the binary definitions of male and female. That dichotomy is too extreme and too oppressive. But the only way to end sexism is to challenge everything at the same time. It’s not just white women climbing up the equality ladder. We have to confront racism head on, and homophobia is also connected to sexism. It focuses so much on hating the feminine, and if we don’t end homophobia, or racism, then we don’t end sexism.”
Hanna has been called a pioneer of riot grrrl, a co-creator of grrrl power long before the Spice Girls ever zigazig ah’d, and a feminist icon. Bikini Kill kick-started the riot grrrl movement of the ’90s, and her later electroclash band Le Tigre never buckled under public scrutiny. In Bikini Kill she created and enforced a “girls to the front” rule at shows, sending the men to the back so women, on stage and off, had a safe place to enjoy the music.
Through every lineup, from Vail and Wilcox to Le Tigre’s Johanna Fateman and JD Samson, she never lost sight of her values.
There were a thousand more just like it that would never be shared.
Bedroom culture
When we spoke, Hanna was back after more than five years of near radio silence. Her new band The Julie Ruin had just finished its first national tour, and The Punk Singer, Sini Anderson’s documentary about her life, had just hit theaters. The Julie Ruin isn’t chasing the same political buttons as her earlier work, but she’s just as fired up as she was two decades before.
“I want to support the work of other feminist artists,” she says. “Everything I’ve done is possible because of the feminists who’ve come before me and those who were working alongside me. And now I have a bunch of younger girls, Grimes, Dum Dum Girls, who are inspiring me as well. That’s such a great thing.”
If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Hanna recycled it. As Bikini Kill slowly came apart, she recorded her first electro album in her bedroom under the alias Julie Ruin.
“Back before the Internet, there was this secret creativity burgeoning in girls’ bedrooms that never saw the light of day,” she says of what she calls bedroom culture. “I was afraid everyone would hate Julie Ruin, but I knew for this one project that I made in my bedroom, I recorded the vocals in my closet, there were a thousand more just like it that would never be shared.”
The opposite happened. In The Punk Singer, her husband, Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, says it was one of the first recordings that truly sounded like her.
“While I was in Bikini Kill I thought of myself as a female performance artist playing the part of a girl in a band,” says Hanna, who credits performance artist Karen Finley as a major influence on her career and her life. “It took a lot of moxie and gumption to release Julie Ruin, but I wanted to put something out that sounded raw, so that people wouldn’t throw away the art they created.” Fittingly, Dum Dum Girls also started as a bedroom recording.
Mentors, not idols
So who left the biggest mark on her? Along with Finley, Hanna names writer and activist bell hooks, whose work “changed my life,” and Kathy Acker, who told her to start a band.
“I wrote an intro to one of Karen’s books, I’ve hung out with her, and I still look up to her,” says Hanna, who has also worked closely with icons like Kurt Cobain and Joan Jett. “By now I’ve worked with Joan Jett for so long that I look up to her like a slightly older sister, but I don’t idolize her anymore. It’s been nice to no longer have idols and just have mentors.”
Don’t get it twisted, though. She still gets starstruck.
“I ran into one artist at a party and had a nervous breakdown. I’ve been obsessed with her for 15 years and I didn’t know I was going to meet her. I cried,” she says. “Everyone still has those people. And I don’t want to brag, but when people come up to me and say ‘you changed my life’ or ‘you helped me through my adolescence’ or ‘you turned me on to feminism,’ it’s the biggest form of flattery. I love that I am that person to somebody.”
In the end, she hopes she pushed people to dig into the history of activism, the roots of racism and the methods of unionizing. “I really hope I brought people to women’s studies and encouraged them to read their own histories.”
Advice for the next grrrls
For women in feminist punk bands following her lead, Hanna has a few words.
“Follow the trail of bread crumbs in your own head.”
“There’s always bullshit work that goes along with it, rude, offensive journalists who are going to write about what you look like and not what you sound like, and you just need to smile at them and be nice, because you don’t want them to mess up your sound on stage. And sometimes that means kissing someone’s ass even if they treat you like shit.” Speaking from experience: she and the other riot grrrl bands lived through a media blackout in the ’90s.
“Avoid reading your press or comments on the Internet. Just remember, the most important thing is your art.”
From the MO print archive: this interview first ran in The Punk Issue of Meets Obsession Magazine. Watch The Punk Singer, Sini Anderson’s documentary on Hanna, for the full story.
Keep it loud
