Kathleen Hanna Is Still a Riot

Kathleen Hanna’s legend precedes itself. As a punk musician for more than 30 years in Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, and the Julie Ruin, and as one of the progenitors of the riot grrrl movement in the 1990s, Hanna’s become a figurehead for a certain underground strain of feminist righteousness, emphasizing the collectivity that’s crucial for making any movement successful. But she’s an artist first, and the past few years have been fruitful.

She's been on tour with Bikini Kill practically non-stop since 2019, and this May, Hanna released her first memoir, Rebel Girl, which chronicles her journey as a punk singer and political symbol. It’s a profoundly frank, open chronicle of one woman’s experiences in the sexist, bro-coded punk music landscape of the ’90s and 2000s. Viewed holistically, it’s also the humanistic document of being a certain kind of woman star who is nearly canonized as a figurehead. Reading it for the second time before we spoke, I thought about Chappell Roan and the parasocial relationships fans who so desperately need an outlet can create, sometimes to the point of destruction. For decades, Hanna has been able to scream where a lot of young women felt like they couldn’t.

Bikini Kill wrapped up another round of touring in September, and Hanna is settling into further projects, including new music, working on her charity T-shirt line Tees 4 Togo, and finishing a documentary she’s making about her cousin, Darcelle XV, the world’s oldest performing drag queen when she died last year at 93. (Darcelle was also the purveyor and namesake of the legendary drag cabaret in Portland, Oregon.) Hanna and I spoke about her book, rejoining Bikini Kill, and the “elasticity of time,” as she put it.

For what it’s worth, my favorite Bikini Kill song has been “Strawberry Julius” since 1998.

I want to ask you about the artistic process of writing a book versus making music. I imagine you finished the book a while ago now. Has your relationship to it changed since it’s come out?

Kathleen Hanna: I finished it pretty much right before people got it; I was working up until the day it was printed, making changes. But I think my relationship to my own life has changed because of it. I was so stressed out, and I feel so fucking relieved—not even that it was well-received, though that’s wonderful. There’s this feeling—and I’m sure as a writer, you have this too, before you put out a piece—like, Am I gonna get stoned in the town square? I didn’t even allow myself to catastrophize, like: People are gonna say I’m a liar, or someone’s gonna sue me, or nobody’s gonna care about it. I didn’t really think of those things till later. I’m lucky that I have a lot going on all the time.

But I feel really relieved; it’s actually improved my relationship with my mom and her partner, because now these things have kind of been said. I did an interview with a podcaster today, and I kind of felt like, Oh god, did I just fucking TMI to the whole world, and now I’m soaking in my own TMI. But once it’s done and it’s out in the world, it’s not mine anymore. I’m just so thankful. I got to go on a book tour and meet some of the coolest fucking people that I’ve wanted to meet, and have some weird public conversation with Lindy West about, like, fairy tales and Doritos. It was so fun, with real writers taking me seriously and asking me questions about my process.

It’s a different beast than music and the way that people talk about books versus the way people talk about you if you’re the frontperson for a band—because as a frontperson for your band, it’s like my body is on the front line of my artistic output. The thing I loved about the book was that I could say all these really intense things, and I wasn’t there.

Something truly staggering is that the same things that you were railing against in the ’90s are still happening. I remember 1992, the March on Washington for abortion rights. What is it like to be touring in the same band that you were in in 1992, and yet 30 years later we have fewer abortion rights? Like, how? Like, what the fuck.

It’s just a big “I told you so.” I mean, it’s absolutely insane. We’ve played Rock for Choice shows since we first started, and we’ve played shows for Planned Parenthood since we first started, and we’ve played for domestic violence shelters since we first started.

I remember thinking, It can’t be worse than this—and every generation since, thinking, It can’t be worse than this. When Bush Jr. got elected, I remember being like, I’m getting my head under the covers and not coming out, and then it just got worse and worse. But I will say it’s made the songs really feel very vital—and that is a huge reason why we did a big reunion tour that lasted three fucking years.

But it was also because I let go of so much with the book. I was able to go on tour and just be a person on tour, and really have fun and listen to the things my voice could do, and work on improving what my voice can do and changing the songs a little to keep them interesting for me. Every night I would just be like, I’m playing a basement show in Olympia. And we went to Olympia! We got the key to the city.

Wait, you legit got the key to the city? 

Yeah! And an apology. It was like a proclamation. And the mayor was just like, “We want to acknowledge that Bikini Kill has had this cultural effect beyond Olympia and Washington State, and we’re very proud.” And then it was like, “We would also like to acknowledge that you were doing this work in our town and we, the city of Olympia, did not support or acknowledge you.” [Note: Verbatim, the proclamation reads, “Whereas the City of Olympia acknowledges that during the formative years of the Riot Grrrl movement, we did not recognize the significance of the movement, the power of the message behind the music and the revolutionary artists creating it.”]

Me and my friends ran Reko Muse—it was a $5, all-ages venue, and we did feminist art and community art projects for the city for free. In an early draft of the book, I had a section about this comedy club that was trying to get us shut down by the city. And they would send this guy from Crackers—it was a comedy club, and their logo was a Groucho Marx drawing. It was like, “Crackers, really?” But he was a big-wig in the community or whatever, and he kept sending the cops to shut us down. I had a whole thing about, “We didn’t even have comedy—unless you call white hardcore guys comedy.” At the end of [the passage in the book], it was like, “They kept trying to shut us down. They should have given us the key to the fucking city.” And that didn’t make it in, but I actually got the key to the city! A really full-circle thing.

But somehow, the early songs that me and [Bikini Kill members] Tobi Vail and Kathi Wilcox wrote— “This Is Not a Test,” “Double Dare Ya,” “Feels Blind,” “Carnival”—every night when I sang those, it was like a fucking time machine. I felt transported back to the garage, the practice space at Tobi’s parents’ house. I remembered exactly the feeling where I was standing, where they were, when it was just the three of us. To have that physically in me while I was singing—remembering that feeling of when the words first came out, or it was like the 10th time we practiced it and we were getting excited about what the song was—and then to look out and there’s like 3,000 people singing the words back to me and jumping up and down. And there’s 12-year-olds there and 70-year-olds there. It was pretty great to have that simultaneous experience. It was such an upper with what’s going on.

Politically?

Yeah. I did this selfishly because I’ve been politically depressed for many, many, many years, as many of us have. And we’re depressed about something we really cannot control. I mean, we can vote, we can protest, which is really important, but people are dying in parking lots of sepsis. I just really want the conversation to expand about abortion. People have always been dying of illnesses that are curable. People who don’t have money have always been dying. Black and brown people have disproportionately been dying because they don’t have healthcare, or their healthcare sucks, or they’re treated like they don’t need medication. Not to speak past myself, but it’s from statistics and what I know from friends, and it’s like—that’s always happened. And so it sort of bugs me that the abortion thing gets removed from healthcare in general, because when you talk about women dying in parking lots, there’ve been people dying in parking lots before.

I know what you mean. It’s the same thing as when politicians started caring about opioid overdoses when it started happening more to white people. This is sort of an aside, but I’ve been thinking about how, as I get more comfortable in middle age, I am reconciling things that happened in my 20s and even my teen years. And I’m wondering if, between the tour and writing the book and thinking about your life, have you started thinking about your experiences in a new way?

Oh, yeah. I mean, it was way worse than I thought. I grew up in a family where my dad had me wrap a dead rat in a box to send to a political rival in the labor union, because he was the head of the labor union. We had to go to school with black-tinted windows on our car because my dad’s office got shot up by someone from a union who was trying to kill my dad. I just grew up in this atmosphere where it felt like anything fucked up could happen.

My dad was a mean person, didn’t know how to talk to children, over-sexualized me and my sister, all that kind of stuff. And so I didn’t really have a gauge for what was normal. You grow up the way you grow up, and you kind of think the same thing’s probably happening everywhere, because you don’t know anything else. And most of my friends had dysfunctional families too. When you’re in that situation, you don’t know. 

So when I was writing the book, I kept having to check in with my husband and be like, “So like, wrapping a dead rat in a box—that’s not a normal thing that you ask an 8-year-old to do?” He was like, “Absolutely not.” And I’m like, “OK, so you’re 16, and your dad’s trying to get you to sleep in his bed with him again, and he’s guilt-tripping you.” He’s like, “No, that’s not normal.” And it’s not that there’s a normal and abnormal, because from what I’ve seen—and maybe it’s just my narrow viewpoint because of what my job is—people have trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma, trauma. And not just one neatly bound trauma, which is why I try to write about a lot of different incidents—that it’s not just one thing. 

There’s some people who are like, “Oh, [the book is] overwhelming. It’s too much trauma.” And it’s like: I left half of it out. And I feel like a lot of people have been like, “It’s totally relatable.” [I heard from people who were] date raped five times in high school, and I was only raped in high school three times, you know what I mean? Obviously it’s not like a quantifiable thing, but I really started being like, OK. 

And also, because of Me Too, I had already started relooking at stuff and being like, Oh, wait. Even though I was in Bikini Kill and I was being like, superhero feminist on stage or whatever, in my personal life I was experiencing a lot of stuff that wasn’t great. Backstage, we were experiencing so much severe sexism, and then even from other women who were constantly like, “You’re not doing it right,” or, “You’re man-haters.” 

One of the great things about your book was reading about the stories behind songs that I’ve listened to for years, and being like whoa. But the stories came through in the songs, even if they weren’t explicit. 

When I first was doing Le Tigre and I would get asked questions about Bikini Kill, I realized that I had written songs for my future self and for my past self in Bikini Kill—and then they’d come true. I’d written about things like, “I want to be the person who is this,” and then I became that. Or like an issue that I was dealing with in my life that I wasn’t ready to face, but I could write a song about it without even knowing that’s what I was writing about. And I was still facing those same core issues when I finally got like a steady therapist. Because I moved to New York, so I had to get a therapist. [laughs] 

We’re talking about the elasticity of time and writing songs. I’m just gonna put it how I actually experience it: When I’m on stage now, it’s way less violent. There’s been some hecklers. There’s been a little bit of groping and having to kick some people out. But way less. And we also have people that we’re working with who protect us—our tour manager, our stage manager. So now I’m not dealing directly with men who work at the club acting like I’m not a real person. 

And then there’s the audiences being so enthusiastic and having such a good time and not throwing stuff at us. This is how the world has changed, even while all this other stuff has gone backwards. This is how my experience of being a feminist musician has changed. For the first time on tour, I was able to close my eyes and really inhabit the music, because I wasn’t looking at the audience to see if someone had a wine glass in their hand to throw. That happened in Le Tigre: I was in Canada and I saw a wine glass being handed to someone, and I was like, That’s gonna come for my head. I just knew it. And 10 seconds later, the dude threw it. I did an H.R. from Bad Brains, and, like, moved my head and kept singing, because I’m cool like that. 

I don’t have to do that at these shows. We wrote these songs 30 years ago, and I was finally able to physically inhabit them in a different way than I was while I was scanning the audience for violence, because I didn’t have to do that. I was able to find a line between communicating with the audience and inhabiting the music. I used to feel like really inhabiting the music was me being some wanky Eric Clapton asshole who was like, masturbating on stage for my own enjoyment. And I was like, You know what? You’re never going to be that. That’s just not who you are. Stop. It’s not one or the other. It’s not like you don’t give a shit at all and you’re just doing it to wank off, or you’re completely present, looking at everything for violence, helping everybody in the audience, and you’re not really even having a good time, and you’re screaming the lyrics to just get them out. 

Things have changed, in a good way, for me as a feminist performer. Worldwide, things have gotten to a really retrogressive, backwards place. But in that space, things have changed enough that I could inhabit the material in a way I was never able to do before. It’s almost like the book: I feel like I finally completed my mission. I got the thing that I was searching for, where I was able to do both: enjoy the music and enjoy the audience. And that’s because time changed, and so the music changed for me, because I felt it different. I enjoy performing it way more now than I did in the ’90s. 

And not having to do that opens the space up for you to do things like mess around with how the song sounds or what your voice does.

Or change the lyrics.

How do you change the lyrics? 

There’s language I use that I’m not comfortable using anymore, that I would change a lyric because I’m like, “That’s not cool.” Or I would just put “Kathi” or “Sarah” in the song to make them laugh. That’s a big part of touring for me, just trying to make them laugh while we’re on stage, because, like, Kathi will not laugh on stage. It’s like a game show: Can I make her laugh this time? It’s become the running joke that she’s the stunning bass player—she’s pretty deadpan on stage and she smiles but, you know, everyone’s like, Whoa, Kathi’s so mysterious. And then I’m the weird, goofy one. 

When I think about all your music, it does feel like there’s a sense of—at least we can change this one thing, if not the whole entire world. How do you think of your art in relation to making things better? Or do you?

Yeah, of course. I think a lot about how good things and bad things ripple out in the world. With writing, you have to start with love. For me, it can’t be a hateful endeavor. It’s pointless. I don’t want to live in that space vault, it takes too long to write a book. But I feel like it’s a part of creating soil that shit can grow in. Like, I’m not changing any policies or bills on a government level. But especially live, because live performance has been the thing that is the most important to me as a musician, from what I see, there are thousands of people in the room and no one is fighting. There’s a really joyous atmosphere of people moving their bodies together and listening to music. There’s very few places that we can feel connected to each other—protests, shows—where you're kind of being sexual and embodied in a public place, and not just in a two-person relationship. It’s like your body is a part of this whole thing. I feel like I’m a part of creating joyous moments, or moments of connection that hopefully people get hooked on, and they want to feel that connection again. 

How did you think about where you wanted to end the book? 

It was weird. The last page is sort of about playing the first concert back with Le Tigre and smoking a couple cigarettes. I didn’t want to end on this totally upbeat note—I wanted to end on this work in progress. Actually my sober birthday, including nicotine, is October 26, for two years.

Oh my gosh, congratulations.

I quit all of that while writing the book, which is the biggest achievement to me. A friend of mine wanted me to end the book on my son coming up to me and saying, “You got this, mom.” I didn’t want to end it with this like, “... and now I have my nuclear family.” Even though I have a kid, and I love my kid, I still feel like a single person also. I am a mom, and I work very hard at that part of my life, it’s really important to me to do good at that job. But I don’t see that as my identity.

I’m trying to find better coping [mechanisms] at being OK. Being like, Hey, maybe the show wasn’t great, but it was the best it could be. I did it, and I’m gonna go and do better next time. That’s how life really is to me.