In May of 1989, a junior at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, named Kathleen Hanna travelled to Seattle to meet Kathy Acker, a forty-two-year-old author she admired. Acker, who had written about abuse, incest, and other forms of sexual extremity, was conducting workshops at the Center on Contemporary Art. Hanna, then nineteen, bluffed her way into an interview. As reported in Sara Marcus’s carefully documented history, “Girls to the Front,” when Hanna explained that she was interested in spoken-word performance and in writing, Acker told her that she should be in a band: “There’s more of a community for musicians than for writers.”
Hanna felt rebuffed at first, but she ultimately took the advice. In 1990, after touring with a band called Viva Knievel, she formed a new group, eventually called Bikini Kill, with a drummer named Tobi Vail, whom Hanna knew from Olympia. Vail had been publishing and writing a feminist zine called Jigsaw, which Hanna admired. Hanna and Vail found bandmates in the bassist Kathi Wilcox, who had never been in a band before, and the guitarist Billy Karren. This led to both a small catalogue of recordings and the birth of the very sort of community that Acker was referring to. People often use the phrase “riot grrrl” as shorthand for the feminist music activism of the nineties, but sometimes they use it simply to refer to Bikini Kill. The group’s first two vinyl recordings are being reissued, twenty years after their initial release, on a label set up by the members to preserve their output. Even though the riot-grrrl community has come to dwarf the songs in historical memory—that was the point, really—the music is still a pungent tonic.
Bands like Gossip, who became pop stars (in England, at least), cite the influence of Bikini Kill and the riot-grrrl movement. Members of the Russian political collective Pussy Riot, two of whom are currently in prison for hooliganism, also cite the band’s impact. (Pussy Riot is known for wearing balaclavas during public actions; is it coincidence that Hanna wore one in “No Alternative Girls,” a short film, from 1994, by Tamra Davis?)
Although Hanna helped put together the first issue of the zine riot grrrl, in July of 1991, and was a member of the scene’s most intensely discussed band, she bristles at the suggestion that she was the movement’s leader. Collectives are like that—designed to create community—while the historical record often insists on seeing a generative process, with a single source, like the starter’s pistol that kicks off a race.
Throughout the decade, riot grrrl thrived between two poles—Olympia and Washington, D.C., Bikini Kill’s second home, where consciousness-raising meetings were held. Discussions often focussed on nonmusical issues: sexual abuse, feelings of insecurity, the lack of a female cohort. This started before the proliferation of bands and self-published zines that carried out the collective’s ideas.
The movement had obvious manifestations in things like Riot Grrrl Press tables selling zines at concerts and graffiti spray-painted on sidewalks (e.g., “George Stay Out of My Bush”), as well as in performers who weren’t necessarily linked in any way to riot grrrl but were perfect expressions of the spirit, and the day: PJ Harvey, Courtney Love, Madonna. Hanna is significant as a figure in the movement not simply because she is visible and charismatic but also because she packed so many issues into Bikini Kill’s brief career.
Hanna is one of America’s greatest living rock performers. If you’re pressed for time, start with the 1998 compilation “Singles,” though the first EP—included in the reissue—is one of the most durable punk records of the early nineties. Built from basic chording, it has a clenched, even beat and Hanna’s clutch of vocal personae: victim, abuser, avenging angel. Recorded mostly in single takes and without overdubs, the EP lasts only sixteen minutes.
Hanna didn’t simply become an impressive lead singer; rather, she seemed to be living the characters who passed through the riot-grrrl community. The voices that came up in the group meetings came out through her lyrics. On “Double Dare Ya,” the band plays bare-bones rock, three notes suspended between punk and something even more basic, like the garage rock that had been thriving in the Northwest since the sixties. Hanna moves quickly through personalities. She begins the song with a greaser’s taunt that could be lifted from “American Graffiti”: “Hey, girlfriend.” Next, she barks in steady bursts, and her tone moves closer to that of Poly Styrene, the fierce singer for the British band X-Ray Spex: “I got a proposition goes something like this. Dare you to do what you want, dare you to be who you will, dare you to cry right out loud.” And then she drops in the language of her opponents, something she does often: “You get so emotional baby”—the kind of gender-based dismissal that Bikini Kill wanted first to illuminate and then dismiss.
Hanna is occasionally footnoted as the woman who scrawled “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on Kurt Cobain’s bedroom wall, inspiring the song’s title a year before its release. (“There’s no big story besides I was being a drunk idiot,” she told Marcus.) Hanna, though, is her own ferocious entry, never marginal. One of the best places to sample this quality is her 1994 appearance in the video for Sonic Youth’s “Bull in the Heather” single. Signed in 1990 to Geffen Records, Sonic Youth represented one of the underground music movement’s important test cases: what happens when coastal weirdos meet flyover-state normals in the mall and on MTV?
Watching the video, one feels that it was all worthwhile, if only in giving Hanna the enormous audience she deserved. In pigtails, tights, and Keds, she hops about as the band mimes playing in a room. She’s like a seltzer bottle that was shaken for twenty years and opened minutes before filming. She flirts explicitly with each band member (kissing the bassist Kim Gordon first), and manages to blot out the band in its own video. It is impossible to watch anyone else when Hanna’s in the frame. In a few minutes, she sums up the work she’d been doing in Bikini Kill for several years. She embodies the sexuality embedded in rock, mocks it, switches tracks as needed, and obscures the point of her own performance. You sense that whatever you take away is laced, spiked, and timed to go off later.
Bikini Kill will eventually reissue not only the original records but DVDs of the group’s live performances. For now, you can watch the band’s beginnings, in footage of a show played in D.C. in April of 1992, months before the first record came out. (The footage is available on Bikini Kill’s YouTube channel.) A song performed at that April show called “Thurston Hearts The Who” ended up on the first EP, but the more interesting performance is of “Lil Red,” which didn’t officially come out until October of 1993, on the band’s first full-length album, “Pussy Whipped.” In the clip, Hanna strips off a white T-shirt, Sharpied with the words “RioT GrrrL,” to reveal a yellow-blue-and-white minidress over knee-high white boots. You might momentarily think, Austin Powers, but not for long. “These are my tits!” Hanna yells, and then, “This is my ass!,” as she turns to flip up her dress and quickly moon the crowd. She starts stomping in place as she yells, “And these are my legs!” She is double-daring you now to figure out what to do. She sexualizes herself before you can, dragging in one of childhood’s most sexualized characters, Little Red Riding Hood, and rewriting the wolf’s deceptive patter for this new Red: “These are my ruby red lips, the better to suck you dry. These are my long red nails, the better to scratch out your eyes.” The song, before its ninety seconds are up, mentions the “pretty girls” and their “side of things.” Like Hanna’s dress under the T-shirt, the song works as a distillation of the competition between women and the war against the familiar term “the male gaze,” which was then still gaining traction.
Despite the vitality of the performances, it seems inappropriate to judge Bikini Kill as simply a band when its project was part of a political and social awakening. Hanna says that young women often write to her, telling her that they want to revive the riot-grrrl moment. She responds, much as one of her mentors did once, with tough love: “Don’t revive it, make something better.” It may not even need music. ♦
