Kathleen Hanna Is a Riot

Like the feminist art she’s made for over 30 years — the incendiary punk anthems and DIY ballads, the electronic rock and blazing fanzines — Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life As a Feminist Punk, is by turns brutal and beautiful.

Hanna chronicles her creative genesis in the Olympia, Washington, underground alongside her bandmates in Bikini Kill, the scorched, epochal band that incited the ’90s punk-feminist movement known as riot grrrl, and later in Le Tigre, which brought that agenda to the dance floor. Evoking the very texture of pre-internet DIY — passing out lyric sheets at shows, mailing postcard flyers — Hanna writes through the miracle of humor, offering blunt cultural critique and staring trauma in the eye as she unflinchingly details the violence her “dream-killer of a dad” inflicted upon her early family life in Maryland. Her prose cuts and shimmers, particularly when she’s describing the music she made from the inside out. Singing “has never stopped being the tiny tornado I most want to be in,” she writes. As a child, it “was like figuring out I could make a rainbow appear on the wall just by staring at it.”

Today Hanna’s cultural impact is overwhelming. Tracing the influence of Bikini Kill’s third-wave countercultural art could begin with their Oly peers, including Nirvana — Hanna famously (drunkenly) scribbled “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on his bedroom wall with a Sharpie marker, titling the world-dominating song — and later Sleater-Kinney, but it continues across genres, mediums, generations.

A couple of nights before our first of two interviews, Bikini Kill’s signature girl-love anthem, “Rebel Girl,” filled Madison Square Garden as part of Olivia Rodrigo’s pre-show playlist: Its joyride hooks boomed right as the stage’s backdrop lit “GUTS” across the screen, and thousands of teen-girl screams filled the arena with Hanna’s own. When I mentioned I took a video of the moment, Hanna asked me to send it over so she could show her 11-year-old son: “He’ll be like, ’You’re still not cool.’” Musing on the process and pain of writing her revelatory memoir, Hanna is truly a riot, evidenced on almost every page of Rebel Girl and across the four hours she spent discussing the book from her home in Los Angeles.

In the book you write that, during Bikini Kill’s first incarnation, you only did two interviews with the press. I knew about what has been historicized as the riot grrrl media blackout — a collective effort to decline mainstream-media queries — but I was still a bit shocked to realize it was only two. What do you remember about those interviews?
A lot, actually. One was with L.A. Weekly, and it was about riot grrrl. A friend of a friend asked me. It was fine. The writer was really fun to talk to. But I do remember specifically lying about how huge riot grrrl was and acting like it was way bigger than 15 girls in D.C. I was like, I’m gonna lie and see what happens. So I just said, “Yeah, there are chapters everywhere.” The hope was that people would look for it and then when they didn’t find it, start their own. I know that in a lot of cases, that happened, and in a lot of cases people looked for it and gave up. [Laughs]

The second one was a doozy. It was either for NME or Melody Maker when we were going to tour with Huggy Bear in the U.K. It was put to us like, “You need to do this interview or we can’t really afford plane tickets. This’ll get people to the shows.” I didn’t want to do it because by then the way people were writing about us was pretty horrible. Anyway, it was at a restaurant two doors down from the club I was stripping at. It was a guy and right at the beginning, he asked, “How can you call yourself a feminist and be a stripper?” And questions about sexual assault that were really inappropriate. Like, “Have you been sexually assaulted? Can you tell me in detail?” It was every artists’ horror story of the worst questions, and they were all directed at me. I remember going to the bathroom and sitting in there like, I hope they’re finishing this ’cause I’m not coming out until it’s done.

That’s unconscionable. How do you feel about the decision not to talk to the press in retrospect?
The thing that’s strange for me is it’s been constantly written about as if it was this big conscious decision for Bikini Kill and for riot grrrl. That’s not how I remember it. For me, it was a mental-health protective thing. It was like, I literally cannot mentally keep going through this. When it started getting talked about in riot grrrl meetings — “we’re being misrepresented” — I was just like, “Well, then just let’s not answer ’em back.” I just threw it out as an idea. I didn’t make a proclamation. I wasn’t like Benjamin Franklin rolling out a tablet on my mountain and saying, “From henceforth no one in riot grrrl will …” Some people went with it and some people didn’t. I didn’t really give a shit what people did. I mean, if I saw articles that were total misinformation, it was sad, but I just knew that in the larger scheme of things, it wasn’t really that important. I just felt like the media is all bullshit anyway. A lot of times when people write about you, they’re really writing about themselves. I just take it with a grain of salt. I’ve read so many things about myself or people I know that are completely false.

When did you decide to write the book and what was your process of recovering memories like?
I started five or six years ago. I had to do it really slowly because it was super painful and awful, and I started going to therapy twice a week because of it. I got diagnosed with C-PTSD while I was working on it. So I took time off. I was figuring out how to process this mental diagnosis. I would get bummed out like, I don’t wanna finish it. I just wanna give my advance back. But then I’d remember how one of the things that has really helped me out is when other people have shared their stories. Hayley Williams from Paramore talked about being sexually harassed on the Warped Tour. It meant a lot to me that she spoke out because I’ve had similar situations, and I’m much older than her, but I felt validated by that. The idea that a younger person in a band could read some of the stories and feel validated was really important to me. And so that kind of kept me going.

The point of writing the book was partially that I wanna let a lot of this trauma stuff go. And I don’t really wanna talk about riot grrrl anymore, honestly. I’m bored of that conversation and I don’t want it to be the only thing I’m known for. I can talk about Bikini Kill every day of my life, but I wanted to tell those stories that I felt like telling, then be able to move on. There is something very practical about being like, I’m gonna tell this one fucking time. [Laughs] So I did it, and I went through all of the physical and emotional stress responses because of it, and I made it out the other side. It was a huge therapeutic cleanse for me.

Were you referring back to diaries or interviewing other people?
I didn’t use journals at all. In the very beginning, I tried. I pulled out all my journals, boxes and boxes, and brought them to my office. I opened them up and it was mainly quotations from books, me interrogating myself about privilege, drawings of outfits, and stuff about people I had huge crushes on that I was sure I was gonna throw myself off a mountain if I didn’t make out with them. It was kind of hilarious, but none of it was really helpful, and it was also massively embarrassing. I am planning a large bonfire for my journals at some point.

A lot of stuff came back to me as I was writing. There were things that were these really visceral memories, and part of it was super joyous. I got out all the vomit-y, bad trauma shit in early drafts, and then I was like, I need to balance this with some joy. I had to realize how much the trauma had blacked out the joy.

“Early in Bikini Kill, we were very conscious of not wanting to be a footnote in any male story” — Hanna, with Tobi Vail (right), at a Bikini Kill show, 1995.
Photo: Alice Wheeler

The book is this miraculous balance of humor and trauma. What were some precedents for you in striking that balance?
Almost every comedian does that: “Tragedy plus time equals comedy.” I see it everywhere. I love the comedian Hari Kondabolu. He takes these racist situations he’s been in and turns them into hilarious stories that are also painful and tragic and make you really mad. I’m a big fan of lemons to lemonade.

My mom is a very funny person, and she taught me to use humor as a way to survive. She has a wicked fucking sense of humor, and that really made her a person. If you can make people laugh, you’re an active agent in your own life. We always had weird private jokes with each other. That was most of our communication. The outside world may have seen my mom as: She’s a woman, she’s a nurse, she’s middle class. But I saw her as this larger-than-life hilarious-ass person. Having a woman like that in my life made me feel like I could be larger than life.

When I think about your work through the decades, I always think about language — being galvanized early on by text artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, moving into spoken-word performance, and how all of that informed your lyrics. In the section about Le Tigre in the book, you write about how language also communicates political context, and this kind of misogynist dismissal of “explaining” songs onstage: “‘Real’ bands let music speak for itself, but we introduced all our songs with language.” What was language doing for you as you were coming into being as a feminist artist?
I think it comes from very early experiences with my family. I was always treated like I was too much. When I would try to bring something up that felt very important, I would be dismissed as being a drama queen. It led me to feel like language was useless and nobody understood anything I said. That’s lasted my whole life. When I used to give lectures years ago, I was constantly finding myself saying, “Do you understand me?” to the audience. It was obvious what I was saying. I had pictures behind me and I was being very clear. But I always have this fear of being misunderstood. And I think that really led me to wanting to write lyrics that kind of shot through stuff and just said the fuckin’ thing.

Girls in the scene didn’t even feel like they had a right to be there and I wanted to address that and be like, “Look, this is happening.” That’s where Girls to the Front came from. I just wanted to, in a quick, interesting way, address the fact that at that time when we started playing shows, typically there were like four women there and they were all in the back. That was then, now is different. But to just cut through the bullshit and say something like Girls to the Front, that’s using language to actually disrupt a situation that is naturalized in the room.

From left: JD Samson, Hanna, and Johanna Fateman, of Le Tigre, 2023.
Photo: Ellen Qbertplaya

Later, when I did a solo record and then with Le Tigre, I was getting frustrated with the limitations of language because I saw that so many things we did got turned into a one-liner about empowerment. When you start to see all these people’s work get put together with a bumper sticker that says “Girls kick ass,” you’re like, no, there’s nuance and variation and all these bands are different. You can’t write about them like they’re the same just because they happen to care about the state of the world. I started to feel like I’d been trying so hard to be understood that I forgot about how beautiful language can be when it’s kind of abstract and not necessarily linear.

To me this was something really important that ran through the book — I was trying to talk about the different ways you can use language and that there are so many different opportunities to do that. My personal experiences with language are very heavy to me. My relationship with language is as important as my relationship with my husband.

What was the first time you wrote a lyric that you felt like really shot through?
A lot of them felt that way to me at the time. We were operating within a scene that wasn’t necessarily super welcoming to feminist content. Boys in the scene treated any lyric I wrote as if it was an arrow directed at them. When actually it had nothing to fuckin’ do with them at all. But you know, if the shoe fits. But I wasn’t really thinking about men that much at all when I was writing. I was writing for other women.

“Double Dare Ya” definitely felt like a breakthrough. I wrote this song called “Daddy’s Little Girl” — “Daddy’s little girl doesn’t wanna be his whore no more” — and it felt like a really outta-control thing to sing that live. It felt super cringe, but it also felt really powerful.

What do you remember about writing “Feels Blind”?
“Feels Blind” is a poem I wrote when I was 16 or 17 that I turned into a song. I wrote that after this adult man hit on me when I was like 16. He was a scientist and a friend of an adult in my life. I’d been hanging out with him, and he read all these smarty-pants books and I was reading like, Sufferings of Young Werther, and I thought I was pretty fuckin’ cool and smart. So he was telling me books that I should read and I was reading them and discussing them with him. We were drinking, which should have been a red flag. Then he hit on me. I was lucky he didn’t pursue it when I said no, but I felt really demoralized and sad. I thought he really liked me as an intellectual. I was like, Oh, he just wants to get in my pants, I’m just a body. I was super drunk and I stayed up and wrote that in my notebook. I wrote poetry all the time since I was really young. It was just the first verse of the song that came from that poem.

I love the way you write about your relationship with Tobi Vail, describing the beginning of Bikini Kill and being in Tobi’s apartment, reading bell hooks and Angela Davis together, and loving independent record labels but hating capitalism. Were you having any mutual intellectual epiphanies at that moment in time?
One of the big epiphanies was the different ways that our minds worked. I was always thinking more psychologically, like, How does the world affect our personal psychology? How does our personal psychology then affect the world? And she had a way smarter class perspective than I did. I always turned around to look back out, but it was a different way of processing the world. I was universalizing more, writing from this place of, “Hey, girlfriend!” or “This is for all girls!” And she always wrote from this specific viewpoint of like: “Take out a piece of paper, put your name up in the corner.” I felt like a lot of her songs were more impactful to me because I could hear the person in it.

The book includes so many incredible details about Bikini Kill and Nirvana’s friendship. Bikini Kill made its first demo tape on discarded Bleach cassettes that Kurt gave you; the photo on the cover of Bleach was taken during a show at your gallery, Reko Muse; Tobi was once asked to be the drummer of Nirvana. You write about your and Kurt’s joint mission as “feminist vigilantes” defacing a “fake abortion clinic.” How did your bands mutually influence each other?
I just know I loved being in the audience of their shows. It was addictive. If I heard they were playing, I wanted to be there. I can only speak for myself, but I was influenced by them in terms of wanting to play good shows live. I wanted to be a band that when we played a party, everybody came together and got really sweaty and had a great time.

Early in Bikini Kill, we were very conscious of not wanting to be a footnote in any male story. But we were in the scene at the same time. Kurt dated Tobi. Everybody would put together bands and play at parties — I think Billy and Tobi and Kurt were in a band. To me the important thing is you can have friends in bands who play really different music than you, and you still respect each other.

I loved learning more about your 1998 solo album, released as Julie Ruin. My favorite from that record is “VGI” — “Valley Girl Intelligentsia” — where you sing “I’m a masterpiece / I’m a philosopher / I wear a scrunchie.” The scrunchie-clad philosopher is an important addition to the lexicon of girl genius. What informed that song?
In the ’90s, there was this whole “don’t sell out” thing. Even just playing a show with the Go-Gos that was sponsored by Budweiser was considered an absolutely horrible thing for Bikini Kill to do. Everything I did as a person was massively scrutinized to such a bananas extent that it felt impossible to do anything anymore within that band. When I started writing on my own, I let go and did whatever the fuck I wanted. I was like, Man, I’m in my twenties, and ostensibly me and my friends started a fucking movement. Fuck all you fuckers. [Laughs] So I was doing something that felt absolutely off-limits, which was writing, “I’m great.” That record for me was sort of like if you’re a writer and you learn how to type as fast as your thoughts. I was learning to make music fast enough to keep up with my brain so I could get my ideas out.

Whenever I did a radio interview, someone would call up and make fun of my voice for being a Valley Girl. People made fun of my voice in articles. Women academics would be like, “Oh my God, you read?” when they would find out that I actually read books, just ’cause I have this accent and I do the upswing at the end of a question. I have a Maryland accent that’s also influenced by the Valley Girl Handbook ’cause we wanted to sound rich and we thought rich girls sounded like that. [Laughs] That does not mean I’m stupid.

I started thinking, What does it mean that young women who have certain kinds of accents are completely diminished as idiots? There’s all different kinds of people who are diminished because of their accents. It was frustrating. To speak back to that felt super powerful. And it’s stealing from Tobi again — she made up these words like “hypocobrats,” ’cause everybody called us hypocrites, and it was like, “No, we’re actually intellectual punk-rockers.”

You describe the writing of your song “Rebel Girl” — of course I knew Joan Jett produced the single version of the song, but you note that you also had Joan in mind when you were actually writing it. How did Joan influence the song itself?
I didn’t formally know her yet. It was more the fact that this woman who I revered so much had taken the time to pick up the phone and call a not-very-well-known punk band and be supportive. She could have just not done that; she was pretty busy. It made me feel like, Oh, I am a part of something bigger. It was like, “Hey kids, you’re on the right track.” Joan lived in Rockville, Maryland, which was not very far from where I lived as a kid — maybe it’s that we both come from Maryland, but from the very first time I talked to her, I knew we were gonna be friends. She also totally reminds me of my older sister. For all the issues I may have with my sister, she’s definitely a fighter. Joan is the loveliest person in the world, but she doesn’t take fuckin’ shit.

About the writing of “Rebel Girl,” you wrote, “I realized this song was already written. I just had to reach up and grab the lyrics.” Is there a songwriting lesson in that? 
I felt like the community spirit of things that were happening at the time, like the women in the scene who were taking back space, who were starting bands that were inspiring me, my friends who were inspiring me, people who were showing up outta nowhere and helping me when I needed help, like Joan — these women who showed up at the right time to make me feel like, you can’t give up. Those moments and those people were in the room at that moment and wrote the song. I was a vessel for it. That was one of the only times I wrote a song where I was like, I like this, right away. The songwriting lesson is I stepped out of the way of the song. I didn’t overthink it. I let myself open my mouth and see what happened. I trusted my band not to laugh at me.

What’s another song you liked immediately after writing it?
I really liked “Hot Topic.” I remember writing that in a basement on Mott Street in New York. We had gotten the instrumentation together and the drumbeat. I remember as I was hitting on the backup vocal part being like, I love what that sounds like. I love the way the verse cuts through on top of it. This is the right direction.

Bikini Kill in a cow pasture, 1991.
Photo: Katie Sinback

What bands do you find interesting today? What have you been reading that inspires you?
I like Lambrini Girls. I like Gustaf. I listen to Lana Del Rey a lot. I think she represents a new way of absorbing information. It’s almost like a really smart person trying to deal with a constant influx of stuff and then turning them into these beautiful dramatic scenes. Her songs are almost like dioramas that have a lot of drapery in them.

I wanna see Paramore live so bad. I was watching tons of videos of Paramore on tour. I went down this Paramore wormhole. She’s such a magnetic performer and her singing is just great. I don’t know how she keeps her voice in shape. I really wanna chitchat with her about that someday.

I’ve been reading mostly stuff by people I’m gonna be doing the book tour with as moderators, Brontez Purnell’s book 10 Bridges I Burnt. I actually read this right as I was turning in the final draft of my book, and it totally saved my life. There’s this final poem in it at the back and it became like my mantra. It says “Eulogy: the encyclopedia / of my scandals / and failures / will always be / a more substantial read / than the pamphlet of your success / I bet money, bitch / on who will ring immortal / I will echo with reverb.” I was feeling like, What if I TMI’d in the book? What’s gonna happen? People are gonna kill me. My family’s gonna hate me. And then I would just read that every day, and I was like, What a moment that I got his book. I’m also inspired by that compilation book Black Punk Now, and I’ve been rereading Your Art Will Save Your Life, by Beth Pickens.

Do you hear any of your songs differently after excavating all of these memories?
Playing them live, definitely. “For Tammy Rae” now brings me back to being on the bus going from my stripping job to my restaurant job. I was trying to avoid this annoying Christian lady and in avoiding her, I started writing in my journal and I wrote this kind of song. I smile during “Double Dare Ya” remembering being in my white jacked-up truck. I didn’t even remember that until I started writing the book, and I was like, Oh yeah, that’s how that song was written. That was kind of my first songwriting practice: I would listen to a bunch of Nirvana, then I would put in the tape of our practice that had like, the instrumental on it, and I would start singing to it and goofing around with it, and ’cause it was a truck, it had that small cab. The way my voice came back to me sounded really nice. So it gave me a lot of confidence.

When you’re in Santiago onstage, or in Lima, Peru, and everyone’s singing the lyrics with you, and you’re like, I wrote that when I was like 22 in my fuckin’ truck on my way to practice — and how amazing is it now that I’m standing in front of thousands of people so far away from home and they all know the words? How the fuck did that happen? I definitely never imagined I’d be 55 years old standing there singing it and feeling a new revitalized energy toward it. I’m just so much more appreciative and grateful that I’m able to be onstage. To hear all these kids screaming about how they know they have rights — it feels radical in a whole different way.

You wrote these songs when you were in your early 20s, which is a real testament to how the things that happen to us when we’re young matter and shape us and take on new resonances.
You should listen to a Blink-182 record sometime — because those guys were very impacted by girls who didn’t return their affections in high school and they will never get over it. We’re touring at the same time as them, and whenever people ask, “Do you still feel the songs?” I am always like, “Ask them,” because I don’t know how they can sing about being rejected for a date by a girl in high school or — I don’t know what their songs are about, actually, but I think a common theme is, “Nobody likes me and I’m the guy that people don’t like,” “I’m immature and dumb.” Our songs got more relevant, but how do you get up and sing a Blink-182 song when you’re like 50, 60 years old?

“I definitely never imagined I’d be 55 years old standing there singing ‘Double Dare Ya’ and feeling a new revitalized energy toward it.”
Photo: Jason Frank Rothenberg

You write that, toward the end of the ’90s, you came to realize that, rather than an activist, you were “a musician who worked on the cultural front.” What does it mean to you now to be a musician on the cultural front?
Everybody was always saying, “She’s an activist. She’s not a musician.” Part of it makes sense because when I first started playing music and would get interviewed in fanzines, people would ask me my influences. I would say “the 14 women who were murdered by Marc Lépine at the technical school in Montreal.” That was something recent that had happened: A man walked into a college and separated the men from the women and then systematically murdered 14 women. In almost every retelling of the story, this was not seen as domestic terrorism against women or a crime against women. It was just seen as “He’s a crazy guy.”

That story influenced me because of the women who lost their lives who had the right to be wherever they fucking wanted to be. The fact that they were killed in the process of gaining an education particularly struck me. So when I was asked about my influences, I thought it was important to say: Everyone’s not just influenced by bands. I’m influenced by whether I ate today or not. I’m influenced by the Anita Hill hearing. So I can see why people got the perception that I was an activist and not a musician. For a long time, I thought of myself as a performance artist probably more than a musician or an activist.

But at a certain point I was like, I’m a musician on the cultural front. I’m not actually an activist who is leading the way to bills being passed. But I’ve been told by countless people that our music allowed them to find the thing they really wanna do and are good at. And they’re like, “I saw myself in what you made and that gave me the courage to continue.” Or, “You guys created this soil for my thing to grow in.” I can be happy with helping create that soil that people can grow in.

When you met Kathy Acker, she asked you why you write, and you said, “Because no one’s listened to me my whole life and I really wanna be heard.” When was the last time you felt like you were really heard?
Do you know Fabi Reyna? She did She Shreds and she’s a musician, she’s gonna interview me in Portland about the book. We don’t really know each other so we did a pre-interview, get-to-know-each-other kind of thing. I felt very seen and heard by her. She asked, “What happens when you’re victimized in some way, but you learn something from it?” No one who is victimized in any way — or deals with oppression in the myriad of ways people deal with oppression — asked for it. But there’s shame around the fact that you may get something out of being victimized.

There’s something lucky about looking out in the landscape of underground music and being like, “Hey, not a lot of people are singing about these particular topics, there’s such an open field.” It’s like having 20 blank canvases prepared for you. There was so much that hadn’t been written about yet, in the scene I was in, and there’s something lucky in that positionality. I was like, Well, someone has to write about this. I’ve never had to search for material. I’ve never been bored. Life has thrown too much at me to ever get bored or complacent. I have more empathy for other people, and I have a real commitment to dealing with my trauma so I don’t put it off on other people.

There’s a certain relief when your purpose feels clear.
Yeah, like thank God I felt silenced for 17 years of my life because once I opened my mouth, I just couldn’t stop.

As riot grrrl historian Sara Marcus notes in 2011’s Girls to the Front, early mainstream-press coverage of the movement brimmed “with condescension and overt hostility.”

Former Bikini Kill guitarist Billy Karren.

When Hanna met the beloved experimental novelist at a writing workshop in Seattle, Acker told Hanna, “You should start a band. Most people go outside and smoke when someone gets up to do spoken word, but people wanna see bands.”