T Magazine | Entertainment
Kathleen Hanna Revisits Her Riot Grrrl Past
When the riot grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna recently dug up some of her earliest work — the first demo cassette she recorded in 1991 with her band Bikini Kill, which has been remastered and is being reissued this month as “Revolution Girl Style Now” — she was a little nervous. “I thought I was going to hate it. I thought I was going to be like, ‘Oh, God, this is so embarrassing,’” she says with a laugh. “These were the first songs we ever wrote; and that tape was made primarily to send to promoters, to try to get shows. It wasn’t even made as a product that we were trying to sell in stores.”
Thankfully, the experience proved less mortifying than hilarious. “I was just laughing the whole way through,” Hanna says. “It just sounds like people who are experimenting and goofing around. Listening to a much younger me, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe I just did that.’” And after some mixing help from Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto (who happens to be her bandmate Kathi Wilcox’s husband), “Revolution Girl Style Now” emerges as something else altogether: a portrait of a nascent band just beginning to figure out what it wants to be. It’s a picture that might surprise fans of the frenetic, throaty feminine subversion for which Bikini Kill would become famous — many songs on the album, including “Ocean Song,” a previously unreleased track premiering here, lean more in a grunge direction. “To hear this material kind of shows the link that we had to the Northwest and to the music scene there; I really love that, because I feel like a lot of times, that gets lost,” Hanna says. “It’s kind of written about like, ‘these freak feminist anomalies who sprung up out of nowhere.’ We actually were friends with people in so-called grunge bands, even though nobody called themselves grunge bands.”
The release of “Revolution Girl Style Now” has provided occasion for Hanna and her bandmates to revisit their movement-defining early-’90s performance wardrobes, as well. “I love fashion, and I don’t see anything unfeminist about that,” she says. “I’ve always loved fashion, since I was a little kid. I used to wear my Winnie the Pooh dress, and I would tape fabric swatches to it and walk around. I would take towels and try to drape them in weird ways around my body when I was, like, 6 years old.” In the early days of riot grrrl, the “grrrl” was of the utmost importance, she explains; second-wave feminism had successfully reclaimed the word “woman” but had left girls out, and many of her onstage style choices sprang from a desire to salvage a specific kind of girlhood. “I had a very dysfunctional family, and I felt very numbed-out for much of my childhood, and I felt like I missed a lot,” she says. “I always wanted to be a girl scout, and I didn’t get to be a girl scout! So I went to the thrift store, and luckily, I’m 5-foot-4, so I could still fit into a large Girl Scout outfit. And I wanted to be a cheerleader, so I got a cheerleader skirt, and I mixed it with a punk rock shirt.”
At the time, Hanna was also working as a stripper, and she began to blend her two professional personae, incorporating elements of that wardrobe into her stage costumes for the band. “Part of the idea of that was, what’s the difference between when I’m on stage taking my clothes off and when I’m onstage singing in Bikini Kill?” she says. “I’m still operating in a sexist society whether I’m in a strip bar or I’m in a punk club. What does that mean?” Eventually, she began to “mutate” some of the moves she used while stripping and integrate those, too. “I was really trying to take my body back while I was on stage, and I used costuming as a way to do that,” she says.
“Ocean Song,” too, was directly inspired by the feminist issues with which Hanna was grappling at the time. She had been working at SafePlace, a shelter for survivors of domestic violence and sexual abuse in Olympia, Wash., and had begun to feel overwhelmed by the stories she was hearing — and by how hard it was to make anyone outside the community listen to them. “I felt crazy, I felt like I’d been dropped in the middle of the ocean, and I was screaming, ‘Look at all this stuff that’s happening,’ and was just making dolphin noises, nobody could hear me,” she recalls. Two and a half decades (and three bands) later, Hanna’s voice regularly reaches tens of thousands of people, but she hasn’t abandoned those initial causes: just a few weeks ago, her current band, the Julie Ruin, flew to Olympia to play a gala benefit for SafePlace. “It was so thrilling and kind of full-circle for me to go back there, especially at the same time as the demo tape’s coming out,” she says. “It just felt really right.”
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