Kathleen Hanna on What Bikini Kill Means Now

In her first interview since Bikini Kill reunited, the feminist punk hero revisits the past, revels in the joy of the present, and ponders the possibility of future music.
Kathleen Hanna
Graphic by Drew Litowitz, photos by Ollie Millington/Redferns

Kathleen Hanna is about to head to Party City. On a recent Tuesday morning, she FaceTimes me from her home in Pasadena, California, and it just so happens to be her 51st birthday. She’s celebrating with a party at a local roller rink, where she’ll take over the sound system with a disco-heavy mix including Kool & the Gang, Donna Summer, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Foreigner. “It just brings you back to the ’70s,” says Hanna, clad in a lemon-yellow sweater and bubblegum-pink lipstick. But before the retro festivities begin, she’s ready to discuss a firmly-2019 matter: the return of Bikini Kill.

The shows that the iconic 1990s riot grrrl band—comprised of Hanna, drummer Tobi Vail, bassist Kathi Wilcox, and new guitarist Erica Dawn Lyle—played in New York, L.A., Chicago, and London earlier this year felt less like a reunion and more like a timely continuation, a historical corrective. Their sets have been intergenerational celebrations of one of the all-time great feminist songbooks, a fact that could get lost during their tumultuous first iteration. (They also sold enough tickets to their short run of shows this year to fill Madison Square Garden almost twice over, something that would have been unfathomable in the ’90s.) Bikini Kill’s anthems of opposition, empathy, and solidarity feel newly relevant and resonant in the Trump era, which spurred on Hanna’s interest in playing them again. The band will continue doing just that in 2020, with new tour dates across Europe and North America, including a benefit for the Interfaith Works homeless shelter in their hometown of Olympia, Washington.

Similar to her legendary singing style, Hanna’s tone in conversation pivots seamlessly. She can be riotously funny, dead serious, or a mix of both at once, as she is while discussing some of Bikini Kill’s more maddening obstacles in the ’90s, or digging into the intricacies of call-out culture. Here, Hanna explains how the band got back together, why she stopped saying “girls to the front,” what she does to unwind after a big show, and much more.

From left: Kathi Wilcox, Kathleen Hanna, and Tobi Vail during Bikini Kill’s original run. (Photo by Tammy Rae Carland)

Pitchfork: How did it feel when Bikini Kill started playing together again?

Kathleen Hanna: It felt like what I was supposed to be doing the whole time. More so than even playing, it was being together. There’s a certain shorthand you have with best friends you’ve been through hell with. When I turn around and see their faces, there are certain looks they give—I can’t describe it, it’s just beautiful.

I could go to therapy for 10 years and not get what I got out of the first day practicing with Tobi again. She was talking about stuff like call-out culture and the trajectory it’s taken since ’90s identity politics, and I felt like, “Oh God, I need this in my life.” It’s been complicated for us seeing how some of the not-great parts of identity politics have come back.

Is there anything you feel is missing from the current conversation around call-out culture?

I know a female musician who’s quitting music because people were contacting her constantly and saying, “You can’t play this show, this guy did this thing, he’s in this band,” and it’s like: What is she supposed to do? She’s a struggling musician. She barely makes any money. Is she supposed to be a detective now? It’s important to me to look down the end of the road and think, Where is this going? instead of being like, “Trevor Marks, who’s in the band Vaginasaurus, is fucked up. He shouldn’t be using that name. They’re playing the club before us, so we’re going to boycott.” Why is Trevor Marks my fucking problem? Or why should I, as somebody in a band, be litigating a situation in a different city where I don’t even know what the fuck they’re talking about?

When is a boycott going to work, and when is it actually negating what you’re trying to do? Will it be productive in the end? I see young bands with marginalized people constantly bearing the brunt of these kinds of accusations—like, “It’s worse to be a hypocrite than it is to be a Trump supporter, because you say you’re progressive.” When smaller bands are boycotted for some stupid-ass shit, I wonder, “Why are these women responsible for all of the ills of the world?” I really question when people don’t look at who they are actually going after.

Was there anything else that shifted for you personally that made it seem like the right time to reunite?

It was you. [laughs] It really was the Raincoats thing. [Ed. note: Bikini Kill played together for the first time in 20 years at a 2017 event surrounding Jenn Pelly’s book about the Raincoats.] After that, being home, I started having situations where I would receive emails from men who were angry at me for things that happened 25 years ago, which weren’t even real, and I was thinking in my head, [singing Bikini Kill’s “Don’t Need You] Don’t need you to tell me I’m good. I was like, “This is really sad. I’m quoting my own lyrics to myself in my own life to get me through.” And Tobi’s lyrics were always there for me in my head: As a woman aging in public, I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve thought, “If you are gonna look at me, I am gonna get a prize.” After we played together [at the Raincoats event], the songs just kept coming back and back and back. I was like, “This is now. I need to do this.” I pulled up all our songs that I had bought on Apple—because I didn’t have them—and sang to them. And I was like, “I can totally do this. I want to do this.”

I emailed Tobi and said, “Hey, what’s up? I was thinking, what if we did something else?” I was really nervous. I was sitting at the computer waiting for a response. It was like having a crush on someone, and I was like, “Do they have a crush on me?!” But it was like I had a crush on my own band again: [frenzied] “Is she going to want to do it?! Oh my God. I hope she wants to do it!” She pretty quickly wrote back. A year later, after practicing with Erica, I was on an all-time high. I can’t even tell you how happy I was. We were all talking, we were all getting along. I was singing these songs that mean more to me right now than they did at the time. I just thought, This is exactly what’s supposed to happen in my life.

Are there any Bikini Kill songs that feel especially potent or relevant when you’re playing them now?

It depends on the night, but there’s a line in this song “Lil Red” that goes, “You’re not the victim, though you try to make it that way/Pretty girls all gather round to hear your side of things.” When we have a president who’s likening himself to an African-American being lynched... it’s only a matter of moments before he’s going to say that he’s being raped by the Democrats—that whole “I’m the real victim” thing we’ve been seeing so much with the right wing. When I sing those lines, it feels very pertinent.

But also, songs like “Jigsaw Youth” and “Resist Psychic Death” talk about how there’s more than two ways of doing things, or more than one way of being. A lot of the songs talk about not having rigid, binary ways of thinking, where something’s all good or all bad. It’s about gray area and question-asking, as opposed to some sense of purity: “This way is right, and this way is wrong.” In the beginning of Bikini Kill, that was a big thing Tobi said a lot that really resonated with me: “Look, we’re not a band saying, ‘Here are the things we’re trying to get across.’ We’re asking questions.” In the writing process, I always felt like: “I’m not trying to tell you how to think. I’m trying to raise questions and say things I’m going through.”

I was assaulted by a male feminist when I was in Bikini Kill, the day before we moved to D.C., in 1991. It was literally three hours after I finished [the zine] Bikini Kill 2, which was called Girl Power. I’m still processing that violence. I still feel that in my bones every time I sing “Star Bellied Boy.” I kept that to myself at the time because I was leaving on tour and I didn’t want to get pulled off my path. I was the loud, angry feminist, and I was really confused about what that meant.

Do you still relate to that idea in “Feels Blind”: “Your world has taught me nothing”?

Yes. People have taught me a lot, but I’m talking about mainstream culture and the fact that we live in the United States where the majority of people didn’t vote for Trump, but Trump was able to be elected. And the fact that I go grocery shopping with people who voted for him, that people in my family voted for him. So, yeah, that makes me feel incredibly alienated to the point where all of our songs make sense to me.

“Feels Blind” always made sense to me on a really visceral musical level more than on a lyrical level. The way the drums come in, the way it starts with just that bassline. There’s something sad about it, but also hopeful and angry. That combination of emotions can be applied to so many different situations, and definitely right now with where we’re at as a country. The Kavanaugh hearings were horrifying. I was thinking the whole time, This is the end of legalized abortion.

You said Bikini Kill has always been a band that asked questions. What questions do you feel Bikini Kill is asking right now?

It’s the same questions we were asking back then. Is there really a mainstream and an alternative, or is it all the same thing in different outfits? And also: What are the feminist projects? Are they working? Who are they for? Who do they benefit? What role does criticism play in art-making? And, do I have to adopt new rules to enact my politics? How important is the subjective voice? A lot of it, to me, is questioning all different kinds of purity.

When the #MeToo movement was cropping up two years ago, I thought, Wow, all of these conversations that have been happening in underground spaces for decades are now happening at the highest reaches of popular culture. How has it felt to watch that unfold on a national stage?

It’s that weird mixture of being super psyched but also, where were you when I needed you?! Late pass, everyone! I was saying that 20 years ago! But there were people who were saying it 200 years ago. I mean, thank God they’re dead. They don’t have to see what’s happening now.

I feel so happy to hear people talking about it, but it also reminds me of stuff I never spoke up about because I was just like, there’s too much. Like, OK, that promoter groped me. Who am I going to go to? It wasn’t like I was going to call the cops. I’m going to go play another show tomorrow and forget about it. It’s made me wonder about the times I thought, “I just want to put this behind me. I have a vision and a mission, and I’m not going to let anybody fucking take me off of my mission. When I’m ready to deal with this, and I’ve saved enough money, I will go to therapy and deal with this. But I’m not going to deal with this when you want me to deal with it because you decided that was the day you were going to visit violence upon my house.” And if I need to be worried about getting something done or a deadline, then I’m going to do it. If I need to cry in bed all day and not talk to anybody and eat pizza and smoke cigarettes, then I need to do that.

The way you’re articulating this reminds me of what you were saying about not wanting to see things in a black and white way, but wanting to understand that there are all of these questions and complications, which seems hard to explain today, at least in 140 characters.

Like the whole “believe all women” thing—no. We live in a country that has a racist legacy of white women accusing black men of crimes they didn’t commit, and them suffering horrible penalties for it. Murder. And so now, in 2019, when we’re living in a society so saturated by racism, you want me to say that I believe all women? That’s taking agency away from women. If I want to talk about my sexual assault and someone has questions, I want to answer them because I want to talk about it. And I understand people who don’t, and who just want to be believed. But I can’t personally do that. I need to investigate. If people are accusing a black man in a band of doing something, and the accusers are all white, and I’m supposed to get on the bandwagon and boycott that person’s band, I need to investigate it. That’s not right.*

When you think of the past year and the Bikini Kill shows you’ve done, what has made you want to continue doing it?

It’s really fun, and at the time it really wasn’t. It was a lot of hard work and not much payoff. The backlash against our band started before our first show even happened. We experienced our whole band within a kind of washing machine of backlash and hatred. We went through the ’90s feeling physically unsafe at our own shows—and at one point took a break, because I was like, “Someone’s going to shoot me” because the letters were just like, “I’m going to come and kill you.” [Bikini Kill] had shows that were stopped in the middle because women would shout us down, and want me to answer a question about how I could be a feminist if I was a stripper. Men would yell “shut up and just play” when I would talk in between songs.

Going through that, and then coming back and headlining Riot Fest after Slayer, is wild. It feels really good to be back and be 50 years old, and everyone’s throwing their arms around you and begging for tickets, and saying the shows were positive.

People are making “women to the front” happen, though at one of the L.A. shows my worst fear came to metaphorical life. There was a white woman who was screaming “girls to the front” over a man of color in this scary-ass voice because she wanted his spot. That was exactly why I stopped saying that at shows. It was gruesome, and I don’t want to be any part of that. I don’t want to misgender people and tell people to go to the back. In this day and age, it doesn’t mean the same thing for a white cisgendered woman to say “women to the front.” When there were three women in the room, the point was to bring those three women to the front—but not when it’s 80 percent.

So you didn’t say “girls to the front” at the shows?

No, but people would start chanting it. At Riot Fest I said something to the effect of, “Hey, people are always asking, ‘How can I be an ally?’ If you’re a straight white cis guy in the audience, here’s your chance. Walk around and see how much space you’re taking up, who’s next to you who never gets space at a show. Is the person next to you someone who probably doesn’t feel as welcome here as you do? Make them feel welcome. Give them more room.” And then I thanked them for being great allies. But I’m not going to ask people to come up front anymore. I’m going to ask you to willingly go to the back or just check out how much space you’re taking up.

From left: Erica Dawn Lyle, Tobi Vail, Kathleen Hanna, and Kathi Wilcox performing at London’s O2 Academy Brixton on June 10, 2019. (Photo by Ollie Millington/Redferns)

With the reunion shows, I’ve observed some conversations along the lines of: “I wish Bikini Kill would play 10 shows at 200-cap venues, instead of one at a 2,000-cap venue, so more people could afford tickets.” But that doesn’t account for your own very real safety concerns, like you mentioned.

[cackling] Yeah. Also—you’re asking a feminist band to play 10 shows and make less money than we would playing one, in the era of Time’s Up? When we were already offered like one-eighth of what comparable male bands have been offered to reunite?

I’ve wondered if there’s a wage gap with these massive festivals and big shows.

I can say that when we first talked about reuniting, the wage gap came up in a very large way. It’s awkward to have people telling me that we should charge less than what everybody else is charging. Why? Because we’re women?! We don’t like capitalism, but that’s the system we’re operating under. I’m sure it would be more comfortable for people if we came and played at their houses for free. But we can’t do that. And you know, even if I could, I don’t want to play at your house for free.

If we don’t charge what people in bands at our same level charge, that’s setting a precedent, and it’s not respectful to other feminist bands. The idea of playing for free means that everyone has to come from rich families with trust funds. Then all of the lyrics thrown our way are going to be from the mouths of people who grew up not having to worry about money. I don’t want that. I don’t want to hear trust-fund kids singing punk rock. Really. It gets back to what we were talking about before: If you’re going to boycott something, or complain about something, what is the alternative? Think it through.

Is there anything specific that you do to unwind from something like headlining Riot Fest or playing a massive sold-out show?

I usually have a special bag of chips waiting for me, like flavored chips. But that’s about it. After the Riot Fest show, I felt weird. We weren’t going to play again for a long time, and there was a lot of buildup, and I’d never played a festival like that. So afterwards I just walked around [backstage] without my pants on. I had tights on and underwear over them and a T-shirt. It was sort of my way of being a rock star: I can’t wear pants, you fuckers look at me. I needed to have some kind of rock star moment. My husband [Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys] is a former rock star and everyone was always trying to give him free weed. Everyone was trying to give me fanzines about incest.

Are you going to write new music together?

We don’t have plans to. I wouldn’t know how to write in that way anymore. Could I see doing some cover songs? Sure. Could I see that leading somewhere? Sure. I don’t know. I just saw an [old] interview with me the other day that was like, “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I ever play with Bikini Kill again.” Watch me eat those words. I’m just saying, nothing’s off the table. I might say right now that I cannot see Bikini Kill writing new material, but who the fuck knows?

It seems like, in this era, you have more control over your own narrative—whereas in the ’90s, riot grrrl was misrepresented by the media, and Bikini Kill stopped talking to the mainstream press. Have you thought about what it means to participate in the continued story of your band?

I love the continued story of our band, but personally, it’s just really healing. Corny as that word is, it’s very, very, very healing to have an honest, respectful relationship with Tobi Vail, who is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. We were separated by time, distance, theory, and emotion for a long time. And we hardly agree on anything, but it’s great now. We very respectfully disagree and have a dialogue with each other and care about each other. To have that back in my life, I can’t tell you how much that means to me. Even if we never played a show again, the fact that we’ve had this time together has been so intensely good for me.

Tobi was a part of my very early intellectual growth, when we started using words like “praxis” and all that stuff. We hung a piece of paper on the wall in her apartment trying to come up with a name for our fanzine, and we were like, “OK, what’s a word that doesn’t go with girl?” “Well, anything positive doesn’t.” So we wrote positive words, and then we wrote words for girl, and somehow it came to “girl power”—me and her sitting there, trying to think of some way to problematize the way that young women were looked at. We’ve been on this journey for so long.

It’s amazing to be able to repeat something, but do it right. Seeing the way that we function together now versus the dysfunction when we broke up, it’s like night and day. So much was coming at us from the outside then that I think we really lost the ability to communicate with each other. More important than the legacy of the band, or anything like that, is the fact that this has given me a lot of gumption to keep making work and to take myself seriously—and to feel whole again.


* This answer has been updated to include Hanna’s unabridged response.