Kathleen Hanna is a pioneer of the feminist punk movement, best known as a foundational member of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre.
She joined GBH’s Morning Edition host Tori Bedford ahead of her show on September 23 with Bikini Kill at Roadrunner. What follows is a light edited transcript of the conversation.
Tori Bedford: I want to start with the recent passing of feminist icon Gloria Steinem. When you were really young, you got to see her speak at a rally in D.C. What did that moment mean to you?
Kathleen Hanna: Yeah, my mom took me to a Solidarity Day march. So it was like a workers’ march in D.C. and Gloria Steinem spoke and it changed my life. Mainly because when she spoke and Bella Abzug spoke, my mom and I were in a group of all women and we were marching in a circle while they spoke in front of them, which was really strange because it was kind of like a feminist mosh pit going in slow motion. I didn’t know that there was such a thing as like female political figures, women who were working for workers’ rights, women who were getting together for equal pay. I didn’t know anything about that. And so it was this really kind of formative experience that I had when I was like 9.
Hanna went on to describe how that experienced shaped her journey into music.
I didn’t have another experience like that again until I started my first band. I think I held onto that and was like, “I wanna make this feeling happen again.” And then I ended up performing, asking women to come to the front and all-women mosh pits. And I was like trying to create that same environment that I had.
Hanna said that passion first went into poetry, before crossing over into music to express herself.
I always wrote poetry. Writing was what saved my life when I felt really invisible and unheard. And terrible things were happening in my life, there had been an abuse situation happen, and I would use poetry as a way to express myself. Then the spoken word kind of led into singing which I always wanted to do. We were singing about sexual abuse and like, “why can’t I wear what I wanna wear?” And singing literally like, “We don’t need you,” to men. We’re not here to get a good review from you. We don’t care. You’re not our audience. You’re our guests. If you come to a Bikini Kill show, you’re a guest. It’s not for you. And I think it was very hard for guys to hear, who are used to being centered in everything, like, go to the back of the room for once in your life.
That was sometimes met with an angry response from concert goers, she said
I thought when we came out that everybody was gonna love us. I thought people were gonna be like, “Oh cool, it’s a punk feminist band. This is what’s missing in our scene.” And that wasn’t what happened. People of all genders were like, “Who do you think you are? You’re destroying the scene with these feminist ideas.” You’re putting down men. And guys were throwing stuff at us and just yelling, “shut up,” the whole time we played or trying to punch us or pull us off the stage. I was afraid of being assassinated, to be perfectly honest. The kind of death threats that I got in the mail were really heavy. I read all my mail and I answered it by hand for 7 years. And it really burnt me out. As we got mainstream press, we started getting more and more hatred and more and more, “I’m gonna kill you, I know where you live,” type mail. And I was just started being like, “I’m gonna go on stage, someone’s gonna kill me,” And turning that off every night to go out on stage just got to be too much. There’s just a lot of things that was like, this isn’t feeling fun anymore. And as 4 people, we were in our 20s, we were terrible communicators. While we’re dealing with all this hatred from the outside world, including our own community, it was very difficult when we weren’t communicating with each other because we were constantly trying to be a unified front against the hate. We didn’t look at each other and be like, “How are you doing?” And I think not checking in with each other can really be the death of things.
Bedford: Bikini Kill broke up in 1988. I actually saw you in Brooklyn when the band got back together 20 years later. And I remember you started that show. I was expecting you to say girls to the front, but you said, we’re not doing that anymore. We’re not assuming gender. When did that shift happen?
Hanna: We’d always talked, Toby and I, about biological determinism a lot, like back in the '90s and using the word girl. But I think when we got back together a few years ago, it just, it felt really wrong. Saying “girls to the front” because I didn’t want to put trans women in danger. And we were seeing problems with cisgender women pointing at trans or non-binary people and being like, “They don’t belong here.” And we were like, “fuck that.”
Bedford: When Bikini Kill first broke up and you’re experiencing this period of burnout and depression and darkness, along comes this opportunity to switch genres, and do something much more kind of radically joyful with Le Tigre. I’m really curious if you feel like Le Tigre was the thing that kind of saved you in a way.
Hanna: It did really save me because I didn’t wanna give up. This is my life, being on stage. I feel more like myself than anywhere else. It’s just such a huge part of my life and I was like, “I don’t wanna just like hide in a corner and be like, I’m done.” It was really, really hard, but I was like, “Let’s create community. How are we gonna create community?” And I just feel like dancing and being joyous is the fastest track, so I started making dance music, joyful and angry and everything.
Bedford: Bikini Kill is back. You’re on tour. Before I let you go, what is the difference between playing with Bikini Kill now versus in the beginning?
Hanna: It’s so different. Back in the '90s, right before a show, I felt so alone, and I don’t feel alone. I feel like we’re all going out there together. Getting a little teary here. It feels totally different. We’re older. We’ve grown up. I think we all appreciate what we had and what we have a lot more.
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