Summarizing my entire prior familiarity with Kathleen Hanna as the "oeuvre rule" intro may overwhelm the reader, but I feel like this is a special book and it merits a special review.
I hadn't really heard the term Riot Grrl until my junior or senior year of high school, i.e. late 90's. This was from a male friend that observed broad cultural trends from an academic distance, and may or may not have identified as a feminist. If I'd heard of Bikini Kill before then, it was likely a passing reference that didn't leave any impression. At the time, Hanna was recording the first Le Tigre album, and I was deep into Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine and Beastie Boys. That would all change in a year or two.
Basically, there was one friend that represented and symbolized all things Bikini Kill and Kathleen Hanna to me. In 2004, Le Tigre played a $5 NYU show at Irving Plaza. She wanted to get a better view, so I told her to get onto my shoulders, and I quickly collapsed and nearly killed us both. I was weaker than I assumed. Another friend had burnt me a copy of the first Le Tigre album on CD-R, and so I was familiar with a few of their songs, but not most as it was the tour for This Island, what would end up being their last album.
This friend and I are now estranged, and perhaps my understanding of feminism and violence against women has finally evolved (or started to, at least, hopefully); my own complicity in perpetuating the status quo, with desultory "support" while maintaining what was essentially a misogynistic outlook is now apparent (some women were cool to me, but many were not). Years later, what I showed signs of being would get a name: incel. And it was because of such feelings that I assumed the problem was with them and not something within myself. It took a while to admit to myself who I really was, and it came too late, and I miss this friend terribly, and I message every time I go back to New York, and they are ignored, and I see what she posts on Instagram, and I am bowled over by all she has accomplished and achieved over the past 12 years, living up to the vision of her future career in near-perfect execution. What's clear now is that she was smarter and more emotionally mature and a more complete person 20 years ago than I even hint towards becoming at present, today.
I am always trying to do better in the face of these past failures, and it is in this context that I read Rebel Girl, often reflecting on that friendship and my regret over screwing things up, wanting so badly to make amends and yet unable to repair whatever damage had been done. This is a side benefit of the book. Beyond being an amusing personal history with amazing insight into the Pacific Northwest indie scene in the early 90's, it is an emotional journey that the reader takes with Hanna, and inevitably instills self-reflection. I think reading this book can make someone into a better person. Not that it entirely did that for me, but it may have helped set a better trajectory.
*
The memoir starts where most do, in childhood, and as might be guessed, it was not great. She has one slightly older sister and parents that fight all the time and eventually get divorced. Unfortunately her dad was a total creep, and this is probably the first "negative influence" that gave rise to her perspective: many men simply had no self-awareness, and her father could hardly have done a worse job as a "protector." As she noted in her interview on WTF, there was not sexual abuse per se, but there was verbal abuse, psychological abuse, physical abuse, and it was usually inappropriate sexually, or mind-boggling in its cruelty (not only towards his daughters, but also their dog):
"My dad was installing sprinkler systems in Gresham when he got the news he'd been elected the head of his union, Local 669. His new office was in DC, so we moved across the country just before I started elementary school, to a tiny suburb called Calverton, Maryland. We were unpacking our boxes when our dog, Holly, shat on the living room rug. My father dragged Holly over to the poop and rubbed her face in it, screaming, 'Look what you did! Look what you did! Well, you won't do it again, will you!?'" (8)
It is in that living room, at Christmastime, when Hanna first sings "Away in a Manger" to herself, loudly, that she finds her r'aison d'etre:
"Hearing my voice bouncing back at me was like watching light refracting off a mirror. A mirror I could finally see my whole self in. If there were words my body could've said, they would've been, 'Right now is perfect. Right now, nothing bad is happening.'...
Eventually I graduated to the bay window for my solo performances. I imagined I was looking out at an audience instead of an empty street. Singing was like figuring out I could make a rainbow appear on the wall just by staring at it. And because of that I always had a place I could return to when things got bad." (8-9)
*
We need not re-hash the memoirs by Kim Gordon, Carrie Brownstein, Patti Smith, Thurston Moore, Bob Mould (or Come as You Are, which I got a year ago and which will hopefully be up here relatively early in 2025), and we shouldn't forget Dean Wareham or Brix Smith, either. But they are all good-to-great, and I keep saying the latest I've read is the best one (i.e. saying Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is better than Girl in a Band, in certain respects). This time is no different. Rebel Girl is probably better than them all with the exception of Just Kids, which should probably be enshrined as a Penguin Classic (more deserving than Morrissey's Autobiography, no doubt).
What makes it the best of them all is Hanna's willingness to be vulnerable. Not that the others above did not do the same (well, one of them did not even try), but Hanna is willing to equivocate and debate with herself, really digging down into the nuance of situations where others more neatly summarize. It may not be much longer than them, but it is 322 pages, and the chapters are notably short--similar to Kim Gordon's (who figures heavily in this book as well as a major role model)--but even more extreme. There is even a chapter that rivals the iconic coin-pusher chapter from Tom Scharpling's memoir in terms of absurd hilarity (ironically titled, "Big Tom").
Maybe it is not the best example, but one that struck me early on was her explanation of why she ran away from her mother's house, after her parents were divorced (unthinkably, she moves in her with her father despite knowing it is a terrible idea). It does not feel like the most rational or serious reason, but her willingness to be totally real and explain why she was in a bad place with her mom at the time is what sets this book apart:
"I'd gone on a long walk with her when I was visiting her in Portland and brought up the gun incident with my dad. At first she was defensive and asked why I was beating a dead horse, until I reminded her that we had literally NEVER talked about it. After a few minutes, we each shared our experience of that night, and I came to understand why she'd asked my sister and me to talk my dad down. The conversation ended with my mom telling me that she had one wish, she'd go back in time and protect me from my dad.
When we got back to her duplex, Randy [her mom's boyfriend] and I watched TV while my mom cooked dinner. Something on TV made Randy uncomfortable and he went off on a bizarre homophobic rant. When I asked him to stop, he just kept going.
Earlier that weekend I'd been hanging out with my friend Gene Barnes, an older hippie writer I'd met in Olympia. He was living in Portland making zines and doing activism. He told me he'd agreed to go on a Carnival-type cruise with his elderly parents and was starting to regret the decision. He'd promised himself he would tell them he was gay on the trip--which seemed extra stressful to me, but he told me he needed to do it ASAP. He had recently been diagnosed with HIV and didn't want his parents to find out he was gay in the hospital. So I helped Gene, a strong, self-possessed, hero-like figure, role-play how to come out to his parents. It was heartbreaking, though we laughed a lot too. And now I was sitting on my mom's couch, watching Randy flounce around the room mocking gay men for being 'too flamboyant.'
I started crying as I begged Randy to just please stop talking. I know my mom heard me, because she popped her head around the corner. I looked at her with a tearstained face, waiting for her to tell him to knock it off, but she turned away. This was the woman who'd told me, an hour earlier, that she wished she could go back in time and protect me. How about you protect me NOW? I thought. After yelling at both of them, I left, vowing never to return." (72-73)
Even though I may not think one man's homophobic stupidity in the late 1980s is a serious reason to question her mother's love, it is clear that her mother was still deferential to thoughtless men that hurt her daughters, even on a seemingly-unrelated issue, and that attention to detail--no matter how potentially embarrassing--is a testament to its greatness. Later Randy evolves in his attitudes and she repairs her relationship with her mother, and it is one of the more endearing moments in a series of them towards the end of the book, when all of the crazy instability of the first 40 years of Hannah's life finally begins to coalesce into something safe, loving, stable and nurturing.
*
There is a crucial moment in the book that more clearly than any other exemplifies its singularity. Basically, this is personal drama involving Kurt Cobain as a supporting character in a scene. (Later, Courtney Love is similarly invoked as she often is in memoirs listed above, and in a rather negative light--which further begs Love to write her own memoir--which clearly, despite however anyone may feel about her, could be truly epic.)
This is basically the moment where Hanna determines to better control her drinking. It is difficult to excerpt and I am wary of spoiling anything at all here, but it really feels like the defining moment and centerpiece of the book.
*
It is the story of the night of the graffiti--her and Cobain get spray paint to graffiti "GOD IS GAY" in giant letters (his) and "FAKE ABORTION CLINIC" (hers) on a new building for an organization that purported to give "pregnancy help" and instead would talk women out of getting an abortion by scaring them. They are very drunk and with Dave Grohl later go back to her apartment building. There is an odd configuration on her roof where she is able to walk across it and to the window of her friend that lives in the same building, who has daffodils growing on the roof. Kurt picks the daffodils and brings them to her, and then she realizes they are from his and instead of saying it was wrong to uproot them, chooses to brag about how she is just friends with the guy because he cooks for her and she has him wrapped around her finger, etc., trying to sound cool. Later her friend says he heard everything through an open window, and Hanna determines that she has a drinking problem and needs to get it under control.
This is the chapter "Benjamin Franklin's Glasses" and it was probably the hardest part of the book for her to write, along with its antecedent, "Friendship and Other Natural Disasters" (followed by "Throwing in the Towel" and finally "Reject All American"). It is not my place to re-hash trauma or spoil the complex drama that is masterfully teased out in the text--suffice to say, it is the most powerful moment in the book, and one of its purest examples of courageous vulnerability. It seems to be the defining trauma of her life, and the way she writes about it from these various contexts and angles across time only further deepens its impact.
In short, we often hear about how 66% or 75% or 80% of women have been sexually assaulted and/or raped. If "Me Too" did anything, it showed that the number is actually closer to 100%, particularly if you include any situation where such assault was escaped. I have to believe that the world is safer for women in 2024 than it was in 1994, but I know, it is still far, far from safe--and it is getting worse again. We might think that Rebel Girl would have had its moment in 2018, but we need it more in 2024 than ever. Don't go on X and look at any post about how men and women are supposed to act unless you want to know what I mean. I hate this stupidity and ignorance, and I will push this book on everyone, because it's only when we really fully inhabit someone else's experience of the world that we can begin to understand the sources from which all of the anger and frustration flow.
*
There is not much more I could say to convince you it is worth reading--you will either know and care about Bikini Kill, or not, but if you have nothing more than a passing interest in the music scene in the early 1990s, you will find something to value here. This is because Hanna's writing is so engaging that (like the currently pending item by Donna Tartt), she could write about pretty much anything and make it seem interesting to the reader, even if they never considered it interesting before.
Yet it is personal to me, in the way the book ends (not unlike Morrissey's autobiography either, totally). She doesn't mention playing Riot Fest with The Julie Ruin in 2016, but I went with that same friend from high school, the first one that acknowledged Bikini Kill as a cultural entity unto itself, and we rolled some rather large joints and snuck them in and lit one up as Julie Ruin began.
If you haven't seen Hanna live, you must if you ever get the chance, because she is one of the iconic performers of our time, and the banter is fantastic. She looked out at the crowd after the first song and made a couple comments. I don't remember what she said exactly, maybe, "Someone rolled up some scooby-doobie dos,"--while clearly looking directly at us. In that moment, we felt seen. Not in the best way, but not in the worst way, either. In any case, that moment was easily more memorable than the rest of the set, which obviously was very good too, one of the highlights that year in a very good line-up.
*
I went back to Riot Fest in 2017 and maybe I skipped 2018, I can't recall--but in 2019 Bikini Kill re-united and they headlined Riot Fest and I had to go. A friend had procured a certain item for us that she ensured was safe to take, and I popped it before Patti Smith's set, which kicked in sharply and made for one of the most beautiful concert experiences of my entire life, as Patti is clearly a national treasure and imbued with an energy that is truly profound and spiritually nourishing.
After taking such ecstasy in that performance, I moved towards Bikini Kill's stage (I think the Raconteurs were playing and I camped out an hour ahead of time at the neighboring stage), and I moved close to the front. Of course I wanted to be as close as possible. People started to go nuts as they prepared to take the stage. Early on, perhaps in the first or second song, I was taking a video, and there happened to be some ruckus that seemed like kind of an incredible WTF moment to have on an Instagram story, so I captured some of it, before one of the women nearby noticed and said, "Don't fucking take any fucking video!" and I became rather embarrassed and deleted it.
At a certain point, a song or two later, Hanna spoke about the rallying cry for which they became known--"girls to the front." And she mentioned that she always used to say that, because it was necessary, but now she realizes, it leaves out a certain contingent of gender expression. She did, however, gently suggest that the men near the front look around to see if they were in front of any women that could not get a good view, and maybe consider stepping back. A song or two later I did that and watched the last half of the set near the sound-booth.
Hanna writes about this same moment near the end of Rebel Girl:
"'I just want to say that we're a feminist band and we're headlining a festival!' I yelled into the crowd. As people cheered, I stood there silently, feeling proud and awkward at the same time. It didn't scare me, because our shows had always been sprinkled with the awkward. The goal had never been to be perfect; it had always been about asking questions and leaving space for the audience to see parts of themselves flash by.
And then the 'Girl to the front!' chanted started.
In the nineties I misgendered a butch lesbian at a Bikini Kill show and asked her to go to the back. I met her years later and she told me what I'd done. I apologized profusely and she laughed it off, but it still broke my heart, and it stayed with me. 'Girls to the front' may have served a purpose when we were a tiny band playing tiny clubs, but it was outdated. And while I knew 'girls' included trans women, I guess they might not feel safe pushing to the front, where TERF-y cis women might hassle them. And what about trans men, nonbinary folks, and BIPOC men? I didn't want to tell them to go stand in the back.
I took a breath as the chant got louder, and I asked the cisgender white guys to look around and think about how much space they were taking up. I asked them to think about how unwelcome some people usually felt at shows. I asked them to make space. And then I said, 'Oh, sorry, is this the same thing Slayer said yesterday?'" (315-316)
Not everyone gets to read a book that reflects back a reality as you experienced it, in that space and in that moment, and that also makes you think about all the choices and circumstances of your life up until that point, and so this book may mean more to me than you--but anyone that has any kind of personal connection to Kathleen Hanna or the music she has made will undoubtedly find several moments that cut deep in a similar way. She made something beautiful with her life, and turned her dream into a reality, and anyone that accomplishes such a task and is generous enough to write a book about it deserves praise. Hanna implicitly is saying in this book (and like many of the other memoirs referenced above), "You can do this, too," and giving the reader that confidence to move forward and boldly make their life into something beautiful, too, is a gift like none other.
Grade: A
