KATHLEEN HANNA

The radical voice of riot grrrl talks to Chris Nelson about illness, recovery, and past/future lives with Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin.

Kathleen hanna, who in the 1990s helped untold numbers of girls find their voices, goes to an 81-year-old teacher to find her own. hanna’s just back from her weekly session with renowned vocal coach Barbara Maier Gustern (whose clients include Diamanda Galas and Debbie harry) when she speaks to MoJo. “She basically teaches me different ways to not hurt my voice,” hanna says. “when i don’t have to talk, i don’t.” Fortunately, she’s generous with the conversation, hunkered in her apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighbourhood that she shares with her husband, adam horovitz, late of the Beastie Boys. their dog, Bobbi, a medium-sized black and white mutt, waits in another room. if she cranes just a bit, she can see the empire State Building through the bars on their window. hanna has been an icon of feminist art for a quarter-century, ever since Bikini Kill released their 1991 demo Revolution Girl Style Now (recently reissued). She and her bandmates were adamantly DiY, unapologetically radical. they were also the most electrifying band to come from the burgeoning riot grrrl punk scenes in olympia, washington and DC. as frontwoman, hanna took fire from all sides: defensive – and sometimes violent – men; women who – sometimes fairly – claimed riot grrrl was too white and too privileged; reporters who were more interested in a fashion story than a political movement. after Bikini Kill folded in ’98, hanna armed herself with a sampler and put out an electronic solo album that year under the name Julie Ruin. that chapter quickly gave way to a dance outfit, le tigre, who shook their hips and fists in equal measure. and then hanna disappeared. Fans wouldn’t learn why until the Punk Singer, Sini anderson’s 2013 documentary about hanna, revealed she’d been suffering from undiagnosed late-stage lyme disease. a relentless touring musician, hanna had become so sick that she couldn’t perform, record, write or even leave bed. intensive therapy brought her back, and with her, a new band of collaborators called, somewhat confusingly, the Julie Ruin. tJR recently issued an outstanding second album, Hit Reset, that boasts lyrics as startling in

their vulnerability as Bikini Kill’s earliest work. “I learned through the illness and through making this record that asking for help is OK,” says Hanna, 47. “I don’t need to be Riot Grandma who’s taking care of everybody. I can ask people for help, too.”

Who was the first person to introduce music to you? Or did you discover it on your own?

I guess it was just hearing Christmas songs when I was a little kid. My favourite jam was Away In A Manger. It was slow and really sad. I didn’t really understand it. That one and Silent Night were really sad, and I was really drawn to sad songs. They were the only ones I knew, because you get taught them at grade school. I was in kindergarten or first grade, and the second when my parents and family were out of the house and I was by myself for any length of time, I would immediately start singing in our living room. I would just do those two songs over and over.

As a young child did you ever picture yourself on-stage?

All I wanted to do was perform. I did not have stage parents. In fact, my father would laugh at me about performing all the time. My mom was supportive. But it wasn’t like now, where she would be doing YouTube videos. The only audition she took me to, I begged her to take me to. It was for the National Children’s Choir in Washington, DC, and I didn’t make it because I didn’t know the words to America The Beautiful. So I just started singing Yankee Doodle Dandy in the middle and they were like, “OK, next!” I knew I fucked up the audition, but it was a great experience fucking up that audition because I got to see what it felt like to be nervous, and sing in front of people I didn’t know. I just wanted to be on stage. I think I felt kind of unseen, as a person. As a kid. I didn’t have the best childhood. I felt like when I was on stage, people saw me – really saw the real me. And I could be the real me, even if it was through a dance or a song.

Was singing a refuge?

Yeah. It was my thing. It was like masturbating – you don’t tell anybody about it. I did it in my living room. It had good acoustics and it had a bay window. I would climb up into it and the curtains would be my curtains in a theatre. The dog would be in the front yard, and I would sing to the dog. I was just practising, but I didn’t know why or for what.

On the new album, Calverton is named after the town outside DC where you grew up.

Calverton is where I was just talking about, with the bay window. That and [the song] Hit Reset, everything in it is true. There are metaphors in it. It was really about my mom. For all the mean things that my father did – he was an alcoholic. He didn’t know how to be a dad. I can’t blame him in this one way. But in this other way, he was so abusive and so mean to me. When I was six years old, he told me I looked like a slut. A six-year-old? Who looks at a six-year-old like that? I can’t imagine telling a six-year-old because she was wearing little shoes with a tiny heel, to go to church, that she looked like a slut. That was a good example of my whole entire childhood. Being woken up in the middle of the night when I was 14 and having my drunk dad yell, “You’re a slut!” A lot of stuff my mom didn’t know was going on. She did the best she could with what she had, for real. I love my mom. Without that one connection in my family, without that one grown up who said, “You can do it. You were good in Annie” – without that, I don’t think I would be here today. All of my success in any way shape or form, any decent song I’ve written, it’s all attributed to my mom. So many people have abusive upbringings and they don’t even have that one person. In Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, it was so important to me to be in touch with the kids who came to our shows and would write me letters. To be there for them. I knew I might be the only grown-up who was listening. Or who they felt safe to talk to.

During Bikini Kill shows, people would grab at you, or threaten you. What was it like the first time you were performing and you thought, “This could be dangerous”? And how did the band decide how to deal with that?

We didn’t. We didn’t know how to talk to each other at all. I didn’t really recognise danger very well because I had grown up in a very dangerous household, so I turned off my intuition at a very young age so I could survive. When dangerous things were happening around me or people wanted to hurt me, a lot of times I was just in denial about it. That was really difficult for my band because they worried for me and they worried for themselves. I would just be out front and I felt like I was on a mission and I was on the right side of history. If people were gonna fuck with me, fine. I don’t think I cared. I felt like because I was on-stage, I couldn’t really get hurt, because all those people were watching and somebody would help me. I felt more scared in normal life, getting sexually harassed or having a guy grab me on the street.

Bikini Kill recorded the three-song New Radio single with Joan Jett. What were those sessions like?

That was probably the best session of my life. Joan and Kenny [Laguna, Jett’s creative and business partner] came in and just schooled me in how to do this. They did give direction, and it was wonderful. In Bikini Kill we were always just doing things on our own, not really knowing what we were doing. We were trying to make our records sound like live records. We wanted them to be exciting, we wanted

them to have mistakes. We wanted them to not sound perfect so that people could be like, “I can do better than that.” It was about encouraging participation more than creating this seamless product. Joan heard us play in New York and then she picked the specific songs she wanted to do. She said, “I can hear how I want them to sound in my head.” And I was like, “I wanna hear what that is.” We gave them free rein to produce. It was the first time I did lyrics over and over and over ’til I got each line perfect. It was so fucking fun. All I had to think about was getting the qualities that they were asking me for. I didn’t have to produce myself. I didn’t have to direct myself. They told me exactly what to do and I did it. They brought out the best in me.

After Bikini Kill broke up, you recorded a solo album under the name Julie Ruin. But when you tried to play the Julie Ruin songs with friends, it didn’t work. Still, that attempt evolved into your band Le Tigre. How did you know Le Tigre was going to work?

I think I knew something was up when I wrote Hot Topic [a salute to agitators like Yoko Ono, Nina Simone and Sleater-Kinney]. We had been through the ringer with the whole riot grrrl scene imploding. Everything was really depressing. Everyone was pissed at me for something. [Le Tigre bandmate Johanna Fateman] saw the whole thing go down and was a part of it. We just looked at each other and started talking about how can we not write bummer songs? How can we write songs about celebrating what we have instead of talking about what we don’t have? Because that’s what we need right now to cheer ourselves up. So it was really this organic thing that we needed for ourselves and we weren’t thinking about, “This is for the world.” It was all about the work. Le Tigre was keeping topics like LGBT rights, police brutality, emotional perseverance front and centre when some of your peers had called it a day. Did that ever feel lonely? Or like a responsibility?

Of course sometimes we felt pressure, because of Bikini Kill, to be progressively political. But it also was just a part of our lives. We were living in New York when [23-year-old Guinea immigrant] Amadou Diallo was shot [by four plain clothed policemen], and we wrote [Bang! Bang!] about it because we both came to practice that day crying. We were just like, Why is this happening? It was organic. We wrote Keep On Livin’ that talked about my abuse history and how you can get really depressed, and be like, Why keep going? – and how that linked up with [Le Tigre bandmate JD Samson’s] experience coming out. Many people traverse both of those worlds at the same time. It was all the letters that we got from kids who were suicidal. We wrote that for them, but we also wrote it for ourselves because we were having these conversations about trauma and being rejected by your family. Having the LGBT community, the feminist community, all kinds of people who are marginalised come together and dance and feel free for just two hours meant a lot. More than our lyrics, the shows were creating a safe enough space for that night for some people who never got that. That was our political statement.

You didn’t tell the band right away when you had Lyme disease.

I didn’t know what I had, I just knew I had something wrong with me. One doctor told me it was lupus. Someone else told me it was Crohn’s disease. I was told I should go on this shit that totally weakens your immune system for Crohn’s. Enbrel, or some weird drug. Like, you have to do it now or it won’t work later. Thank God my intuition over the years had turned back on because something in me was screaming, “You don’t have Crohn’s, you don’t have the symptoms of it. Don’t do this drug.” If I would’ve done that drug, I probably wouldn’t be talking to you right now because it would have made my Lyme disease completely apeshit.

The new Julie Ruin song I Decide includes the lyric, “I belong to the wolves who drug me, in their mouths just like a baby.”

I Decide is “I’m taking back my life”. I really forgot who I was for awhile. The whole thing, “That’s the bitch from Bikini Kill,” or “the feminazi from Le Tigre.” Or, “You’re my favourite feminist icon.” It goes both ways, where people are overly positive. I’m just a musician and I’m trying to do what I do and what feels normal to me. If it helps people, that’s great, and I’ve definitely had it in my mind that I want to do that. But the illness set me free to write about my own life more and to remember that I decide. I decide if I’m gonna put out another record or not. I decide if I’m gonna tour. I decide to put my health first. All those kind of things.

Staying with the new album, a song like

“Singing was my thing. It was like masturbating – you don’t tell anybody about it.”

Planet You, phrases like “past caring” feel connected to things you did early on, like the riot grrrl flier that said, “Recognise empathy and vulnerability as positive forms of strength.” That’s not being “past caring”. Do you see threads that run across your career?

On this record, the theme of vulnerability – I actually thought about that. I don’t know if it was on that flier, but there was something [early] where I said, “Cry in public.” I always remember crying on the bus. People out in the world showing their emotions. It’s not always safe to do. I definitely felt that when writing Calverton and Hit Reset, which were the most personal songs. And the most scary. I felt like I was going to puke when I sang them. But I was like, “I need to do this, for me, even if everybody else hates these songs.” I need to do this even if it’s embarrassing and overly vulnerable and people say it’s corny. I don’t care. That’s a through-line, definitely: vulnerability as strength.

Rather Not’s chorus has a Shangri-Las feel.

It definitely sounds throwback, really ’50s, ’60s. [At one point] we changed it to be more Elvis Costello-y. We were like, This sounds too throwback, and everybody has been doing that for the past 10 years, the girl group thing. We changed the guitar sound, and I sang it a little more sparse. Elvis’s songs sound really full, but there’s always a lot of space in them. I sang some of the parts more monotone, less like I was feeling it. More like I was observing it. I feel like he sings in this very observational way. When we were in the studio, we did the Elvis Costello style, and I was like, “You know what? This song just wants to be a really pretty girl group song. Let’s just make it that and stop fighting it.” I was like, the way it’s written is to be this song about [somebody getting a crush on you and you] being like, “What the fuck?” Or trusting somebody who’s a friend and being like, I don’t wanna hear you love me when you treat me like crap. A lot of songs I write sound like they’re love songs, or anti-love songs – and they’re usually about friendships.

You’ve been writing songs now for 25 years. Has it gotten any easier? Is it harder? That’s a long time to be at a craft.

(Laughs) That’s weird. I never thought of it as a craft. In Bikini Kill I never even thought of myself as a musician. But I listen to Bikini Kill songs and I’m like, “That song’s really good.” Because I never listened to our music, but I had to when we were setting up Bikini Kill Records. We were remastering and looking for unreleased tracks. I was like, “Wait a minute, that song’s really good, I love that song.” I love New Radio. I wanna write something more like that. Or Jigsaw Youth I really like. I love all [Tobi Vail’s] songs. I usually get inspired by what other people are doing. Johanna in Le Tigre had a totally different singing style than me, and I’ve had a lot of fun ripping off some of her phrasing. Some of her phrasing is so good and funny and weird. I really enjoy hearing something and being like, “What would it sound like if I did that?”

Le Tigre produced My Girls for Christina Aguilera, and you offered her Just My Kind, which The Julie Ruin recorded. Is there an allure of writing for a much bigger audience?

Oh yeah. But also Christina herself. We share similar values in terms of women’s rights and LGBT rights. We have a lot in common. And she’s technically such a great singer. To be able to work with that kind of voice is a thrill. It’s great to be on a self-released record label and doing everything yourself in this one way. And writing everything yourself. But it’s so great to have challenges. Collab-ing with [hip-hop artist] P.O.S. and with [Nigel] Holt this year, with Seth Bogart [of Gravy Train !!!! and Hunx And His Punx] and different people who said, “Here’s what I want.” I worked with [performance artist] Mykki Blanco a while back. I love doing those collaborations because it shows me something I can do that I didn’t know a lot of times. I also love being bossed around, in terms of the studio. Other ways I don’t.

You seem to be comfortable with knowing you have a legacy, influencing music and culture. That’s a mantle that some musicians are uncomfortable with.

I’m honoured and proud to be a feminist artist who’s been working as long as I have. I know so many better singers, more talented singers, more talented feminist artists who don’t get the recognition I’ve gotten. While it was a burden in a lot of ways, when I was young and I was a member of a grassroots community that was trying to build something – being pulled out of that community and being the poster child for riot grrrl was frustrating. People resented me. Then there were the men who hated me, called me names, threatened me. I have gotten over it, because I’m old enough and things came around. When I came back with The Julie Ruin, I’d been gone awhile. It was great to see 16-year-olds coming to shows and being like, “I didn’t know about any of this shit! (Laughs) And then I found out about Bikini Kill and Le Tigre!” It’s really great to have a multi-generational audience. That’s part of what having some kind of legacy gives you. I’m lucky. I’m not gonna bitch about it. There’s so many people who made the riot grrrl scene, that did the hard grunt work, that have never been recognised. I just feel like it would be a total dishonour to them to realise that I’m lucky that I have a name so I can make a living doing lectures or playing shows. While I hated it at the time, 25 years later, it gave me the ability to know that my work would be remembered, and that the work of my bandmates would be remembered. To me that’s really important. Feminist music, feminism in general, it’s a continuum, and it has to be passed on from generation to generation so people can make it better. If it just stops and we keep reinventing the wheel all the time, we’re only gonna make it so far.

In 2016, what are the most important things to kick against?

The work that I do is on a cultural level. You have to change the culture to change laws. That’s a part of changing laws. I know that having people be able to get together and have a good time together – which is why the Orlando [Pulse nightclub] shooting was so massively, massively, massively disturbing – is important. People create safe space for themselves to be who they are. To have the sanctity of that, that boundary crossed by someone… it’s terrorism on such a deep level. So now we have to be afraid to go to gay bars? Now we have to be afraid to go to church? There’s gotta be a groundswell. I’m happy that feminism is supposedly cool again. There’s all this nonsense: “Beyoncé’s talking about feminism and black power, that’s just using it.” You know what, she has so much power in the world, and she’s making herself less marketable by speaking out on these issues. Brav-fucking-o for her to do that. It pisses me off that just because she worked really hard and made a lot of money we’re supposed to hate her guts now because she’s a capitalist. Guess what? She just had all these kids looking up their own history of the black power movement. She has all these kids looking up the word ‘feminist’ on the computer. Oh happy day! Seriously! Let’s make it trendy. Let’s make it cool not to hate people. Let’s make black pride cool. Let’s make gay pride cool. Let’s make being female-identified cool. It should be! What’s the problem?

The Julie Ruin’s Hit Reset is out now on Hardly Art.

“Being the poster child for riot grrrl was frustrating. People resented me. Then there were the men who hated me, called me names, threatened me…”