San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Self-reflection just her latest radical act
Early in her memoir, musician and activist Kathleen Hanna attributes the time she spat a mouthful of Frosted Flakes into her father’s face as her “first act” of performance art. Created in response to male aggression, it’s a pattern that would ultimately guide — but never define — the author’s pivotal yet complicated part in the 1990s Riot Grrrl movement and role as the frontperson of music acts Bikini Kill and Le Tigre.
Packed with harrowing stories and illuminating revelations, “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Punk Feminist” finds Hanna rejecting the victory lap premise of most music memoirs to instead interrogate and, by extension, make peace with past regrets. It’s a radical act of self-reflection and one that Hanna incisively pairs with cunning critiques of the historically patriarchal music industry as she takes readers through the select highs and copious lows of life on the road in a feminist punk band.
Utilizing a voice that’s often bitingly funny but never insincere, Hanna proves a captivating narrator as she recounts eras from her life, like the lively music scene of Olympia, Wash., in the early ’90s where Bikini Kill played its first sweaty house shows alongside acts like a then-unknown Nirvana.
Detailing her friendship with the late Kurt Cobain, Hanna describes special moments they shared as young upstart musicians but also reveals how inadvertently coining the title to his band’s most famous song one drunken night would later come to haunt her. That occurred when someone played Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the jukebox during Hanna’s subsequent tenure as a stripper.
“I was taking my clothes off to a song I’d written the title to,” she writes. “Kurt was on his way to being a multimillionaire while I was jiggling my ass in a broke-down strip club.”
Hanna rightfully makes no apologies for her time as a dancer, explaining how such work made it possible for her to afford college tuition and
keep her DIY woman-powered punk band afloat. There’s also an undeniable humorous passage in which she recalls unsuccessfully attempting to perfect her dance moves to a recording of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” prior to her first shift.
Presented in short, compulsively readable chapters, “Rebel Girl” offers plenty of colorful stories from Hanna’s career fronting Bikini Kill and later, the electro-pop group Le Tigre, including the former group’s choice to wear only pajamas for a period in hopes of keeping creeps at bay. It was in such attire that Bikini Kill would first meet Joan Jett, who immediately asked to record the band and notably had no qualms with their outfits of choice.
In recounting some of the darkest moments in her life, Hanna’s words resonate with clarity and conviction, as when she details how, at the age of 17, she sought an abortion and was first forced by the clinic to write an essay proving she was “mature enough” to have the procedure.
Later, in one of the book’s most devastating moments, Hanna recounts how a relentless stalker left her with an impossible decision: move back to an apartment where she’d previously endured a sexual assault or remain in her current location. Faced with such a choice, she writes: “I chose the site of a previous rape rather than the site of a possible future one.”
Yet from this bleak situation emerged an act of creative resistance: Hanna’s solo project, the band the Julie Ruin. Most acutely reflected in the song “Apt. #5,” the track is but one of many she’s created in response to trauma, although Hanna is careful to draw no generalizations in documenting her own path to healing. Regardless, there’s strength to be drawn from Hanna’s repeated refusals to accept ignorance and bigotry as the status quo, instead often channeling it into art that doubles as a call to action.
By contrast, she also demonstrates palpable strength in her willingness to admit on the page that even the awe-inspiring Kathleen Hanna can
still feel completely helpless too.
Writing of her battle with a long undiagnosed illness — eventually diagnosed as Lyme disease in 2010 — Hanna shares how the care and support of her husband, Adam Horovitz (of Beastie Boys fame), proved essential in getting her through the hardest days of her sickness. That would lead to her eventual reunion with Bikini Kill bandmates Tobi Vail and Kati Wilcox, who began playing shows together again in 2019 following a lengthy period of semi-contentious inactivity that many had assumed marked the band’s end.
A return for Le Tigre would soon follow, bringing a welcome dose of Kathleen Hanna back into the spotlight. Now, with the publication of “Rebel Girl,” Hanna has gone a step further: revealing her life in all its beauty and imperfections as a means of celebrating what’s possible when you realize the rules are yours alone to set.