“I’M NOT INTERESTED in a revival,” says Kathleen Hanna. “I’m not interested in ‘Riot Grrrl Part Deux.'”

It’s one of the first things she says when we talk on the phone ahead of her appearance in Portland, and it sounds like she’s had to say it a lot recently. Thanks to mounting nostalgia for the ’90s, she’s started getting letters from teenagers that say things like, “‘I wish I lived in the ’90s… I wanna revive riot grrrl,'” she says. “And it’s like, please don’t. Start your own thing, start something that speaks to your generation, start something smarter and better.”

Hanna’s been positioned—often reluctantly—as a figurehead of the feminist punk and art movement since she was lead singer of Bikini Kill. Twenty-five years later, Hanna’s writing and performing with her newest band, the Julie Ruin, with visual art projects in the works (she’s a fan of installation artist Yayoi Kusama). When she says she doesn’t want a riot grrrl mulligan, it doesn’t come off as nihilistic or demurring, but deeply practical, at least if you care more about lasting social change than vintage baby barrettes. “I guess that’s a kind of horrible message,” she admits, laughing. “I’m like, ‘Don’t do it!’ But… look at what punk rock feminism brought to the table and find the stuff that you can take into the future that’s great, and throw the stuff that was stupid away.”

Hanna’s comments about nostalgia for the movement hit close to home. I’ve noticed it among millennial women in particular: We feel like we missed out on something, and retroactive FOMO may be the worst kind, because it’s impossible to kill. But when I ask her point-blank if she thinks we missed out, Hanna says that’s the wrong way to think about it.

“Yeah, I don’t think you did,” she says. “I think that you guys were given a really interesting legacy to look at and explore and make something out of. And the thing that’s exciting about people saying, ‘Oh, we missed out’ is that they’re interested in feminist activity…. And if it’s nostalgia for something that you didn’t get that leads you there, I don’t care.”

What Hanna doesn’t want to see is riot grrrl uncritically replicated, and she’s uncomfortable with the impulse to romanticize a movement that wasn’t as intersectional as it could have been—and was often challenging to be part of. “[Bikini Kill was] very vilified during the ’90s by so many people, and hated by so many people, and I think that that’s been kind of written out of the history,” she says. “People were throwing chains at our heads—people hated us—and it was really, really hard to be in that band…. It’s sometimes hard for me when people are like, ‘Oh, I wish I was in a girl band in the ’90s,’ and I’m like, ‘No, no, you don’t.'”

Hanna’s frustration over a revisionist history is understandable, and it isn’t surprising. She’s always had a somewhat fraught relationship with her own hagiography, and with ’90s nostalgia, it’s back with a vengeance, her name cropping up repeatedly in books like Sara Marcus’ Girls to the Front; when we talk about The Punk Singer, the documentary made about her in 2013, she’s emphatic in pointing out what it omits (that she’s “a bit of a jerk”). Other artists might be comfortable with mythologizing, but it says a lot about riot grrrl that Hanna is so invested, 25 years on, in making sure that we get closer to the truth. After all, it marked a moment in time when, faced with an often dangerous, male-dominated punk scene, young women began to speak up—at the highest possible volume—about their experiences with sexism in underground music (sometimes, you have to be a jerk). That urge to be loud about injustice is one of riot grrrl’s greatest legacies. And it doesn’t need to be revived, because it hasn’t gone anywhere.

13 replies on “Rebel Girl, Redux”

  1. Anyone who’s ever had to deal with her in person knows she’s actually a lot of a jerk. And anyone who was there knows that riot grrl was a step back for feminism, but hey; what a movement in fashion.
    She’s right about the punk thing, though. Somebody had to bust into the stupid macho with stupid macha. It sounds like I’m damning with faint praise, but I mean it.

  3. She’s an interesting performance artist, and iconic counter-celebrity, but even the Sex Pistols were self admittedly not really musicians, which was actually their point.

    The fact that Hanna has a new act, illustrates that perhaps she is an artist, after all.

    Bravo for her encouraging young fans to become what they most admire for themselves.

  4. I must’ve been living under a rock during the 90s. Oh, I was really addicted to watching Full House at that time. 15 years clean. Hope the remake sucks

  5. I don’t care what style of music women get involved in as long as there is passion. As musicians, we create from a place of inspiration not imitation. Millennial Mamas are removed from music not by age, but by their own self-doubts. Furthermore, as a musician who rocked the nineties, I can honestly say there is no time more exciting to me than now. Kathleen Hanna gets it. Julie Ruin is sweet punktronica bliss.

  9. Musical satire is barely tolerable to listen to one song, even if it is funny. PSU Professor Jon Newton, the guy who produced the soundtrack for Will Vinton’s, California Raisins commercial, once had a band called, Dahnce Combo. Ostensibly made up of French musicians who had to learn English lyrics, phonetically. In the middle of each and every song, of a forty song set, there was the same circus music, bridge. What was funny is that it took a few songs before you realized what was happening. After that, it was time to leave.

  10. Nirvana got it’s break because Clive Davis introduced the CD, named after himself, and did away with LP albums, thus, grounds for rewriting recording contracts which paid less, and required more. The dinosaurs refused to sign, so Clive went to Seattle and signed every hack Grunge act he could find, thereby saving a fortune on expensive production costs by taking creative control and limiting the amount of time bands were allowed in the studio. Then Rap was found to be cheaper yet to produce. The amazing thing is that consumers bought it all.

    Teen Spirit
    (by a legendary teen idol, who wrote My Way)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsS811o21-k

  13. “In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think, how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.

    And yet, I ask is not an alien force ALREADY among us?”

    “There are only a handful of people who know the truth about this.”

    –Ronald Reagan to a full session of the United Nations, September 21, 1987

    http://www.mt.net/~watcher/angelicconspiracy.html

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