Many people join bands because they had terrible childhoods. In music they find alternative families, and on stage they create a version of themselves as they want to be seen, away from the eyes of those who abused them. These days, stories of personal trauma arrive with the artist but 30 years ago, you had to figure it out from the songs. The mainstream rock press was powerful, stylised and male; in early magazine interviews, Tori Amos’s rape by a fan was given little attention, despite the fact that she was clearly sitting there talking about it. Most editors in the 1990s probably thought it a bit of a downer, unsure of how to position it within their take on a new, kooky, flame-haired Kate Bush descendent.
The upside of this enforced mystique was that there was more room for the political in music. Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill, turned her childhood experiences into activism as well as songs. Hanna is one of the most important figures in third wave feminism and a founding member of the riot grrrl movement – though many of us aren’t sure exactly what riot grrrl was. Her punk band, named not after the swimming two-piece but the island blighted by nuclear testing, were formed in 1990 in Olympus, Washington State, the site of the progressive Evergreen College where Sleater-Kinney were later students. At gigs, Hanna called women to the front, creating a safe space where they could a) see the band and b) not get groped. The merch stall charged double for men, to highlight the gender pay gap, and after each show she’d lead impromptu counselling sessions for girls, standing there out front with a clipboard and flyers. These sessions were an early, analogue forerunner of the #MeToo movement, affording ordinary young women the chance to reveal what had happened to them at the hands of entitled prom kings, football captains, that guy at the party, or their own fathers.
The riot grrrl movement was spread by fanzines (one was titled Girl Power) and formed small pockets of feminist resistance across the US (though it did reach the UK); by the time the mainstream press got hold of it, Hanna was moving on. In the late Nineties, the Spice Girls co-opted their slogan and Geri Halliwell said that Margaret Thatcher was “the original Girl Power”. All things considered, Hanna is quite relaxed about this in her new memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk.
At the heart of Hanna’s founding experience is an unforgettable father, who sucked coffee from the nipple of a “titty mug” and drove a car with a bumper sticker saying “ex-wife in trunk”. Were he simply a lunkhead, she might not have become the person she became. But he also threatens suicide, a gun in his hand, while his daughters beg him not to pull the trigger (“See, that’s what it’ll feel like when I’m gone!”). He tells Hanna, aged 14, that he wishes she was dead, after which she starts putting rum in her Thermos for school. As she grows older, he engages in drunken co-sleeping, hovering constantly on the edge of sexual abuse which he never quite carries out. Her sister, nicknamed “Goodtimes” by local kids and slut-shamed from the age of ten, is a portrait of what can happen to girls when the father relationship is so confused. Hanna’s prepubescent nickname is “Lil Goodtimes”. She adores her mother fiercely, which sets up the protective instinct she turns into activism. Being in a band allows her to “relive my childhood and win this time”.
Before reading this memoir, I had little interest in riot grrrl: it seemed distant and chilly to me, like the Pacific north-west. Elements of the Washington state music scene are beyond parody, such as the “vegan hardcore” movement. But Kathleen Hanna’s story is jaw-dropping, and her energy brings the era into technicolour. She grows up with a finely tuned radar for sexism and sexual threat, and her world often feels like a grotesque hall of mirrors. At one Bikini Kill gig, a woman is attacked in the crowd, so Hanna clocks the offending punk over the head with her mic; he presses charges, and while the police are coming, a worker at the venue offers to hide her in a cupboard – then enters with her, and sexually assaults her. She is raped by her best friend, at the moment she is crying on his shoulder saying how grateful she is that he isn’t like other guys.
Yet she is always practical, always on the move: “I had no idea how to relax.” At college, she trains as a domestic abuse counsellor on the side. She never seems to sleep, staying up all night in the studio with a giant screen-printing machine, or making her own album on an eight-track. With no family money (unlike some other punks), she pays her fees by lap-dancing, and I admired her appreciation of grey areas, how she refuses to examine the “contradictions” of stripping until three quarters of the way through the book, when she eventually concedes, “My dad had taught me to emotionally play dead and in my own twisted, unhealthy game of ‘lemons to lemonade’, I turned his abuse into lunchboxes full of cash.” All her feelings are converted into music, fanzines, counselling and questions for visiting feminist speakers – like Kathy Acker, who told her to start a band, and whose talks she attends with questions carefully written out on cards.
In April this year, the Irish punk band Sprints made headlines when their lead singer Karla Chubb was groped by an audience member: everything Hanna fought for in the margins of pop culture is now a mass-media concern. Riot grrrl would have flourished with the internet, but the movement swallows its own tail: at one point Hanna decides that riot grrrl is racist, and examines her own white privilege. The book describes a war of identity politics that, for a few years, would have seemed quaint but is now our dominant way of looking at the world.
Feminists were always seen as angry and difficult, and everywhere Hanna goes she is preceded by the reputation of being “a bitch”. She was a close friend of Kurt Cobain, and scrawled “Kurt smells like teen spirit” on his bedroom wall when the two were high, inspiring the song. Though we can’t know whether, some time later, she really stood there saying nothing while Courtney Love threw her an uppercut, I want to think it’s true, and, at the end of the day, this is her story. In later life, a singing teacher reveals that Hanna has spent her whole career breathing in when she’s singing, instead of breathing out – a phenomenon associated with repressed trauma. She has a six-year battle with Lyme disease, which she is found to have carried since childhood, but she still shows up for work with her band Le Tigre, formed after Bikini Kill in 1998.
She finds domestic happiness with Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys (and yes, she acknowledges that some of their early lyrics were sexist). They meet in 1996, when she is as famous as she will ever be, yet she buys a poster of the band, and whiles away her hours kissing his lips till the paper is destroyed. This is one detail that made me love her. Another is the strip performance she’d do when the lap-dance club was empty, banging her head on the stage to Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”. But the moment that made me love her most is the day, during a low patch in her life, when she decides to buy ten hot dogs from a drive-thru window, one after another, from the same young teenage server, to execute a one-woman art statement that no one sees.
These days, Hanna is comfortable on the lecture circuit, with younger acolytes who appreciate what she was doing in a way the music press never did at the time, and listen to her as she once listened to Kathy Acker, probably with their questions written out on cards.
Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk
Kathleen Hanna
William Collins, 304pp, £20
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[See also: The young prole rebels of Dexys Midnight Runners]
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