I’ve always been loathe to write about Bikini Kill and the Riot Grrrl movement in general because every time I read about either I run face first into discussions of third-wave feminism and find myself confronted with words like “post-structuralism,” and just ten minutes ago I ran across a doctoral dissertation (I’m assuming) entitled “From Girl to Woman to Grrrl: (Sub)Cultural Intervention and Political Activism in the Time of Post Feminism.” And while I consider myself an ardent feminist (the world would be a better place if women ran it) the horrible truth is I’m a frivolous person and simply not that smart. And Marx ruined me for manifestos. Foghat didn’t write manifestos.
So let’s just say that bands like Bikini Kill were angry and had damn good cause to be angry, and called for a revolution girl style now because one was desperately needed, what with rape, physical and sexual abuse, condescension, and all of the ugly thoughts and words and deeds of a patriarchal society that considered it their god-given right to tell women what they could and could not do with their bodies and minds, all of which Bikini kill saw not as abstractions but as day-to-day reality.
To rebel against a male-dominated society (hell, a world) where violence real and psychic are your daily fare, and to want to change that, and to tell young women they too could change that, put Bikini Kill and their like on the side of the angels. Recently it came out via an informal social media poll that woman would sooner run into a bear in the woods than a man. And not because bears are better looking.
While I’ve never been a big fan of angry music, especially when it comes from white male indie types (Fugazi, anyone?), I’m a huge fan of Bikini Kill because they produced some of the most ferocious, confrontational and succinctly brilliant music of the post-punk era, and seemed to be having fun while doing it. And their songs were complicated, nuanced, and went well beyond the simple rah-rah didacticism of “I am woman, hear me roar.” Not that they didn’t do their fare share of sloganeering. It’s simply that the messages in their songs—which were aimed at both young girls and their oppressors—went far beyond easily grasped agitpop. They could be a subtle bunch.
Formed in Olympia, Washington in 1990, Bikini Kill included Katheen Hanna on vocals (and sometimes bass), Tobi Vail on drums and occasional lead vocals, Kathi Wilcox on bass (although she played a bit of everything), and Billy Karren on guitar, whose guyhood proved from the get-go that Bikini Kill were not, as plenty of threatened punk boys (and rock writers) would have it, a band of rabid man-haters.
They would ultimately relocate to Washington, DC for the simple reason that Olympia was not receptive to their message while our nation’s capital boasted a progressive punk scene that was more simpatico to bands with a confrontational bent, whether they were targeting the right-wing state of the nation, attacking sexism, racism, or homophobia, or advocating for vegetarianism or anti-corporate music-making. DC was the capital of punk activism, and Bikini Kill felt right at home.
Bikini Kill’s early recordings were primitive and lo-fi to the extreme, and depending on your love for the ecstatic, unpolished, the raw, amateurish, abrasive, and unapologetically angry music to be heard on 1994’s Kill Rock Stars compilation, the CD versions of the first two records just may be the Bikini Kill you like most. But as bands (sadly) tend to do, Bikini Kill learned to play their instruments (it takes true genius not to), and if it’s a more proficient and polished (relatively speaking) Bikini Kill you want to hear, you can’t go wrong with 1998’s The Singles.
The Singles opens with three of the band’s purest yet most user-friendly blasts of punk rock fury, all three given shape and sonic oomph by ur-riot grrrl and band producer Joan Jett. Talk about your ideal collaborations—Jett is a feminist icon and proud bearer of a bad reputation who’d established her punk bona fides by producing the Germs. Did a masterful job of it, too, and she does the same with the songs “New Radio,” “Rebel Girl,” and “DemiRep,” which form one of the strongest one-two-three opening punches I’ve ever had on an album. In short, they score an instant rock TKO.
“New Radio” is positively titanic thanks to Jett’s guitar and the pounding rhythm section, but what makes the song are Hanna’s vocals (and the assists she gets from Jett). It’s a real scream-along, this one, with Hanna quickly going ballistic on the lines, “It doesn’t matter who’s in control now/It doesn’t matter ’cause this is NEW RADIO!” She sings the great lines “Baby boy you can’t kill what’s fucking real/Turn that song down/Turn the static up” then screams the line, “Come here baby, let kiss you like a boy does!” before going pure ecstasy, swapping “woahs” with Jett and then cutting completely loose with a “yeah, yeah, yeah yeah” that outdoes The Beatles in the joy department. Before shutting things down with the Beastie Boys-beating lines “Lets wipe our cum on my parents’ bed/C’mon!” For teen rebellion it’s not bad.
“Rebel Girl” is sonic assault and battery with Jett’s guitar and Vail’s unrelenting drum thump bringing Bikini Kill to the metal borderline and beyond. Hanna is all hero worship and who can blame her for wanting the “the queen of the neighborhood” to be her best friend? And for wanting to try on her clothes? Hanna’s Rebel Girl is the personification of grrrl revolt: “When she walks, the revolution’s coming/In her hips, there’s revolution/When she talks, I hear the revolution/In her kiss, I taste the revolution.”
Hanna and Jett playfully open “DemiRep”—which means a woman of doubtful repute, gasp—with a childhood game of “Miss Macky Mack” before breaking into a song that has more DIY ragged punk speed, propulsion and spirit in its DNA than the anthemic duo “New Radio” and “Rebel Girl.” As usual it’s Hanna’s explosive vocals that make the song—she drags out the lines “And I’m not some lame… so-roriety queen/Takin’ you home to meet my… da-a-a-dy” to wonderful effect, ditto the way she repeats that “I know I know I know I know” and the way she delivers the lines “You take what you want/You get what you take/You take what you want/You get what you take/But I’ve got something, man/That you’re fuckin’ money cannot buy”—namely, “You don’t know what it’s like to be alive.” Hanna’s a live wire, with her nerves on the wrong side of her skin, and a lightning rod for every emotion under the sun, good and bad, and you can hear it in every syllable she spits into the world.
Vail sings the twenty-eight second epic “In Accordance with Natural Law” and she sings it in such a rush—spitting out a whole lot of words in that less than half a minute, trying to keep up with the song’s insane tempo—that you can’t understand a word out of her mouth, But no matter, the lyrics seem to be some kind of Marxist self-critique but what do I know, that shit’s above my pay grade. What matters is she’s having her say and god help the fool who gets in her way.
And Hanna does the same on “Strawberry Julius.” She’s basically having conniptions trying to fit the words in sideways, thataways and upside down although phrases (“come on” and “what the fuck”) stick out, and what’s really cool is the way she goes from brief moments of almost normal speak to machine gunning her words because they’re sticking in her throat. She’s purging poison and slaying demons at the same time. “Just don’t touch me with your bare hands whatever you do” jumps out, as does “’Cause I got more tongues/Than just this one.” (Great line, that, even if I don’t know what she means.) Songs like this one defy easy interpretation because Bikini Kill do so much more than just stick daggers into the patriarchy—there are levels and layers and ambiguities in their songs, and you’re invited to dive in and start thinking.
“Anti-Pleasure Dissertation” opens on a Who-like note (in reference to one of their songs, Thurston may not be the only one who hearts the Who) with big power chords and features Hanna sounding slicker and more traditional female lead-singerish than usual as she sings about kissing and telling. But before long she fast forwards into a speed rap with the lines “Did you score that point? Are you so fucking cool, fucking cool/Now did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya?” Did ya what? “Go tell your fucking friends/What I saw and how I felt/How punk fucking rock my pussy smelled/Why don’t you tell them?” Now if that ain’t the most punk-fucking-rock line ever I don’t know what is. Like teen spirit maybe? Incredible song.
On “Rah! Rah! Replica” Hanna’s vocals get buried in the sonic punk din but no matter, just lose yourself in the song’s V2 thrust and hang on to the great backing vocals that make me think of the punk rock cheerleaders in Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video. Consult the lyric sheet if you want, I did and Hanna’s words didn’t exactly change my life, but my loss—they may have changed other peoples’ lives, and that’s what matters. “I Like Fucking” could be a Joan Jett hard rocker, you’ve got these Godzilla-big power chords and the cymbals take a real thrashing while Hanna’s working it all out, the whole pain versus pleasure thing that surrounds sex in a world where, for too many men, sex equals hate, and unlike (I think) in “Anti-Pleasure Dissertation” on “I Like Fucking” Hanna’s ultimate take is sex positive:
“Just ’cause my world, sweet sister
Is so fucking goddamn full of rape
Does that mean my body must always be a source of pain?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no no no.”
And she ends things with the words “I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure, babe/I do, I do, I do.” And I suspect that my thinking there’s nothing radical about the possibilities of pleasure just proves I’m a man, or a man who’s been at the receiving end of sex as a source of unimaginable physical and psychic trauma.
On the least captivating track on the album, the very heavy “I Hate Danger,” Vail sings about hanging out with people who aren’t your friends and who don’t seem to give a shit that you’re there so you just clam up (Vail, in a deadpan tone that doesn’t exactly suck you in: “I stopped talking an hour ago”). Things don’t really liven up until the end, when Vail finally explodes:
“Okay, your whole thing puts me in negative space for way too fucking long
The only thing I managed to say during that time was, “I hate danger”
What I really should have said was
“You’re so not dangerous. You’re so not what you say you are at all.”
In the mid-nineties Bikini Kill and their kindred female spirits in bands like Bratmobile and Huggy Bear were waging a revolution, and at the micro-level at least the revolution was successful—they conveyed a message of female empowerment that inspired legions of the girls they were fighting for to form their own bands and share their pain, their horror stories, their anger and their disgust at a music scene (and more importantly, the world at large) where men felt free to do whatever the fuck they wanted with women’s minds and bodies. “I want to scream because I am just as much of a human being as any man but I don’t always get treated like one,” read an early Bikini Kill zine. That was putting it mildly.
But, and I’ll say it again because I think it’s so important, what I hear when I listen to Bikini Kill is a sense of the radical possibilities of joy despite it all, because there was a joy in the waging of that war and a joy in just being alive and making music with and for women (and men) who were clued into the fact that no, everything was not all right. Fun WAS on the riot grrrl agenda, and for me that means so much, because there were and always will be those on the indie scene (Ian MacKaye said as much) who don’t see fun as something worth fighting for. Which I think is terrible, because where’s the fun in no fun? It’s like D.H. Lawrence said, if you’re going to have a revolution be sure to have fun doing it, because otherwise you’re just going to end up a joyless puritan.
And I know Bikini Kill were having fun because their patron saint Joan Jett SAYS SO at the end of “DemiRep.” No joy, no fun, no deal, that’s what I hear when I listen to Bikini Kill. Who, I’d be remiss if I didn’t add, are back together and maybe even coming to your town this year. Go, and if you’re old enough to have daughters take your daughters and if you’re old enough to have sons take your sons and your granny to while you’re at it. She’ll love them. They’ll turn her into an even more badass woman than she is now. They’re a fucking riot.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
