There’s a Kathleen Hanna performance I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I first saw it a decade ago, and it’s not a musical one. In the grainy three-minute video from 1991, Hanna, the lead singer of ’90s band Bikini Kill, delivers spoken word—not the finger-snapping style you might be envisioning, but an assonant, staccato jeremiad against rape culture—in a crowded venue in Olympia, Washington, continuing even when a man in the audience interrupts her.
The man calls out “nothing was happening” in response to Hanna’s chant-like iteration of “it was the middle of the night… ” and at first it’s not clear if his interjection is part of the act. Or maybe he’s just one of the many proto-bros who interrupted Hanna and her Bikini Kill bandmates—guitarist Billy Karren, bassist Kathi Wilcox, and drummer Tobi Vail—almost every time they endeavored to make art onstage. As Hanna outlines in her new memoir Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, this type of disruption wasn’t out of the ordinary in the largely male-dominated, often hostile music scene of the ’90s in the Pacific Northwest.
Ever since she came onto the scene, Hanna’s anger over the decades of abuse and misogyny she suffered at the hands of men has been anything but submerged. There was her father, who she has described as being erratic, violent, and sexually inappropriate throughout her childhood, and the once-trusted friend who raped her in her twenties—all the effects of a life spent navigating those men’s whims are apparent in that spoken-word video, as well as in Bikini Kill songs like “Carnival,” “Feels Blind,” and “Suck My Left One.” But Rebel Girl refines that blunt rage into something more complex and mature, making it clear that there’s room for people of all genders, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds to screw up and hurt others, even inadvertently.
Anger at men was practically the only angle the press was willing to explore in its coverage of Bikini Kill in particular and the riot grrrl movement in general. But is is the women who let Hanna down who are given new attention in the book, from the anti-porn feminist Andrea Dworkin (who once publicly promised Hanna that the years she spent stripping at Olympia’s Royal Palace would “haunt” her) to the clinic administrator who forced a teenage Hanna to write an essay proving that she was “mature” enough to obtain an abortion to, yes, Courtney Love. (If you’re merely in it for the details behind the infamous Courtney/Kathleen feud, which infamously played out at the 1995 Lollapalooza, don’t worry: You’ll be fed.)