Kathleen Hanna at 17 from her
blog
THE PUNK SINGER B+
USA (80 mi) 2013
d: Sini Anderson
BECAUSE we girls want
to create mediums that speak to US. We
are tired of boy band after boy band, boy zine after boy zine, boy punk after
boy punk after boy… BECAUSE we need to talk to each other. Communication/inclusion is the key. We will never know if we don’t break the code
of silence… BECAUSE in every form of media we see us/myself slapped,
decapitated, laughed at, objectified, raped, trivialized, pushed, ignored,
stereotyped, kicked, scorned, molested, silenced, invalidated, knifed, shot,
choked and killed. BECAUSE a safe space
needs to be created for girls where we can open our eyes and reach out to each
other without being threatened by this sexist society and our day to day
bullshit.
We want and need to
encourage and be encouraged in the face of all our own insecurities, in the
face of beergutboyrock that tells us we can't play our instruments, in the face
of 'authorities' who say our band/zines/etc are the worst... Because we don't
wanna assimilate to some else's (boy) standards of what art is... Because we
are unwilling to falter under claims that we are reactionary 'reverse sexists'
AND NOT THE TRUEPUNKROCKSOULCRUSADERS THAT WE KNOW WE we real are... Because I
believe with my wholeheartmindbody that girls constitute a revolutionary soul
force that can, and will change the world for real.
—Riot Grrl Manifesto (excerpts), early-90's
Girls to the front.
Boys to the back. Back, back. All boys be cool for once in your lives.
—Kathleen Hanna, Bikini Kills
An exhilarating, all-in look at Kathleen Hanna and the early
stages of girl power in punk music in the early 90’s, where Hanna’s earliest
musical interests were unleashed through fanzines, homemade booklets with
creative artworks celebrating particular music acts and the power of
expression. Eventually she got the
attention of one of her underground heroes, Kathy Acker, the writer of Blood and Guts in High School, one of
the original underground, mixed-media feminist publications that challenged
social taboos, giving voice to subjects that were largely silenced or severely
limited by mainstream media, such as rape, abortion, incest, pornography, and
domestic violence. Acker believed in
challenging the male-centric power structures by continually giving voice to
this restricted territory, by taking ownership of these issues. An art student at Evergreen State College
from Olympia, Washington, Hannah was angry from the dismissive media coverage
of Anita Hill’s sexual harassment claims against a sitting (for life) Supreme
Court justice, the Tailhook scandal, the William Kennedy Smith trial, and an
article in Time magazine that asked
if feminism was dead, all happening at a time when she was trying to process
the rape and murder of her roommate. In
1991 Hannah entered Slam poetry festivals where she’d wail at the top of her
lungs “I am your worst nightmare come to life.
I’m a girl that won’t shut up,” stomping onstage and shouting “I’m going
to tell EVERYONE!” It was Acker who told
her that nobody comes to Slam fests but other performers, that “if you want to
be heard, start a band,” which couldn’t have been better advice, as her
screaming angry defiance onstage perfectly fit the profile of a punk rock lead
singer, where she literally fused feminism with punk rock. Gathering around her best friends, girls she
could trust, they quickly formed Bikini Kill, where her badass onstage
performance was inspiring to other young girls, where she’d scrawl “slut” in
lipstick across her stomach, adopt a Valley Girl accent, dance aggressively and
stomp around the stage in underwear or a miniskirt, while bringing girls in the
audience to the front and sending boys to the back, where most importantly she was
defining herself on her own terms.
The band actively sought to create a physical safe space for
women at shows, making this a policy of bringing them to the front at their
performances, where they could even sit onstage, as this was the boy era of mosh
pits and crowd surfing, which could get excessively physical, intimidating and
often injuring girls who came anywhere near, developing a Riot Grrl Manifesto,
“We are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak,”
a revolutionary call to action refusing to assimilate to male standards that
was published in a Bikini Kill fanzine in 1991, which showed early on she was a
force to be reckoned with. “I’m so sorry
if I’m alienating some of you/Your whole fucking culture alienates me," sings
Hanna in "White Boy" Bikini
Kill - White Boy - YouTube (2:15), a song that still resonates with a fury,
as some twenty years later the music industry continues to generate rape
culture lyrics and imagery, while a subject the newscasts still routinely omit
is the prevalence of rape in the military, where according to Kirby Dick’s
eye-opening film The
Invisible War (2012), more than 20% of currently serving female veterans
will be sexually assaulted, while less than 3% of the identified rapists will
ever be convicted. It’s enough to make
anyone angry, and from 1991 – 1999 it was a glorious era for Riot grrls, where
Hanna insisted “I’m not going to sit around and be peace and love with
somebody’s boot around my neck,” berating men in the audience from the
microphone for behaving like jerks, literally daring other young girls to
follow. She was sexy, she was angry, and
she was defiant as she strutted the stage with a supreme confidence,
proclaiming “We want a revolution!” One
of the best pieces of archival footage shows Hannah as a full-throttled
frontwoman for Bikini Kill singing at the top of her lungs to Mohawk-cut punk boys
who are literally inches away from her staring her down, confessing “Every show
we played was like a war.” Her
uncompromising spirit has had a tremendous influence, even if her bewildering
mixture of overt sexuality and confrontational anger, not to mention her
insistence on the word “girl,” has been tamed and co-opted by today’s consumer
market.
While there’s really not a negative word heard anywhere in
this picture, becoming something of a love fest, the mostly female cast of supporting
voices includes Hanna’s Riot grrl sisters-in-arms Carrie Brownstein and Corin
Tucker, Joan Jett, Kim Gordon, and several music and culture critics, including
Ann Powers and Jennifer Baumgardner.
While the unadulterated praise is unanimous, it also appears genuine, which
is the prevailing theme throughout, without which this would be just another
ordinary profile. Hannah is credited
with coming up with the title of Nirvana’s 1991 rock anthem “Smells Like Teen
Spirit,” spray painting it on Kurt Cobain’s wall, which he reinterpreted with a
revolutionary meaning for an apathetic generation. Hole’s Courtney Love, Cobain’s eventual wife,
sucker-punched Hannah backstage during Sonic Youth’s performance at
Lollapalooza in the summer of 1995.
Hannah filed charges against Love, who remembered nothing as she was high
on drugs at the time, and prevailed in court, challenging Love to “a feminist
debate at the university of her choice.”
Hannah dropped out of sight in 2005, officially retiring from the music
industry, where many felt she abandoned the very issues she was
advocating. But the film reveals a
mysterious illness sidelined her literally for years before it was finally
diagnosed as late stage Lyme disease in 2010, causing chronic neurological
symptoms, an illness that can be managed, but often gets worse before it gets
better. Her resilience has been
impressive, as this debilitating illness has taken nearly a decade out of her
life, where half that time the worst part was living with the fear of not
knowing what was causing her to be so sick.
But Hannah is a woman who has pushed personal crusades into worldwide
movements, who has fought to overcome antifeminist ignorance in the mainstream
press, where early in her career she had to stage a complete press blackout due
to negative depictions that belittled and distorted her activism, refusing to
allow the media afterwards to frame her message targeting bullied teen girls
and young women. Hannah is seen as
surprisingly intelligent, introspective, and tough, where her impact is perhaps
most felt with similarly smart middle class white girls, but her message of
empowerment has grown since the Riot Grrl days, broadening her field of vision
to include battered women, rape victims, gays, lesbians, and the
transgendered. Her influence has spread
to Russia and the jailed Pussy Riot band member Nadezhda “Nadya” Tolokonnikova,
an anti-Putin punk rock feminist sentenced to two years in prison for defying
the established male order, a political expression of women’s liberation rooted
in the Riot Grrl movement.
