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Kathleen Hanna Is a Riot
The Bikini Kill singer mined decades of trauma to write her new memoir. She’s grateful she made it to the other side.
Hanna chronicles her creative genesis in the Olympia, Washington, underground alongside her bandmates in Bikini Kill, the scorched, epochal band that incited the ’90s punk-feminist movement known as riot grrrl, and later in Le Tigre, which brought that agenda to the dance floor. Evoking the very texture of pre-internet DIY — passing out lyric sheets at shows, mailing postcard flyers — Hanna writes through the miracle of humor, offering blunt cultural critique and staring trauma in the eye as she unflinchingly details the violence her “dream-killer of a dad” inflicted upon her early family life in Maryland. Tracing the influence of Bikini Kill’s third-wave countercultural art could begin with their Oly peers, including Nirvana — Hanna famously (drunkenly) scribbled “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on his bedroom wall with a Sharpie marker, titling the world-dominating song — and later Sleater-Kinney, but it continues across genres, mediums, generations.
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