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REBEL GIRL: My Life as a Feminist Punk, by Kathleen Hanna
Kathleen Hanna’s means to flip — and flip off — expectations has made her one of the riveting frontpeople in latest musical historical past. Because the singer for the band Bikini Kill within the Nineties (they reunited in 2019), she shifted from seductive dance strikes she discovered as a stripper to bullhorn roars of “Suck my left one!,” a riposte she borrowed from her older sister. In Le Tigre, her subsequent main group (their reunion got here in 2023), she delivered feminist historical past classes with electro-pop glee.
However what has made Hanna a radical artist isn’t just the way in which she tears away preconceptions, however the truth that she re-centers the embodied experiences of ladies. Rape, incest, empowerment, harassment and what Bikini Kill famously referred to as “Revolution Woman Fashion Now!” — it was the title of their first self-released demo — had not often been the topics of three-minute punk songs or Xeroxed manifestoes till the quartet made it so.
As with the riot grrrl zines Hanna and her sisters-in-arms as soon as created, her first memoir, “Insurgent Woman: My Life as a Feminist Punk,” unfolds in uncooked, ragged segments. She has at all times explored tough topics, however with out the music’s cathartic energy and her commanding stage presence, the e book could be darkish. (I like to recommend the 2013 documentary “The Punk Singer” as a visible and sonic accompaniment.) Right here, Hanna reveals particulars of the non-public traumas she hinted at in such songs because the alienation anthem “Feels Blind”: a sexually inappropriate alcoholic father, a sister who overdosed and nearly died, a number of rapes.
She writes that she will’t untangle her artistry “from the background that’s male violence.” However the critiques from her friends appear to have been equally damaging to her psyche. The rock star who recorded for the formative indie label Kill Rock Stars was at all times a strolling, shouting contradiction. She suffered vicious private, political and bodily assaults for standing out in a subject of standouts; in Australia, they name this tall poppy syndrome.
Hanna may, and may, be polarizing. There’s a predictable sample within the tales she recounts: a cycle the place she stands up for herself, then caves in, then one thing dangerous occurs. You wish to shake her and warn her, “Don’t do it!” However she doesn’t hear you. A well-read graduate of Evergreen State Faculty, she continues to be upset that information tales unfold false details about her and the riot grrrl motion, however she doesn’t appear to totally settle for the function that her refusal to speak to the media performed in permitting misconceptions to take root.
Principally, Hanna is cleareyed. “I perceive now why different ladies in bands might have resented us,” she writes. “Lots of them labored laborious for the little press they bought, after which we confirmed up saying ‘NO THANKS’ to the media and had been nonetheless written about in all places.” She’s impressively forgiving of many who transgressed towards her (although not a lot Courtney Love, a longtime antagonist who, in Hanna’s telling, as soon as “coldcocked” her backstage at a music pageant). She’s additionally beneficiant in her reward, etching beautiful and loving miniature portraits of main figures, together with Kathy Acker and Kurt Cobain, and a few who must be higher identified: Tobi Vail, Tammy Rae Carland, Kat Bjelland.
Hanna will get schoolgirl-silly writing about her husband of almost twenty years, the Beastie Boy Adam “Advert-Rock” Horovitz. By letting go of Bikini Kill and embracing her marriage and different endeavors, she appears to have freed herself emotionally and creatively; there’s a welcome lightness to the memoir’s second half, whilst she recounts her struggles with debilitating Lyme illness. She even manages to make a narrative a few miscarriage freaking hilarious, showcasing her continued means to talk brat to energy.
From the 1993 single “Insurgent Woman” to this e book of the identical identify, ladies’s sovereignty over their our bodies has been Kathleen Hanna’s North Star and cri de coeur. Given latest court docket selections sending America again to the Darkish Ages, her story, together with Bikini Kill’s upcoming tour, couldn’t really feel extra mandatory.
REBEL GIRL: My Life as a Feminist Punk | By Kathleen Hanna | Ecco | 336 pp. | $26.99
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