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from Spin Magazine Written by Evelyn McDonnell
This punk-rock quartet's debut EP opens with a feminist call to arms: "We're Bikini Kill and we want revolution girl-style now!" Frontwoman Kathleen Hanna exhorts in a tone that starts out Valley-girl high and winds up a drill-sergeant bellow. With such unminced words, driven by a catapulting, squalling, feedback-and-snare sound, Bikini Kill — three gals and one boy — quickly became one of the most famous musical exports of Olympia, Washington, and the flagship act of the loose coalition of female-powered bands that were tagged "Riot Grrrl" (actually the name of both a zine and an activist network). "Dare you to do what you want / Dare you to be who you will / Dare you to cry right out loud," Hanna challenges girlfriends in one song. "Suck my left one!" she shouts at molesters and abusers in another. To young feminists who had been languishing during the conservative backlash of the '80s, Bikini Kill were third-wave consciousness-raisers who could really kick out the jams. Trouble was, Hanna, Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Billy "Boredom" Karren didn't want their revolution publicized. When the media began to lap up their provocative slogans and penchant for performing with words like "slut" written on their bellies, the group (who broke up in early '98) stirred up even more controversy by declaring a press ban. "It's insulting when people act like you're the first woman to be in a band, and you know you're not," Hanna says now. "We were definitely not the first band to have feminist or anticapitalist lyrics." She adds that such acts as Scrawl, L7, and especially Babes in Toyland inspired her own music. "We saw Babes at a party, and we were just like, 'Wow!'" Hanna says, "[Singer Kat Bjelland] was like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, playing the craziest, most inventive guitar chords, and wearing a dress. She wasn't assimilating into the rock-dude thing—she had her own thing going. That band influenced so many people." Still, there was something uniquely incendiary and crystalline about Bikini Kill, co-recorded by Fugazi's Ian MacKaye and Don Zientara. "It hit the nerve button," says Marcelle Karp, coeditor of the femalecentric zine Bust. "They made it okay for women to bond together like they did in the '70s and say, 'Fuck this, we're going to start all over again.'" See also: For more unapologetically feminist early-'90s agitpop, try Bratmobile's Pottymouth. back to in print what is riot grrrl? | band biography | lyrics | discography images | did you know? | links | about the site home |
