PASADENA, CALIF.- The first draft of Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk,” was 600 pages long. As she worked to cut the manuscript, Hanna found herself excising page after page of male violence. “It’s pretty sad, if you read the book, because there’s still a lot in there,” she told me. “I had a joke with my editor about it.” Like, she’d already removed a rape and a kidnapping and a guy who threw a wineglass at her head! “What more do you want from me?”
Hanna is super funny. When she takes the stage as the frontwoman of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre or the Julie Ruin, she plays a kind of punk trickster, shifting her voice to resemble a bratty Valley Girl, a demonic cheerleader, an obnoxious male fan. She is always subverting femininity and disarming bad guys with her spiky and irreverent lyrics. But when it came time to write her life story, she realized that she could not playfully twist away from her past.
“I keep trying to make my rapes funny, but I have to stop doing that because they aren’t,” she writes in the book, which comes out May 14.
“Rebel Girl” documents Hanna’s long career as an underground artist and musician, and its striking intersections with the mainstream. In the 1990s, she helped instigate the riot grrrl movement, calling girls to the front of punk venues and setting off a DIY feminist ethos that was later assimilated into a girl-power marketing trend. She was a friend of Kurt Cobain’s who scrawled the phrase “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on his bedroom wall, inspiring the anthem that exploded into a global phenomenon.
Nineties nostalgia applies an appealingly gritty filter to that era’s underground rock scene, but it could be punishing for those who stood in opposition to its white male standard. Hanna has sometimes worried that if she put it all out there, she would be disbelieved. “I’ve been told by men: Oh, you’re just the kind of woman these things happen to, as if I have some sort of smell I’m emanating,” she said. “But I knew that other women would understand.”
When Joan Jett first discovered Hanna after finding a Bikini Kill demo tape at a Fugazi show in 1992, “It felt like she was my little sister,” said Jett, 65. “Rock music didn’t have room for women with strong opinions,” she added. “Kathleen locked in and spoke to her generation.” In 2019, after the preteen rock band the Linda Lindas covered “Rebel Girl” at a local benefit show, Hanna invited them to open for Bikini Kill at the Hollywood Palladium. “It’s phenomenal how many barriers she broke down,” said guitarist Lucia de la Garza, now 17. “It was refreshing to hear someone be that loud, especially when I was little.”
Hanna, 55, typically wears a platinum streak down the front of her black hair, a ramshackle bun atop her head and a coat of bubble gum lipstick. This gives her a somewhat superheroic look, even when she is folded into her living room couch with a damp-looking terrier in her lap. She shares her midcentury Pasadena, California, home with her husband, Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock of Beastie Boys), their 10-year-old son, Julius, and Terry (the dog). Hanna still can’t quite believe that she gets to live there.
Or that she is alive. Sometimes she will be sitting by the pool and get a swimsuit wedgie that transports her back to a strip club where she used to work, dancing in a thong to fund a semester at Evergreen State College or pay to repair Bikini Kill’s broken-down tour van.
As Hanna wrote the book, she was pulled into the dark recesses of her memory. “I was always walking around the house with this weird-ass look on my face,” she said. She was experiencing “what I guess in the ’50s you’d call a ‘nervous breakdown,’” she explained. For a time, she stopped writing and reported to a therapist’s office, where she was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
The diagnosis forced her to realize that “I was living my life in a constant state of agitation and fear,” she said. And it has given her permission to ask her family for certain things to help her feel safe in their home. The place is covered in what she calls “’80s carpet,” and now Horovitz drags his feet on it whenever he approaches, so she is never startled by his sudden appearance. “It’s kind of like making him wear a cowbell, but it’s really helpful,” she said.
The detail reminded me of a story from her book. It was 1997. The Spice Girls were dominating MTV with girl-power cosplay, Bikini Kill was in a rut and Hanna could barely pay rent. But she got her hands on an eight-track recorder, and for the first time, she could make music alone, laying down vocals and samples and hand claps whenever she felt like it — except not quite, because she had acquired a stalker who kept raging around town, telling people she was a “prostitute” who “needed to be punished."
As Hanna worked through the night (on the songs that would birth her solo project, the Julie Ruin), she was constantly forced to pull off her headphones and spin toward the door to make sure the stalker wasn’t breaking in. When I mentioned the incident to Hanna, she couldn’t resist making a joke: “That’s why the songs were so short.”
THERE IS A MYTHOLOGY of the male artist that normalizes his aggression. For a long time his violence only contributed to his mystique, or else it was excused as a side effect of his creative drive. The recent challenges to this figure have not diminished his dominance as an archetype. He’s easy to imagine.
But the artist who is also a victim does not enjoy roomy cultural space. She must claw her way to subjectivity and defend her work against things that she did not even do. Hanna, who has been making music for more than 30 years, has watched her art get dismissed as a paroxysm or a therapy session. Her victimhood has been used to define her work and to erase it.
In the book, she compares herself to Rapunzel choking on her own hair. In our conversation, she joked that she had written “the feminist ‘Hobbit.’” She was reaching, a little cheekily, for her own mythology, a narrative expansive enough to accommodate a story like hers. And her tale does have an epic quality.
Hanna describes her father in the book as an alcoholic who kept a loaded gun, punched a hole in her bedroom wall and called her “slutty” when she was 5. Her mother, a nurse who struggled beneath her husband’s thumb, gave Hanna a window of escape by encouraging her onto school stages and into singing lessons. As she grappled her way to cult fame as a punk singer in her early 20s, the angry men who came to her shows to throw stuff at her head or grope her backstage multiplied. A friend raped her next to his bookshelf stuffed with feminist theory after she embarrassed him in front of Cobain. At Lollapalooza in 1995, she writes, Courtney Love punched her in the face.
But Hanna kept climbing onstage and singing the story of her life. “I’m so lucky I had songwriting as a practice to talk about this stuff,” she said. She articulated her approach in Bookforum in 2016: “There’s an art to turning personal tragedies and brushes with oppression into your own, sometimes funny narratives. It’s like pulling a sliver out of your foot and fashioning it into a tiny little sword.”
In “Rebel Girl,” Hanna amasses an impressive arsenal. Every time another man diminishes her and her work, she sharpens a sword, carves out another space for herself and her friends and starts filling it with interesting material.
At Evergreen State, after her roommate Allee was attacked in their apartment, Hanna started volunteering at a rape crisis center, where she realized that her father’s abuse had placed her “on the incest spectrum — not a good place to be,” she recounts in “Rebel Girl.” Later, she spent months making a collage project called “Pretend You Like It” that recontextualized her own childhood photographs, only to find her work torn down from Evergreen’s walls at the behest of a passing Boy Scout troop leader. So she and her friends started their own gallery, Reko Muse — a name that evoked the project of “wrecking our status as muses and claiming our place as artists,” she writes.
As she wrote the book, Hanna realized, “I had suppressed the happy things as much as I suppressed the bad things,” she said. Other women were always reaching their hands out to yank her into new creative worlds: writer Kathy Acker, who told her to start a band; punk musician Tobi Vail, who joined that band; and her idol Jett, who became their producer.
With Bikini Kill, Hanna made “dank rock-bro clubs” transform as if by magic. In her zines and spoken-word pieces, preserved in a riot grrrl collection at New York University, she sketched out a theory of the artist forged not in defiance to the male standard but in cool dismissal of it. If men get to be “the producers and the makers, positing myself in opposition to them resigns me to mere waiting,” she writes in one zine. In another, her call for girls to join her is charmingly misspelled: “We are not specail; anyone can do it.”
All of this makes the book’s twist all the more devastating. Bikini Kill’s scene was swiftly and alarmingly publicized. Journalists descended to dissect it, condescending to Hanna’s art while exaggerating her role. A fan sold a picture of Bikini Kill in their swimsuits to Newsweek. Riot Grrrl Press, the zine distributor Hanna helped found, resolved to boycott Bikini Kill, citing class issues. Hanna was broke and still working as a stripper to pay her bills, but now she was accused of betraying punk by selling out and betraying feminism by stripping.
The punk scene was flowing with secret trust funds, and “because of what I looked like, I was always treated like I was Nancy Kerrigan,” she said. Some fans seemed to expect her to be a charity act, a rape-crisis counselor and a photo opp — what she calls “Feminist Barney” — all wrapped into one. For a time, she could at least maintain a barrier between the strip-club stage and the punk one, but soon the media attention demolished it.
A regular at the D.C. strip club The Royal Palace showed up at a Bikini Kill show, and a couple of local scenesters turned up at the club. They walked in while Hanna was working, put Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the jukebox and laughed. Hanna was forced to dance to the famous song with the title she wrote “with a fake smile plastered on my face, hiding a sense of humiliation too deep to describe,” she writes.
Therapy and writing allowed Hanna to process these moments, see beyond her own bad situation and acknowledge the privileges she did have as the white woman anointed the “queen of riot grrrl.” As she squirmed under media scrutiny and fan pressure, “I had the privilege to put my middle finger up at that stuff” while other female musicians were made to feel invisible, she said. These days, Hanna is relieved that “selling out” is no longer a weapon wielded against struggling artists. Also, she finally knows what it feels like to enjoy economic stability: “because I married the Beastie Boys guy,” she said. “Which is just, to me, very, very funny.”
In 1995, the rap trio invited Bikini Kill on a festival tour of Australia, where Hanna met “the sexiest boy I’d ever seen in my life,” she writes. Afterward, she bought a Beastie Boys poster and kissed Horovitz’s face with such dedication that it became wavy and discolored. When he finally came to visit, he discovered the poster rolled in a closet and said: “What’s wrong with my mouth?” They married in 2006, when Hanna’s health insurance coverage ran out, and adopted Julius in 2013. Hanna wears a gold nameplate ring that reads “ADAM,” and he wears one that says “KATHLEEN.”
None of the book’s contents surprised Horovitz, he told me. But when it’s published, “I think she will have said some things that she’s wanted to say out loud — outside of the apartment — for some time,” he said. “It’s scary to put things out there, but after you do, the world is still spinning. People move on with their lives. And you’re OK.”
THERE IS PLENTY that Hanna did not want to recount in the book. She was not eager to relitigate the Courtney Love incident, but “if Santa came up and hit you with a baseball bat, you’d have to put it in your autobiography,” she said. She titled her memoir “Rebel Girl” with reluctance; it feels so close to “riot grrrl,” and she remains conflicted about being overemphasized in that vast and leaderless movement.
Also, she had never before spoken publicly about being a mother. “I didn’t want to get asked work-life balance questions at every single interview,” she said. Motherhood, like victimhood, was another artistic pigeonhole she hoped to avoid. But “Rebel Girl” is a book about her life, and Julius is a big part of it. “I asked him if he wanted to be in it. And he was like, I’m going to be mad if I’m not,” she said.
Hanna was speaking in front of a coffee table piled with books, but the memoir is not one of them. She does not want Julius to pick one up and start reading. “He understands that some things happened to mom that, you know, made her jumpy,” she said. He, too, has learned to drag his feet on the carpet before he enters a room.
On the issue of work-life balance, “I’m the asshole dude who’s like, My art comes first,” she said. She credits Horovitz with shouldering caretaking responsibilities — for their son, but also for Hanna, while she battled Lyme disease (which she documents in the book), and as she dealt with the fallout of excavating her life.
In her 50s, music has opened up new opportunities for Hanna. “It’s really great right now to be a musician because I’m getting the kind of respect I never got in my 20s and 30s,” she said. She has set boundaries for herself, too: “I’m not constantly being burdened by, like, trauma-bonding with people who I don’t even know.” And the book, perhaps, will help to relieve some of the pressure on her body. She doesn’t need to always be showing up and explaining herself.
“Now I can be like: It’s in the book, it’s in the book, it’s in the book.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
