Sounds Like Riot Grrrl Spirit: Kathleen Hanna’s Feminist Art Knows No Silence or Bounds
Cover of Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, forthcoming in May 2024.
“I won’t be quiet.
I won’t be quiet.
I’ll never be quiet.
I’ll never be quiet.”
So sound the teen intonations of soon-to-be iconic riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna near the start of a fascinating documentary film on her life, The Punk Singer, released in 2013 and directed by feminist filmmaker Sini Anderson. Among other things, Hanna, born in 1968, would become the lead singer of Bikini Kill, the game-changing band that sought to forcefully merge feminism with the male-dominated punk scene in the 1990s.
Hanna, in the form of late-night wall graffiti, would gift to her friend Kurt Cobain the song title, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which appeared on his band Nirvana’s Nevermind album (1991). The anthemic song galvanized disaffected youth and others, everywhere, and arguably catapulted Nirvana into the mainline bloodstream of radio waves and album sales. Cobain, for his part, always maintained that he and Nirvana emerged from the feminist art punk scene, despite many retrospective attempts to rewrite their emergence as a more masculinist phenomenon. Here, as ever, cultural narratives congeal and recast stories, with apparent ease, in the marketable terms of dominant sexist ideologies.
Nevertheless, the truth continues to resound through Hanna’s telling and retelling and retelling again. She will not stop reminding, she reminds us – from the rooftops and the sound stages and her living room, from the books and the zines and the magazines and the films. She will not be silenced.
The above Hanna quote is from a spoken-word event, which appears near the full-throated start of The Punk Singer, shown as part of her origins story. The film begins with Hanna’s youth and her co-creations of riot grrrl, a feminist musical art movement that suddenly emerged, fully formed like goddess Athena through father god Zeus’ forehead, in the early ‘90s. Happily, much more of riot grrrl’s cultural history promises to be revealed in Hanna’s memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as Feminist Punk, forthcoming later this year in May 2024.
When the young Hanna in the film repeats these lines at the spoken word event, they ring in the mind like an omen. She issues them with the signature lifeforce and unrelenting fire that helped to propel her to feminist punk stardom.
Riot grrrl was a space that female artists basically created for themselves, in the thick of a masculinist punk scene that, for all of its iconoclasm, just couldn’t seem to shake the sexism, misogyny, and physical aggression that continue to beset much of contemporary culture to this day.
Hanna was and remains an unapologetic, irrepressible, and powerful force to be reckoned with. After her spoken word footage, she explained that she joined a band to be better heard. She had started doing spoken word performances because, over the course of her life, she had felt that no one would listen or pay attention to her story.
“Someone told me I should join a band, that the only people who come to see spoken word are people who go see bands. So, I joined a band,” Hanna recalled.
She started a band and, with it, helped to ignite the full-on movement that came to be called riot grrrl. This feminist art arena bore no coat of arms and forswore dogmas.
As scholar Rachel Greenwald Smith (author of On Compromise and Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism) unearthed in her beautiful essay in 2021 in The Yale Review, Tobi Vail, a cofounder of Bikini Kill and coiner of the “grrl” (aka grrrl) spelling, warned in the second issue of the Bikini Kill zine in 1991:
“In this environment it is too easy for our doctrines to turn into dogma … I encourage girls everywhere to set forth their own revolutionary agendas from their own place in the world, in relation to their own scenes or whatever, rather than to simply think about ours.”
Although Bikini Kill vehemently banished creeds and propaganda, they proceeded to chart a bullet-train movement simply by doing their thing and not letting anything or anyone stop them.
One key feature of their shows involved gendered spatial rearrangements. Women were physically endangered at punk shows, and Hanna and the band sought to end all that. Their solution? Ask the women to come to the front, near the stage, and tell the men to go to the back of the venue.
“All girls in the front. I’m not kidding,” Hanna instructs from the stage, in the film. “All boys, be cool for once in your lives. Go back.”
Corin Tucker, a cofounder of the feminist indie rock band Sleater-Kinney, recalled this move in her commentary in the film. Tucker grew up in the riot grrrl scene.
“There physically was not the space for young women to be safe at these shows. And that’s a huge part of what Kathleen [Hanna] did - was to say, ‘That is unacceptable,’” Tucker reflected.
Sara Marcus, music and politics writer, chronicles the power of this space-shifting and the broader riot grrrl scene in her inspiring 2010 book, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution.
In the film, Tucker shares how the words of Bikini Kill’s song, “Feels Blind,” still give her chills. It’s the same for me. It begins:
“All the doves that fly past my eyes /
Have a stickiness to their wings /
In the doorway of my demise, I stand /
For all the grrrls, girls, women, and those sympathetic to them, I cannot recommend The Punk Singer film enough. I will not spoil more of it. Let me just say that it movingly traces Hanna’s move from Olympia, Washington, to Washington, DC, with her band, Bikini Kill, and members of the Bratmobile band. They sought to be a part of DC’s more politically minded music culture. The film travels her longstanding relationship with Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys, which continues today. It also covers Hanna’s later transformations in her solo work of Julie Ruin and the later band, The Julie Ruin, as well as the birth and long life of her electronic punk band, Le Tigre.
While the bands’ music and scenes may have morphed, the spirit of riot grrrl, for me, remains as fresh as ever. Their multivalent messages about gender, empowerment, and reclaiming stages and sounds continue to ricochet through a mainstream culture still so laden with the density of overblown, domineering masculinist egos. I don’t mean all men, of course, by any means.
Hanna summons all and sundry with these words in “Double Dare Ya,” placed at the start of the film’s accompanying soundtrack album.
This revolution is ongoing, but at least, compliments of the film, a part of it is now televised.
Cover art for the film, The Punk Singer (2013).
About the Author
Lauren Coyle Rosen is a cultural anthropologist, artist, and author who focuses on the roles of spirituality and creative inspiration in art, music, and culture. She is the author of The Spirit of Ani (with Ani DiFranco, forthcoming), Hannibal Lokumbe (with Hannibal Lokumbe, Columbia University Press, 2024), Law in Light (University of California Press, 2024), and Fires of Gold (University of California Press, 2020), as well as eight volumes of poetry. Coyle Rosen is currently a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. She was a cultural anthropology professor at Princeton University, where she received the President’s Award in Distinguished Teaching. She lives in Washington, DC, and in Philadelphia with her husband, Jeffrey Rosen. She has a JD from Harvard Law School and a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.
