No artist of the last decade is more prominently associated with feminist rock ‘n’ roll than Le Tigre’s Kathleen Hanna. It was Hanna and her co-conspirators, Tobi Vail and Kathi Wilcox, who emblazoned “Girl Power!” across the cover of their Bikini Kill fanzine long before the Spice Girls co-opted the slogan. And it was Hanna, Vail and Wilcox who formed the band Bikini Kill in 1990 to help spread their message, demonstrating to a generation just how much young women could accomplish armed only with three chords and a head full of ideas.
But before all that, Hanna was just another wayward student piling up absences at a Portland, Oregon, high school.
“In the ’80s, I was kind of a loser,” says the 31-year-old singer, the daughter of a welder and a nurse. “I wasn’t aware of feminist music or even many female rock bands. I went to punk shows where the girls were pushed to the sidelines because the boys were beating each other up. But I was really lucky I went to high school when femmy guys were in vogue, like Duran Duran, ABC and the Fixx. Back then, there was some insidious sexism in pop music, but also a lot of hot glamorous gay celebration going on.”
Hanna piled up so many absences that she had to write an essay stating why Evergreen College in Olympia, Wash., should grant her admission. “It was my last-ditch effort to go to college, and it worked,” she says. “And I found this amazing scene. Ever since I was a kid I wanted to be a singer. But I never thought I could be in a band. Olympia changed all that. It was just assumed girls could be in bands.”
Hanna’s Bikini Kill, both the band and the fanzine, became building blocks of the riot grrrl movement that swept the underground in the early ’90s and nurtured the inner-feminist in rockers from Sleater-Kinney to Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, whose “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was inspired by a slogan Hanna spray-painted graffiti-style on his bedroom wall.
After Bikini Kill broke up, Hanna struck up a casual musical partnership with friends in New York that became Le Tigre, which incorporates the dance music and new-wave-style hookiness of Hanna’s youth.
“I always wanted people to dance, and even with Bikini Kill we talked about getting more swing into the songs,” Hanna says. “I want to continue in the direction of being more danceable, more theatrical. To me, going to a concert is a big deal, so we’re gonna get dressed up and put on a big show.”
Despite the dizzy beats and splashy outfits, Hanna and bandmates Johanna Fateman and JD Samson still dish the dirt from the feminist front lines. The songs on the band’s second album, “Feminist Sweepstakes” (Mr. Lady Records), are stories of dead-end jobs and marginalized lives — snapshots from a society in which gender and sexual orientation too often dictate the difference between economic success and failure, social acceptance and ostracism.
“The only disappointing thing about going from Bikini Kill to Le Tigre is when people say, `You used to be so angry and now you’re not angry,'” Hanna says. “Well, I’m still so [expletive] angry that I am going to find 3,000 ways to express it. I’m older, and I’ve learned how to express my anger in more complicated and beautiful ways.”
If anything, her latest, more accessible music has opened up the possibilities of what feminist rock can mean and whom it can reach.
“I didn’t know my Her-story when I started,” Hanna says. “In all my youthful idealism I had a total arrogance about what feminist projects had gone before my feminist projects. A big problem in any feminist music or art is that we’re cut off from each other by racial lines, class lines, generational lines. Those borders need to be crossed with respect. In a selfish way, I need other women to continue, I need other women bands, women promoters, feminist activists and artists to exist, because that nurses me. I’m not a totally altruistic person out to save the whales. I need that community to keep going, because that keeps me going.”
Le Tigre
When: 7 p.m. Thursday
Where: Metro, 3730 N. Clark St.
Price: $12; 312-559-1212
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Hear Greg Kot on “Sound Opinions” at 10 p.m. every Tuesday on WXRT (93.1) FM.
