“Let fury have the hour, anger can be power,
D’ya know that you can use it?”

—The Clash, “Clampdown”

There have been few musical artists who displayed the courage of their convictions as clearly and consistently as Bikini Kill.

Bikini Kill came out of the Pacific Northwest at a time when the “family values” crap peddled by the GOP and the Christian Coalition had both pundits and average janes questioning whether or not feminism had run its course. The push for the Equal Rights Amendment had pretty much lost its steam; the word “feminist” conjured up an image of a broad with hairy legs spewing hatred towards men and unholy rejection of their essential role in aiding and abetting fruitful multiplying. Why listen to those grumpy bitches when you can guzzle your beer as you watch big-tittied cheerleaders smiling for the sideline cameras and feel enormous satisfaction that despite the whines of feminists, America was raising another generation of women who appear to be more than delighted to serve as eye candy for their male masters?

What Bikini Kill did in no uncertain terms is to call bullshit on the patriarchy, bullshit on the death of feminism, bullshit on cultural notions of beauty and womanhood. They expressed the rage of the millions of young women who had experienced sexual abuse and domestic violence and who felt they had no recourse or outlet because society had defined women as “less than,” “hysterical” and “emotional.”  And unlike many of their predecessors in feminism’s first wave (think “abolitionists and suffragists”) and second wave (think “ban the bra and ERA”), they celebrated sexuality as a fundamental form of human expression and connection, regardless of partner gender.

Zooming back in time to the period when they were putting the band together, I would have set the odds of Bikini Kill getting anyone to even listen to them equal to the likelihood of me going down on Donald Trump. Their publicity strategy in that pre-Internet era was limited to feminist zines and word-of-mouth. Their music distribution strategy was confined to DIY cassettes sold at small-venue concerts. While touring, they often slept on the floors and couches offered by friends and admirers. While Tobi Vail came from a family of drummers and had drummed in other punk bands, Kathleen Hanna and Kathi Wilcox were still trying to get their chops down on guitar and bass while breaking in new lead guitarist Billy Karren. That shouldn’t have been too much of an obstacle given the values of the DIY punk scene; after all, The Clash signed a contract with CBS after only six months of existence, at a time when Paul Simonon was still figuring out the bass. The difference, of course, is that The Clash were men; female bands and band members were considered novelties at best, by both the average fan and the male-dominated music industry.

The punch line is that the members of Bikini Kill weren’t interested in a big-label contract anyway. Their vision specifically excluded the commercial path to fame and fortune:

They knew from the beginning that Bikini Kill was going to be something special, not a feint at the Top Ten or at bourgeois stability. They had plotted it out carefully in strategy sessions: Their band was going to be a revolution. They would settle for nothing less.

Marcus, Sara. Girls to the Front . HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.

As they describe it on the About page on their website, “Bikini Kill believed that if all girls started bands the world would change. They actively encouraged women and girls to start bands as a means of cultural resistance. Bikini Kill was inspired by seeing Babes in Toyland play live and attempted to incite female participation and build a feminist community via the punk scene. They used touring as a way to create an underground network between girls who played music, put on shows and made fanzines. This independent media-making and informal network created a forum for multiple female voices to be heard.”

While I guess all that is true, it sounds kind of sterile—and Bikini Kill was anything but sterile. Bikini Kill didn’t just “actively encourage.” Kathleen Hanna got right in your fucking face, challenging girls to stop putting up with the bullshit, to be who the fuck they wanted to be and to let it all out—the abuse, the pain, the dirty little secrets, the devaluation, the constant feeling of insecurity, the sexual frustration with guys who only wanted to bang away and couldn’t find the clit if you surrounded it with flashing lights—all of it.

The “underground network” eventually evolved/morphed/merged into Riot Grrrl, a designation that would be twisted and devalued by mainstream media forces who couldn’t get their heads around a leaderless movement built on collaboration and empowerment. The remarkable story of Riot Grrrl is fully covered in Sara Marcus’ fabulous work, Girls to the Front, The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. Marcus makes it very clear that building the network involved more than the usual trials and tribulations:

But if the front rows held girls passionately singing along with every song, there seemed to be an equal number of men just behind them who shouted “Show us your tits” and howled “Shut up!” whenever Kathleen paused between songs to talk to the audience. She engaged hostile hecklers, occasionally at length. She wanted everybody’s eyes on the offenders; if they were being abusive, they needed to realize the whole crowd was aware of it, because she knew polite silence too often led to more abuse.

Marcus, Sara. Girls to the Front. HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.

Hate mail, death threats and the constant threat of physical violence were also part of the bargain.

Still, they persisted.

*****

When I’ve played Bikini Kill for friends who had never heard of them, their first reaction is usually, “Whoa! Don’t you think that’s a little raw?” Sometimes they’re referring to the music; sometimes they’re complaining about the production.

The music is raw because it had to be raw. Bikini Kill was trying to launch a revolution, and you’re not going to spark an uprising by playing Bach and reciting Wordsworth. Kathleen Hanna was channeling female rage suppressed by centuries of oppression, anger that rarely saw the light of day. The sound and the lyrics had to be aggressive to shock young women out of hopeless complacency and inspire them to take control of their lives.

The relative rawness of the production was the result of artist preference and indie economics. The First Two Records combines a self-titled EP released in 1992 (6 songs) with the Bikini Kill half (7 songs) of Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah, a split album shared with the English riot grrrl band Huggy Bear. The EP was produced by Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, who was “completely blown away” (Marcus) by the band when he heard them in D. C. at the end of a cross-country tour. MacKaye tangibly manifested his enthusiasm by offering Bikini Kill free studio time and his services as producer. In contrast, Bikini Kill’s contribution to Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah was recorded in their rehearsal space on a 4-track machine without producer oversight. Because MacKaye had both the studio experience and the punk credentials, he knew how to produce punk in a way that minimizes aural distractions while maintaining its aggressive orientation; hence, the EP features noticeably better sound quality. However, the songs presented on Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah have an aural fierceness that serves to complement the jolt-you-out-of-your-seat lyrics.

In the final analysis, I can understand some of the criticisms related to “rawness,” but I also have this nagging feeling that the animus behind many of those complaints come from men who feel threatened by female displays of aggressiveness .  .  . like the jerk who wrote the original Rolling Stone review of the EP:

The EP Bikini Kill has plenty of yowling and moronic nag-unto-vomit tantrums over stock school-of-Sabbath riffage; like almost all noisy bands lately, this one is better at melody than at ugliness but usually opts for ugliness. The Kill also cages its rage in silly editorial doggerel – “YOU! DO! HAVE! RIGHTS!” – instead of letting the rage work on its own.

We will now leave this nutless bastard with his head stuck firmly up his ass and move on to the review.

*****

The EP opens with one of the clearest statements of artistic intent on record. I have this wild fantasy where I imagine Bikini Kill launching their career via a 30-minute prime-time riot grrrl reality show with “Double Dare Ya” streaming over the opening credits:

We’re Bikini Kill and we want revolution
Girl-style now!

Hey girlfriend
I got a proposition goes something like this:
Dare ya to do what you want
Dare ya to be who you will
Dare ya to cry right out loud
“You get so emotional baby”
Double dare ya, double dare ya, double dare ya

Girl fuckin’ friend yeah
Double dare ya
Double dare ya
Double dare ya

—“Double Dare Ya,” Bikini Kill, The First Two Records

As a TV theme song, it would have crushed “Hey, hey, we’re The Monkees” and represented a significant step forward in human evolution.

The recording is engaging from the get-go, though the form of engagement is somewhat perverse: the first sounds we hear from Bikini Kill are fuck-ups—loud hiss, Kathleen Hanna asking, “Is that supposed to be doing that?” followed by some annoying feedback and guitar buzz from either a wobbly cord or shaky wiring. “Ok, sorry, ok we’re starting now,” Kathleen apologizes, then immediately hits her sweet spot with the opening call to action. While studio chatter and re-starts have become fairly common additions to modern recordings, this isn’t the studied nonchalance of The Beatles in the opening moments of “Taxman,” but an affirmation of the DIY ethic that tells the listening audience, “We’re nothing special—if we can make records, so can you!”

The counter-argument to that assertion is Kathleen Hanna’s vocal, which is pretty special. She is a woman of many voices, a quick-change artist who can change her voice from full-throttled woman to Valley Girl to smart-ass chick in a heartbeat. The first verse quoted above is largely Kathleen at full power, though she effortlessly shifts to “girl talk tone” filled with cheek and guile when flinging the “double dare ya” challenge at her invisible companion. In the second verse, she downshifts from high gear to deliver the line “Gotta listen to what the man says” in a voice dripping with acidic sarcasm. She goes full Valley Girl in the last verse until the subject of women’s rights comes up and she shifts to a bullying tone in the line, “Rights? Rights? YOU-DO-HAVE-RIGHTS!” When Ian MacKaye observed that Kathleen was “dialing it in from somewhere else, like high up” (Marcus), he was speaking factually, not fancifully.

The band is pretty special, too, pumping out the musical energy with a tightness unusual for a relatively new group. Tobi Vail plays the role of conductor, providing comparative newcomers Wilcox and Karen with a solid foundation and displaying enough confidence in them to hold things steady while she throws in a few thrilling drum rolls and syncopated riffs. “Double Dare Ya” is one of the strongest statements of identity I’ve ever heard from a band, a piece that established Bikini Kill as a purveyor of no-bullshit feminist punk.

“Double Dare Ya” bleeds right into “Liar,” where another childhood taunt is used as a challenge. This time, it’s directed to the men who perpetuate rape culture. If you don’t exactly understand what rape culture means, here’s a handy definition from the Women’s Center at Marshall University:

Rape Culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women’s bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women’s rights and safety.

Rape Culture affects every woman. The rape of one woman is a degradation, terror, and limitation to all women. Most women and girls limit their behavior because of the existence of rape. Most women and girls live in fear of rape. Men, in general, do not. That’s how rape functions as a powerful means by which the whole female population is held in a subordinate position to the whole male population, even though many men don’t rape, and many women are never victims of rape. This cycle of fear is the legacy of Rape Culture.

The site goes on to list numerous examples of rape culture perpetuation, including:

• Blaming the victim (“She asked for it!”)
• Trivializing sexual assault (“Boys will be boys!”)
• Tolerance of sexual harassment
• Publicly scrutinizing a victim’s dress, mental state, motives, and history
• Defining “manhood” as dominant and sexually aggressive
• Defining “womanhood” as submissive and sexually passive
• Pressure on women to not appear “cold”
• Assuming only promiscuous women get raped
• Refusing to take rape accusations seriously
• Teaching women to avoid getting raped instead of teaching men not to rape

If that list doesn’t help you understand the rage in Bikini Kill music, nothing will.

After a spot of dissonant feedback and two spirited grunts from Kathleen, she launches into the song by describing two common forms of rape: “Betty’s got the back of her dress all ripped out/Mama’s got her face muffled, twist and shout.” The latter form, of course, involves the religiously-sanctioned form of rape, justified by whatever piece of scripture you have handy that conveniently defines “wife” as “property” and dismisses the notion that rape can within marriage. Kathleen launches into the liar-liar-pants-on-fire taunt, punctuating it with gusto (“You know you’re a goddamn motherfuckin’ liar”). The following six lines will seem repetitious without a lyric sheet: “You profit from the lie/You prophet from the lies.” If you don’t understand how one can profit from the lie of rape culture, you have the examples of Donald Trump and at least two Supreme Court justices to help you connect the dots; given all the sexual scandals involving televangelists and other “fundamentalist Christians,” the connection between profiting and “propheting” should be obvious. The last line in the sequence adds a single word to drive the point home (“You profit from the rape lie”), then Kathleen proceeds to connect rape culture to cultural expressions of masculinity, racism and domestic violence:

Eat meat
Hate blacks
Beat your fucking wife
It’s all the same thing

I would have replaced “eat meat” with “buy guns,” but yeah, it’s all the same fucking thing.

Kathleen reminds us that while men get away with rape by simply denying it, the victim knows that whatever the outcome, she will “stand my whole life on trial.” After a repetition of the profit/prophet sequence, we arrive at the most chilling part of the song, when the guitars disappear, the drums become more insistent and Kathleen sings, “All we are saying is give peace a chance” in a sweet, “feminine” voice over the horrifying screams of a rape victim. The repetition of the first verse and chorus that follows seems superfluous, but I don’t know how else they could have ended the song . . . the screams still ring in your ears . . . and you’re left to face the truth that trying to fight toxic masculinity armed with idealistic slogans and naïve hope simply isn’t going to cut it.

Kathleen seems to channel Kim Deal’s spoken-word intro to “Tony’s Theme” in the introduction to “Carnival,” as the two women share a similar vocal timbre. Kim Deal also wrote about the joys of fairs and carnivals (“Saints” on Last Splash), and both songs express a delightful sense of wickedness in the base enjoyment of an essentially tacky experience. Unsurprisingly, Kathleen provides more juicy details about the “seedy underbelly” of those carnivals that plant themselves in the parking lots of shopping malls to give teen girl shoppers a more thrilling bad-girl experience than they can get from run-of-the-mill shoplifting. “This is a song about 16-year-old girls giving carnies head for free rides and hits of pot,” recites Kathleen, revealing no shame whatsoever as she repeats “I want to go” three times, like Dorothy wishing herself back to Kansas. If there’s one line that gives Kathleen’s take on carnivals the edge, it’s gotta be “I’ll win that Motley Crue mirror if it fucking kills me!” One could argue that requiring the girls to give head really sucks (man, I love a good pun), but nowhere in the song does it indicate that the carnies are imposing such a requirement. Kathleen wants to go, and she makes it clear that the main obstacle is cost (“But I know it’ll cost $16 now”). Giving a guy a blow job in exchange for weed and the thrill of the Tilt-a-Whirl seems like a fair deal when you ain’t got the dough. It may be naïve, it may be dangerous and she may be prostituting herself (gasp!), but it’s her choice. For those searching for a feminist message in “Carnival,” I think it’s this: “pro-choice means giving women the right to do stupid shit and learn from the experience.” Confession: I learned more from doing stupid shit than I ever learned in high school.

The relative lightness of “Carnival” disappears in a flash with “Suck My Left One.” With the band in full throttle bash, Kathleen uses three different voices to tell the story: Valley Girl for the bulk of the performance, amped-up Valley Girl for a key transition line and a voice that can only be described as ghoulish for the one-line chorus, “Suck my left one” (though on the second go-round she flips the switch to Valley Girl for the second “one”). The dazzling display of vocal pyrotechnics serves to intensify the meaning in the lyrics, but that meaning is also highly dependent on context. Verse one presents either two blood sisters or two lesbian girls (“sisters” in feminist-speak) in an unidentified mixed-gender environment (“Tell me what the fuck we’re doing here/Why are all the boys acting strange?”). The narrating sister responds with the transition line that urges rebellion against sexual repression: “We’ve got to show them we’re more than queer.” Kathleen then goes ghoulish on the line “Suck my left one,” imbuing that rendition of the line with the sinful evils associated with witchcraft. In the second verse, “sister” is used in the familial sense, but in the context of a father sexually abusing his daughter. When this sister instructs the father to “suck my left one,” the ghoulish voice now communicates the hopeless bitterness of the abused. The third verse establishes the mother as an abuse-enabler, supplying the rationale for her hopelessness. Classic maternal messages—“Show a little respect for your father” and “Wait until your father gets home”—now take on a horrifying meaning and explain the daughter’s sullen acceptance (“Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine”). “Suck My Left One” is a tough song to listen to, but hey—Bikini Kill is not for sissies.

In the fascinating documentary The Punk Singer (a film about Kathleen Hanna), Corin Tucker of Heavens to Betsy and Sleater-Kinney fame quotes snippets from “Feels Blind.” When referring to the line “Look at what you have taught me/Your world has taught me nothing,” Corin had this to say: “The way Kathleen delivered that line was so angry; it was so outside the realm of how a young woman was supposed to act—really raw.” Corin’s partner Carrie Brownstein shared similar sentiments about the song with Spin magazine:

I remember being very struck by the lyrics of “Feels Blind,” remembers Wild Flag and Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein, “‘As a woman I was taught to be hungry / Yeah, we could eat just about anything / We’d even eat your hate up like love.’ It was the first time someone put into words my sense of alienation, the feeling that all of these institutions and stories we’d been taught to hold as sacred had very little to do with my own experiences.”

The song knocks me out, too, especially during the passages when Kathleen abandons the Valley Girl and goes into full belt-out mode in the chorus. That, my friends, is power personified:

All the doves that fly past my eyes
Have a stickiness to their wings
In the doorway of my demise I stand
Encased in the whispers you taught me

How does it feel?
It feels blind
How does it feel?
Well, it feels fuckin’ blind
What have you taught me?
Nothing
Look what you have taught me
Your world has taught me nothing

If you were blind and there was no Braille
There are no boundaries to what I can feel
If you don’t see but were taught
What you saw wasn’t fuckin’ real, yeah

Doves generally symbolize peace and hope, but in a woman’s experience, there’s always a catch that gets in the way of full flight, frequently dashing hope and any sense of inner peace. The “stickiness” consists of all the “yes, buts” and “girls don’t act like that” and disapproving looks by the majority who subscribe to the belief that women by their very nature are limited creatures. The whispers could be a combination of the self-talk women engage in as they encounter a world that bears no resemblance to the illusions painted by mom and dad, or the useless advice from parents and elders trying to get women to passively accept their lot as second-class citizens.

It helps that “Feels Blind” is one of the strongest band performances on the album, and despite a lack of supporting documentary evidence, I’m going to go out on a pretty sturdy limb and tell you that the arrangement bears more than a trace of Pixies influence. The song begins with a lengthy, clean bass solo where Kathi Wilcox channels Kim Deal; the arrangement adopts the soft-loud dynamics the Pixies made famous; the dissonant noise from the guitars would fit nicely into several Pixies songs (though I don’t hear any Joey Santiago in the lead guitar). The great differentiator is Kathleen’s stunning vocal performance, an all-time favorite that I call up whenever I need music to clean the crap that has collected in my soul as I navigate through the world of male entitlement.

The EP section of the album ends with “Thurston Hearts the Who,” a live performance where Tobi Vail reads a negative review of a Bikini Kill while Kathleen sings a song (such as it is) about the dangers of identifying yourself with an indie rock idol (in this case, Thurston Moore, lead guitarist of Sonic Youth). Let’s just be polite here, call it an “interesting art piece that could have benefitted from further development and move on to the stuff from Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah.

The recording quality on Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah wasn’t the greatest, and the band feels a bit uptight at times, but the grrrls manage to get in more than a few good licks. “White Boy” is a simple, lo-fi, demo-quality production saved by an introductory mini-interview and Kathleen’s bitter, sarcastic response:

[White Boy:]  I don’t think it’s a problem ’cause most of the girls ask for it.

[Kathleen:]  Uh huh, how did they ask for it?

[White Boy:]  The way they act, the way they… I… I can’t say the way they dress because that’s their own personal choice.  Some dumb hos, those slut rocker bitches walking down the street, they’re asking for it, they may deny it, but it’s true.

Translation: White boys are remarkably fortunate that the creator endowed them with psychic powers. The ability to read a girl’s mind—-nay—to know a girl better than she knows herself has come in handy in many a rape defense. In response, Kathleen refuses to pull any punches:

Lay me spread-eagle out on your hill, yeah
Then write a book ’bout how I wanted to die
It’s hard to talk with your dick in my mouth
I will try to scream in pain a little nicer next time

How very thoughtful of her! Kathleen also realized she would get some pushback for calling out our precious, entitled white boys, so with great foresight she included an apology in the song:

I’m so sorry if I’m alienating some of you
Your whole fucking culture alienates me
I can not scream from pain down here on my knees
I’m so sorry that I think!

I’d bet you a million euros that the white boy who appeared in the intro would “read” Kathleen’s response as a woman begging for a man to put her in her place. Guys! Leave the cat-and-mouse shit for Tom and Jerry and grow the fuck up!

“This Is Not a Test” is our assurance that the members of Bikini Kill were indeed human and capable of fucking up. The song’s message takes forever to develop, and when it finally arrives, it’s in the form of adolescent defiance: “You don’t make all the rules!/I know what I’m gonna fucking do/Me and my girlfriends gonna push on through/Riot Grrrl gonna stomp on you.” I don’t think the riot grrrl movement needed an official rally song, and if they did, this sure as shit wasn’t it. The band is seriously off the mark, struggling with the stop-time moments and unable to maintain a consistent tempo.

Before we get into “Don’t Need You,” I want to go two steps back, highlight a line from “White Boy” and garnish three words with bold type: “I’m sorry if I’m alienating some of you.” Bikini Kill weren’t a group of rabid man-haters; they simply had zero tolerance for assholes of any gender. Kathleen Hanna dated Dave Grohl and later married Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys; Tobi Vail dated Cobain; Kathi Wilcox married Guy Picciotto of Fugazi (and obviously, they featured a man on lead guitar). What they collectively rejected were the twin notions of male-as-protector and female-as-dependent, and that’s what “Don’t Need You” is all about:

Don’t need you to say we’re cute
Don’t need you to say we’re alright
Don’t need your atti-fuckin’-tude, boy
Don’t need your kiss goodnight

Wow!
We don’t need you
We don’t need you
Us girls
Don’t need you

Don’t need you to tell us we’re good
Don’t need you tell us we suck
Don’t need your protection
Don’t need your dick to fuck

Wow!
We don’t need you
We don’t need you
Us whores
Don’t need you

Does it scare you
That we don’t need you?

The only men likely to be scared by this message are those who believe that keeping a woman down is essential to masculine identity. Truly secure men would embrace female independence because it’s much more validating when a woman chooses to be with a man instead of just submitting to societal expectations. The band is much tighter on this piece, featuring Tobi pounding away with enthusiasm and establishing a beat so strong that it’s impossible for the others not to fall in line—you get the sense that the group really felt this one.

Kathleen Hanna supported her budding musical career by working as a stripper, a choice that caused some second-wave feminists to feel rather uneasy:

She attended a talk by Andrea Dworkin on the evils of pornography, and she went to a meeting in Seattle of the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT), but she felt out of place at both events. Dworkin, the intellectual architect of an antiporn orthodoxy that was the most well-known strain of feminism at the time, took the view that all sex workers were victims of patriarchy. Kathleen worked as a stripper, and she considered it a choice she had made freely; she liked to tell people that it felt no more degrading than working as a waitress, and it paid a lot better. When she brought this up during the Q&A, Dworkin’s response left Kathleen in tears. “To her, feminism and sex-trade work were diametrically opposed conceptions,” Kathleen recalled. “She said, ‘Oh! I appreciate you coming out and saying this in front of all these people. And I just want to tell you that if you think this experience has not affected you, I want you to know that it’s going to affect the whole rest of your life. You’ll be paying for it forever, blah blah blah.’”

Marcus, Sara. Girls to the Front . HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.

Those were the feminists Camille Paglia called out for having a “Nazi and Stalinist view of art, where art is subordinate to a pre-fab political agenda.” Although I’m not much of a fan of her music, I agree with Paglia that Madonna pretty much destroyed the argument that a woman who chooses to openly manifest her sexuality surrenders her power. In “Jigsaw Youth,” Kathleen defends the right to reject such judgmental dogma and follow your own path:

I can sell my body if I wanna
God knows you’ve already sold your mind
I may sell my body for money sometimes
But you can’t stop the fire that burns inside of me . . .

We know there’s not one way, one light
One stupid truth

Won’t fit your definitions
Don’t fit into your dumb plans
Not into win/lose mentality
Won’t meet your demands

Once again, the band is on fire here, with strong power-chord guitar supporting the equally hard stance in the lyrics. Ironically, Kathleen delivers the song in her Valley Girl style, as if she’s mocking the Andrea Dworkins of the world who considered her a helpless idiot.

The belief that there is more than one path in life available to a woman is given further emphasis in “Resist Psychic Death.” I have no problem with the message of refusing to submit to cultural repression of women (“I will resist with every inch and every breath/I will resist this psychic death”), but the performance feels both stiff and choppy, particularly when the band attempts a tempo change and doesn’t quite pull it off. I can understand why the song earned semi-anthemic status when first introduced, but I don’t think it aged well beyond the urgency of that particular moment.

“Rebel Girl” is probably Bikini Kill’s best-known song, and yes, the version on Pussy Whipped may sound better to those who prefer greater refinement. I like them both because Kathleen Hanna kicks ass on both versions—flipping back and forth between the two as I review the song has been a thoroughly pleasurable experience . . . so much so that I had to wash my fingers before I was able to type this sentence. I will say that the version here has a touch more sassiness to it, a feeling that probably comes from the rougher guitars and less filtering on Tobi’s drums.

The foundation of the song involves two uniquely female behaviors—and I mean learned behaviors, not DNA-programmed behaviors. The first is that women are always checking out other women and that checking out always starts from a competitive orientation. The second arrives when the emotional intelligence kicks in: the competitive fire cools and we reach out to the former object of our envy and seal the friendship by exchanging clothing. Heterosexual guys don’t check each other out with the thoroughness manifested by heterosexual women, probably because they’re terrified of being tagged as gay. And I’ve never heard of heterosexual men showing each other their wardrobes and saying, “Oh, you’d look good in this Oxford button-down.” If a straight guy lends another guy some clothing, you can bet that it’s only because the man in need has vomited all over the duds he was wearing. For women, “I don’t have anything to wear—can I borrow that patterned sleeveless of yours?” is a bonding experience, an affirmation of close friendship. Sharing clothing is also a financial necessity because women’s clothing is far more expensive and most of us can’t afford a new dress every time we want to do some high-class clubbing. You’re not going to lend your special occasion duds to just anyone—you have to trust the borrower enough to have confidence that she won’t return a pile of rags that smell like the floor of an Irish pub.

Now, I don’t have any scientific evidence to support this, but my sense is that because girls are always checking each other out and checking out bodies in particular (ostensibly for fit, but that’s crap), it’s easier and more comfortable for women to take the next step and engage in displays of physical affection (air kisses don’t count). Having armed you with facts and reasonable theory, we can now explore “Rebel Girl.”

The song opens with classic female competitive envy that turns into idol worship in about ten seconds:

That girl thinks she’s the queen of the neighborhood
She’s got the hottest trike in town
That girl, she holds her head up so high
I think I wanna be her best friend, yeah

What motivates Kathleen to take the next step is not the trike but the way “she holds her head up so high.” That orientation might earn her the “stuck-up bitch” label from those who resent her confidence, but for Kathleen, there lies the attraction. The girl expresses confidence and pride—and in the context of the patriarchy, that makes her a rebel.

Rebel girl, rebel girl
Rebel girl you are the queen of my world
Rebel girl, rebel girl
I think I wanna take you home
I wanna try on your clothes, yeag

Here the clothes exchange involves trying on a new identity, something traditional women do on a much larger scale. When her crazy schemes fell flat, Lucy Ricardo’s fallback plan would invariably involve a new dress or hat. India Adams sang, “There’s nothing like a new man to make you feel like a new dress” in “It’s Silk,” underscoring the importance of apparel to self-esteem. Here the girl is trying to assimilate the rebel girl’s confidence by trying on her clothes; the “I think” indicates some trepidation about taking that big step into rebelliousness. Feeling a bit shaky, our heroine feels the need to justify her admiration and comes out in favor of total rebellion:

When she talks, I hear the revolution
In her hips, there’s revolution
When she walks, the revolution’s coming
In her kiss, I taste the revolution

Sara Marcus wrote, “With this incantation, the girls raise the shade of the role model, the someone they’ve been longing to see. The intensity of their desire, the power of that projection, conjures her into the room. The invoked apparition sharpens, focuses. They make of each other that girl. They make her themselves.” Viva la fucking revolución!

The album closes with the comparatively subdued “Outta Me.” This is a demo quality take with an arrangement that needed some work, but the song itself has enough potential to make me wish they would have revisited it. You rarely hear full chord strumming on a Bikini Kill record, and though the sound is scratchy and rough, it demonstrates that the song could have used a full acoustic arrangement a la Ani DiFranco to support the breezy melody while maintaining the bite.

Although the #MeToo movement and the recent upsurge in domestic violence attributed to the worldwide lockdown tell us that the problems women face are as widespread as they were in the early ’90s, no one can say that Bikini Kill did not change lives and raise consciousness despite the limitations of indie distribution. In the documentary The Punk Singer, Kathleen Hanna talked about how her audience was not the music consumer but the teenage girl sitting in her bedroom at night, writing in her diary, wondering why her parents told her “You can be anything you want to be” when her daily life consisted of blocked paths and harsh judgments—judgments that had nothing to with her brains, compassion or the content of her character, but everything to do with her physical appearance. This one-bedroom-at-a-time approach to revolution may seem like a longshot at best, but before you reach that conclusion, I suggest you take a trip over to The Bikini Kill Archive and read the responses to the invitation on that page: “Please add your Bikini Kill story to this blog! It can be totally off the top of your head and doesn’t need to be fancy. Maybe it’s your reaction to a song we wrote, something weird that happened at one of our shows, a personal anecdote or just WHATEVER.” Some of the contributors heard Bikini Kill in their prime, but a surprising number were toddlers in the ’90s and only recently discovered the band. Here are a few of my favorite responses:

• “Since I was born I was raised to suck in my stomach and not talk until spoken to, Bikini Kill taught me to say fuck it and take no shit from anybody. They still help me through the days and I could thank them every day for it.”
• “I live and study in the small town in Central Europe where feminism is still some weird concept that many women despise because of the demonizing image of the feminists by the media. But I am doing my best to educate them, I show men why feminism is important to them as well. I am still angry, but I’m making a change with my anger.”
• “After leaving a violent and psychologically abusive marriage, I crank up BK and it takes all the self-loathing and shame for simply being a woman all away.”
• “I was sexually molested for several years by a neighbor when I was just a little girl. It tore away my self-respect and confidence at an early age and I was terrified to be around guys who weren’t family. I didn’t know how to channel my anger and shame. Bikini Kill lyrics and Kathleen’s voice also carried me through a very emotionally abusive relationship that I couldn’t find the strength to get out of until I found empowerment through music. I truly love Kathleen for everything she’s done for my mind.”

Pretty powerful stuff, but the one that moved me the most came from a man:

Listening to them opened the door to the Riot Girl movement and I learned about feminism and overall treating women with respect and dignity. It was a confusing time period for me because I didn’t have any father figure and a lot of what I was learning about being a man came from what I saw and read. I believe learning about feminism at such an early age taught me how to be a better man and now a better father for my daughter.

Beautiful . . . and painfully relevant today. We live in a world where misogyny is entrenched, where domestic violence continues unabated, and where rape and sexual abuse remain sanctioned by the powers that be. Daughters need all the support they can get to navigate such a confusing and often cruel reality.

Fortunately for daughters (and fathers), Bikini Kill is back, having launched a US tour that was unfortunately suspended by COVID-19 but is now rescheduled for the fall (keep your fingers crossed). Even Rolling Stone has joined the party, publicizing their return in the appropriately-titled article “Bikini Kill Is the Band the World Needs Now” by Brenna Erlich (status: female). I can’t guarantee a splendid time for all, but if you’re lucky enough to scoop up some tickets before they disappear, the experience might just inspire you to do more to make our world a safer place for women.

Go to the next review in the series: Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair