Like putting my head in a toilet and flushing it a hundred times,” is how Kathleen Hanna describes the process of writing her memoir Rebel Girl. Written in short, fierce, punch-to-the-point chapters, it’s a book that won’t leave readers in any doubt about why 55-year-old Hanna ended up as a lightning rod for feminist punk frustrations as frontwoman of riot grrrl pioneers Bikini Kill in the 1990s. “The writing process was retraumatising,” she tells me over a video call from her home in California. “On a physical level I was revisiting terrible experiences I’d shoved deep down or because I thought that’s just what you had to put up with if you wanted to be a woman in the music industry. After some writing days I was unable to speak to my family, I just got into bed and cried.”
Active from 1990 to 1997 and now back together for a third reunion tour, which kicks off this weekend at Barcelona’s Primavera music festival, Bikini Kill are credited with coining the phrase “girl power” in a 1991 zine. When they toured the UK in 1993, fans were screaming out for their scuzzy three-chord anthem, “Rebel Girl” (produced by Joan Jett), whose defiant lyrics celebrate female liberation and friendship. Hanna would clutch her mic and yowl in celebration of a girl who’s “got the hottest trike in town… when she talks I hear the revolution… They say she’s a dyke, but I know she’s my best friend!”
