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Rebel Girl

My Life as a Feminist Punk

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

An electric, searing memoir by the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre.

Hey girlfriend I got a proposition goes something like this: Dare ya to do what you want

Kathleen Hanna's band Bikini Kill embodied the punk scene of the 90s, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like "Rebel Girl" and "Double Dare Ya" are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from?

In Rebel Girl, Hanna's raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumul­tuous childhood to her formative college years and her first shows. As Hanna makes clear, being in a punk "girl band" in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination.

But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her, including with her bandmates Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, JD Samson, and Johanna Fateman. And her friendships with musicians like Kurt Cobain, Ian MacKaye, Kim Gordon, and Joan Jett reminded her that, despite the odds, the punk world could still nurture and care for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her musical growth in her bands Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its exclusivity.

In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful—and how they continue to fuel her revolutionary art and music.

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    • Kirkus

      March 15, 2024
      The lead singer of feminist punk band Bikini Kill chronicles her life and career. Before Hanna became a beloved musician and co-founder of the Riot grrrl movement, she was a child trying to survive domestic violence. Her father was a labor union leader whose "untreated alcoholism" led to her parents' divorce. Hanna left home for Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where she majored in photography. There, she met Tobi Vail and Kathi Wilcox, and they formed Bikini Kill. In the years that followed, the band toured the country, coining famous phrases like "Girls to the Front," which doubled as a call for girls to join bands and a way for punk girls to feel safer in the face of harassment from male audience members. The author's troubled past and the realities she observed at organizations like SafePlace, a domestic violence shelter, highly influenced her lyrics, many of them focused on experiences with gender-based violence and sexual assault. After leaving Bikini Kill, surviving Lyme disease, getting married to Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys, adopting a child, and founding the band Le Tigre, Hanna reflects on everything she has learned in her long career. She is particularly circumspect about the Riot grrrl movement and her views on race, both of which she says have evolved considerably, as well as her history surviving violence. "Male violence didn't create me," she writes, "it just made it harder to make my art--but I did it anyway." Hanna's book is raw, honest, poetic, insightful, and often funny. Her political evolution is particularly gratifying, especially for readers who grew up with Hanna's self-admittedly imperfect activism. At times, the text is more of a stream-of-consciousness rendering of chronological events than a structured narrative, a style that is mostly charming but occasionally confusing. An impressively perspicacious memoir from one of feminism's most influential artists.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 25, 2024
      Hanna, lead singer of the punk feminist band Bikini Kill, debuts with a no-holds-barred account of her turbulent life. Growing up with a violent, alcoholic father who once threatened suicide, Hanna began singing as an artistic outlet in college. After her roommate was attacked by a man, Hanna trained as a volunteer at a domestic violence shelter, awakening feminist convictions that she explored in punk band Viva Knievel and—starting in 1991—in Bikini Kill. Later chapters discuss the somewhat accidental origins of riot grrrl, a feminist punk movement that elicited anger from male concertgoers and sexist takes from the media (she’d held the meeting that established it partly to find writers for her zine). Also recounted are Bikini Kill’s late-1990s breakup (they’d go on to reunite in 2017 and 2019), and Hanna’s tenure as frontwoman for the band Le Tigre in 1999, a period during which she gained a measure of healing; though she’d informally counseled women about sexual abuse for years, she’d never processed her own traumas, including abuse by her father, stalkings, and rapes (“I just kept overworking and stuffing it down”). While the narrative feels unstructured in places—early performances, creative tensions between bandmembers, and feminist musings blend together—Hanna’s visceral prose captivates, and she’s refreshingly candid about the riot grrrl movement’s failures, including its whiteness and her “tokenistic” efforts to diversify it (at one workshop, she realized that “BIPOC women were as disappointed in white punk feminists as I’d been by white male punks”). It’s a raw and revealing portrait of a vital figure in the feminist punk scene.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from May 1, 2024

      Bikini Kill frontwoman Hanna's memoir is a raucous, rousing tale about the power of music and activism. Before becoming a pioneer of the riot grrrl movement of the early 1990s, Hanna grew up in a dysfunctional and abusive household. She used music and singing as a means of escape. After graduating from high school, she attended the progressive Evergreen State College, where she developed her talents in photography, fashion, and spoken-word poetry. It was the feminist writer Kathy Acker who first motivated Hanna to start a band in order to reach wider audiences. Hanna's memoir is chock-full of details about her romantic relationships and her friendships with Kurt Cobain, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Joan Jett, and Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi. She notes her run-ins with Courtney Love and her inadvertent inspiration for Nirvana's breakthrough single "Smells Like Teen Spirit." This is not a memoir about name-dropping, tales of woe, or feminism. Hanna's story is a full-bodied portrait of a fighter and activist who has used music as a way to tackle adversity. VERDICT A vivid, funny, and powerful memoir that will appeal to rock lovers and music historians.--Leah K. Huey

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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