Bikini Kill, 30 years later: punk and feminism as free space
“You made the rules / You wrote the script out / Don’t blame me / When you fucking lose”. “Statement of Vindication” is a frontal attack, which opens “Reject all American“by Bikini Kill with just over a minute of music, but with an enormous political weight. Kathleen Hanna lays bare and attacks the mechanism that regulates the gaze on women, a system made up of expectations, models and judgments to which one should adapt in order to be accepted, desirable, legitimate.
In April 1996, as grunge was slowly losing its centrality and movement riot grrrl it was no longer the urgent and disruptive novelty of a few years earlier, the Bikini Kill released their second and final studio album. Thirty years later, “Reject all American” is a record that still remains precise photograph of a moment of transitionof crisis and at the same time of awareness.
To understand what this album represents we need to go back to the beginning of the nineties, to Olympia, Washington state, when a small network of musicians and activists, between fanzines and posters, tried to building an alternative space within and against the male-dominated punk scene. The girls needed to feel safe, to be on or below a stage without fear, and to be able to speak, write, play, talk about themselves without having to ask permission. Thus the riot grrrl movement came to life, uniting against a society that did not recognize the value of female experiences and to promote the active participation of women in cultural production, encouraging them to create their own music and fanzines instead of simply following existing materials. And it is in this context that the singer Kathleen Hannathe drummer Tobi Vail and the guitarist – later bassist – Kathi Wilcox they decided to form Bikini Kill in 1990, almost out of necessity rather than ambition.
As told by Hanna in her autobiography “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk”, Kathleen, Tobi and Kathi they chose to adopt as the band’s name the same one used for the fanzine they were working on at that time. “Tobi felt an almost magical affinity for that name the moment he heard it,” Kathleen Hanna wrote in her book: “It evoked the complex history of the bikini swimsuitnamed after Bikini Atoll, the islands where the U.S. government tested twenty-three nuclear bombs, resulting in a racially motivated genocide. The military attached a photo of Rita Hayworth to the side of one of the bombs, an act against her will that helped make her known as a ‘bombshell.'” That name also contained a subtle reference to a song by one of Tobi’s favorite bands, Gang of Four, who sang in “I Found That Essence Rare”: “See the girl on the TV, dressed in a bikini, / She doesn’t think so, but she’s dressed for the Hbomb.” Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk” is then underlined: “We liked the idea of being able to tell this little-known story when someone asked us the origin of the name.”
In the same way, even the individual choices within the band still tell a precise vision today. Also in her autobiography, Kathleen Hanna recalled that a few months after the group was born Kurt Cobain asked Tobi Vail – with whom he was having a relationship at the time – to become Nirvana’s drummer. “She said no because it was convinced that our band would change the landscape of music for women“, wrote Hanna: “I’ll say it again for those in the back: Tobi Vail could have been the drummer for Nirvana, but she chose to play in a feminist band”.
When Bikini Kill’s first studio album was released in 1993, “Pussy whipped”, that vision became pure, abrasive, immediate, made of screams, dirty guitars and lyrics that spoke without filters about violence, body, identity. Three years later, “Reject all American” arrived in a completely changed context, in which riot grrrl was now misunderstood, simplified, often reduced to a labelwhile the music market moved elsewhere, towards more accessible and more easily sellable forms.
The second and last album by Kathleen, Tobi and Kathi, produced by John Goodmansonin fact sounded more defined, more readable, less chaotic than in the past. This choice was not only aesthetic but it told of a transition phasebecause on the one hand the original anger remained, on the other a more articulated, more melodic, at times even fragile writing emerged. Songs like “Jet ski” or “No backrub” maintained the punk urgency, while “False start” or “RIP” opened up different spaces, in which Hanna’s voice became more controlled and narrative, capable of keeping together pain and lucidity.
In this sense “Reject all American” presented itself asa more complex and less immediate albumbut precisely for this reason more revealing, because showed what happens when a movement born to stay outside the mechanisms of the mainstream finds itself dealing with its own growthwith its own contradictions and with the end of a phase. It wasn’t a compromise, but an acknowledgment, the moment when the DIY utopia collided with reality and stopped being an impervious refuge. Also for this reason, when listened to again today, the album almost seems like it dialogue with what was happening in the same year outside that circuitwhen the slogan “girl power” was starting to become a global commodity with the Spice Girlsemptying and simplifying a language that the riot grrrl movement had built in a radical and conflictual way.
However, inside “Reject all American” it remained intact the centrality of Kathleen Hanna’s voicenot just as a singer but as a political and narrative figure, a musician who, as she wrote in her memoir, “felt she had achieved the greatest honor imaginable when a woman told her she had repeated the lyrics I had written in her head to get through a terrible rape trial.” Here in “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk”, Hanna was able to proudly write: “I’m a person who sang ‘Rebel Girl’ in front of thousands of people, supported by the thought of that woman, that woman, that woman“. Precisely during the making of “Reject all American”, for Kathleen Hanna herself, music has stopped being representation and has become an instrumentsurvival space, collective practice. In her autobiography, Kathleen Hanna names an entire chapter after Bikini Kill’s latest album to convey this thought through its history. “Tobi and Kathi thought we needed a voice with a different timbre to ours for the choral parts, like this they suggested I call Darrenwho had moved to Seattle in the meantime,” we read: “He wasn’t a singer, but they simply wanted a different voice to fill the louder parts. I hadn’t spoken to him since I sent him that letter. I had no desire to see itespecially in the middle of an already stressful recording session – not to mention I was mourning the loss of three people at the same time. I tried to avoid it. I said I didn’t think another stamp was needed. I said to think of someone else. I said whatever came to mind. But I didn’t say, ‘He raped me’. Even though the recording was bringing us closer, I was too emotionally overwhelmed to tell the truth to the band, so I let it happen.” And again: “Kathi and I were sitting in the Target parking lot when I told her about Darren. I was afraid he wouldn’t believe mebecause everyone loved Darren, and no one would have ever imagined that he was capable of committing rape. She was shocked, but immediately believed me. When Kathi leaned out of the front seat to hug me, I felt it as if I had received clemency for a crime I hadn’t even committed”.
After the album’s release in 1997, Bikini Kill disbandedand what remains is not just a short discography, but a legacy that passes through the following years in different formsin Hanna’s projects like Le Tigre, in the new feminist waves, in the independent scenes they continue to use punk as a political language and as a free space. Thirty years later, Reject all American” is not only the last chapter of a band, but the document of a moment in which feminist punk stopped being a phenomenon to become practice. Bikini Kill’s anger wasn’t aesthetic, it was biographicaland precisely for this reason it continues to be recognizable today, in a time in which the same questions about body, power and representation remain open.
