Happy 30th Anniversary to Bikini Kill’s debut album Pussy Whipped, originally released October 26, 1993.
In 1989, before Kathleen Hanna was the tsunami force at the front of the band Bikini Kill, she was a 19-year-old photography student at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. It was during this time that she boarded a bus for Seattle in anticipation of meeting experimental novelist Kathy Acker. Acker was the author of Blood and Guts In High School (1984), a book that suggested, via its unconventional structure, that the difficulties of women’s and girl’s lives were too complex to be written about in traditional narrative form. It was a philosophy Hanna shared. She’d been doing spoken-word around Olympia, and in one powerful performance titled “The Middle Of The Night In My House,” Hanna delivered an artfully off-kilter, narratively zigzagging account of sexual abuse, ending with her screaming, “I’m going to tell everyone.”
Hanna had lied to Acker, claiming to be a journalist at a regional magazine her friend Alice worked for, all so that she could have an in-depth conversation with her hero prior to a writing workshop Acker was leading that weekend. The interview ended up morphing into an even exchange, with Acker asking Hanna why she did spoken word. “I feel like my whole life no one’s ever listened to me,” Hanna said. “I want people to listen.” Acker advised her to change course, pointing out that nobody really appreciates spoken word: “There’s more of a community for musicians than for writers. You should be in a band.”
So Hanna started a band. It wasn’t a huge stretch—everyone in Olympia had a band, and expertise wasn’t required; in fact, a primitive, stripped-down, lo-fi aesthetic was revered in the quirky Northwest college town. Hanna’s first band was called Amy Carter, after the former president’s gawky daughter, and she did that while interning at a domestic violence shelter. Then, she formed another band called Viva Knievel, embarking on a national van tour. Many of Viva Knievel’s songs were about violence and sexual assault, reflecting the work Hanna was doing at the shelter, as well as conversations she was having with women at Viva Knievel’s shows.
Back in Olympia, Hanna had begun to take notice of a young woman named Tobi Vail, who played drums in the band the Go Team. Vail put out a fanzine Jigsaw, in which she defended female musicians against widespread sexism (“The Go-Go’s don’t suck so stop putting them down”), which Hanna admired. Vail had also developed a bit of a friend crush on Hanna from afar, and so it was only a matter of time before the two women began hanging out with each other at punk shows.
When the Viva Knievel tour ended, Hanna moved to Portland for the summer, sharing a house with another Evergreen student named Kathi Wilcox. When Hanna and Wilcox returned to Olympia in the fall, they sought out Vail and the three women formed Bikini Kill, based on a discarded band name originally coined by their friend Lois Maffeo. “Bikini Kill” seemed to perfectly capture the fraught intersection of sex and violence.
Hanna became their natural frontwoman, Wilcox set about learning bass, Vail continued to play drums, and they found their guitarist in Vail’s friend Billy Karren who, despite his dude status, identified as a feminist. “We just took the feminist stuff that we read about in books and tried to filter it through a punk-rock lens,” Hanna explained in The Punk Singer. “We were like, ‘We’re gonna take over the punk rock scene for women.’” They developed a loud, buzzing, stereotypically hardcore punk-rock sound, with Hanna’s alternatingly screaming and soulful vocals and confrontational stage antics taking them over the top. After all, they didn’t want to just be a band; they wanted to be a whole revolution.
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In 1991, Susan Faludi’s Backlash detailed how the feminist advances of the ’70s had suffered a crippling backlash in the ’80s by arbiters of the status quo. Bikini Kill’s formation, however, would fortuitously coincide with the publication of a Ms. magazine article by Rebecca Walker (daughter of Alice Walker) titled “Becoming the Third Wave.” “The Third Wave was founded in response to a feeling on college campuses in 1992 that feminism was in some ways dead, irrelevant, that women of my generation were apathetic, not desirous of working on behalf of women’s empowerment,” Walker explained later. “My feeling at that time was that was absolutely not true.” In Walker’s article, feminism’s new generation, the Third Wave, was challenged with picking up where their mothers’ generation had left off, and Bikini Kill proved themselves up to the task.
I first heard Bikini Kill’s debut album Pussy Whipped via my friend Sharon (not her real name), who had lived on our American army base in Germany during middle school and then moved away for a couple years to the Washington D.C. suburbs. During her first stint in Heidelberg, I’d mostly just seen Sharon around. Our middle school was pretty rough, and she’d hung out with a very fast, wild crowd while I mostly stayed out of the melee with my tight-knit group of tamer friends. But in high school when she moved back, Sharon and I became close and she told me how back in middle school, at age 13 or so, she and her friends had been dating GIs in their twenties.
Sharon’s interest in Bikini Kill had coincided with her realization that what had happened was seriously fucked up: no normal 20-something man “dates” a 13-year-old girl. Sadly, Sharon would only stay on our base for less than a year. Her parents were divorced, she was living alone with her dad, and one morning while getting ready for school she discovered a video camera hidden in the bathroom. She promptly moved back to the states to live with her mom.
None of my experiences at the time were anywhere near as horrible as Sharon’s, but they still sucked. I’d been groped a couple times in middle school—a guy named Randy once walked past my desk and casually grabbed my breast. Another dude in homeroom put his hand between my legs on a day when I was wearing a skirt. And in high school, a football bro with whom I had been on one date a couple years prior pushed me to the floor of the film-editing room, straddled me, and felt me up in a room full of people who took way too long to get him off of me. It seemed like this was the kind of shit that happened to everyone—or every girl. So I could appreciate the white-hot rage of Bikini Kill, and for the first time it felt like maybe it didn’t have to happen to everyone.
Nineteen ninety-three, the year of Pussy Whipped, was a stellar year for feminist punk rock. Not only was it the year of Bikini Kill’s inaugural full-length, but also Heavens To Betsy’s first EP and Bratmobile’s debut Pottymouth. These three bands formed the core of Riot Grrrl, the feminist movement built on punk music, radical fanzines, and an underground comprised primarily of teenage girls—girls my age at the time—who were fed up with misogyny in all its iterations, from casual sexism to domestic violence and rape.
Riot Grrrl’s proximity to Grunge would serve as both complication and useful reaction point. Kurt Cobain had lived in Olympia while writing Nevermind (1991), had dated Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail and was friends with Kathleen Hanna (who famously coined the term “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), which meant that Riot Grrrl attracted too much media attention way too fast. It thrust the movement under a spotlight that wasn’t always welcome, threatening its underground status and ability to operate on a powerful grassroots level.
On the other hand, the violence at shows was the catalyst for Hanna’s highly memorable Riot Grrrl slogan “Girls to the front.” “Right when Bikini Kill started, right when grunge was going off the hook, right when Nirvana was exploding, it was a wild scene,” Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker observed. “It was very physical—all the moshing and stuff—and there physically was not the space to be safe for young women at these shows.” Some of Riot Grrrl’s more public talking points derived from this situation, allowing the grrrls to forcibly carve out space in the punk and grunge scenes by moving to the front of the stage, demanding literal equal footing for women.
By many accounts, the movement had begun in Bikini Kill’s early stomping grounds of Olympia at the 1991 International Pop Underground Convention, where women’s bands were centered on opening night. But Riot Grrrl’s more official beginning might also be traced, as Sara Marcus does in her excellent book Girls To The Front, to July 1992 when Bikini Kill performed at the Capitol with Fugazi, to a crowd of Riot Grrrls who got into an altercation with male Fugazi fans. The show was then immediately followed by the Grrrls’ first national convention. By the time Pussy Whipped came out in 1993, there were Riot Grrrl chapters all over the United States, as well as a vibrant culture of zines that allowed the grrrls to communicate in a vast network.
For someone like me, however, who wasn’t really a joiner (at least not at that time), Bikini Kill was enough. Just hearing Kathleen Hanna directing her immediacy and anger to “an elusive asshole male”—of which I knew many—was enough. And hearing her double dare me to be and do what I wanted, at that impressionable age of 16, would eventually lead me to more overt expressions of feminism. Pussy Whipped was vulnerable and fearlessly raw, an unmistakable call for revolution, a razor-sharp dissection of gender politics, and an honest look at the complicated relationship Riot Grrrl had to the media and the world at large.
Pussy Whipped announces itself as a serious punk-rock record with a rumbling bass line on “Blood One,” which then lights into a dissonant explosion punctuated by Hanna’s wails, orgasmic and angry as fuck: “I don’t owe you nothing / Nothing / Nada. Next, “Alien She” keeps the furious tempo chugging along, as Hanna expresses both solidarity and separateness with an “alien” who at times might be herself, and at others another woman: “She is me, I am her / Siamese twin connected at the cunt” and “She wants me to be like her / I want to kill her but she might kill me.” The song does a perfect job of depicting how women can internalize sexism and also turn on each other in the fight for survival, equality…and solidarity.
“Magnet” fumes with “You don’t own me / Fuck you don’t own me,” while “Speed Heart” infuses sludgy grunge into the mix that soon morphs into speeding, careening pure punk and curdling screams as though Hanna is trapped on a rollercoaster she can’t get off of—“Every guy I meet is such a cheater / And still I’m as fast as you.”
“Lil Red” begins with piercing feedback and grinds gloriously like metal against metal, while Hanna sings “These are my tits, yeah / And this is my ass.” When performing this song at shows, she’d often bend over and pull up her dress, mooning the audience in her thong. But lest you try to get off on any sexiness, Hanna grunts and groans and produces all sorts of guttural puking sounds as she sings to that elusive asshole male: “These are long nails to scratch out your eyes,” turning the Little Red Riding Hood myth on its head.
Tobi Vail takes the mic on “Tell Me So,” and screams her throat ragged and raw as she tells some other jerk, “If you are gonna look at me / I am gonna get a prize.” The capital of female beauty—and the power of the male gaze—is clear here, and it’s clearly bullshit that Vail’s not having any part of. Meanwhile, on the rumbly “Sugar,” Hanna mocks the sugar daddies in a little-girl singsong (in a vein of sex-positivity, Hanna worked for a while as a stripper to fund her music career): “Oh baby, I want you / You’re so fuckin’ big / You’re so big and hard” and then she asks quite rightfully on her own behalf: “Why can’t I ever get my sugar?”
Another flirtation with murky, sludgy grunge, “Star Bellied Boy” tackles the dude who tries to pretend he’s different, maybe even an ally—“Prove you’re different from the rest / You’re no fuckin’ different from the rest”—and it ends with Hanna screaming in utter frustration: “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t cum.” Meanwhile, “Hamster Baby” features screaming like a rhythmic siren, a name-drop of British journalist Everett True who mined the Olympia scene for stories and trends, and a proposition: “Who is gonna carry our bass amp / Who is gonna buy us a van / It could be you.”
Bikini Kill’s most famous song ever “Rebel Girl” comes swaggering in at this point, hips swaying and announcing the goddamn revolution no one’s gonna come back from: “That girl thinks she’s the queen of the neighborhood/ I got news for you SHE IS.” It depicts a feminist as utterly irresistible and sexy—to both girls and boys—and Hanna is overcome as she shrieks with boundless passion, “In her kiss, I taste the revolution.”
Already tired of the media breathing down her neck and misrepresenting Riot Grrrl, Hanna sings on “Star Fish,” “They want to buy / The look of my abuse / The want to use my blood / To color their perfume.” The album ends with wistful, mellow introspection on “For Tammy Rae,” written for Tammy Rae Carland, one of Hanna’s oldest friends in Olympia. “We can’t hear a word they say / Let’s pretend we own the world today.”
Like all revolutions, Riot Grrrl would end up losing steam so that, once another Riot Grrrl named Kenya moved to our army base in the mid-’90s, I was excited but also, sadly, had already begun to think of the movement as over. A couple of the major national chapters chugged along through 1996, and then Bikini Kill broke up in 1997. Yet we’re still talking about Riot Grrrl, and we’re still weighing the impact of the Third Wave, while countless Gen X women still proudly call themselves feminists and continue to take action every day.
At the end of The Punk Singer, the documentary celebrating Kathleen Hanna’s career and lasting influence, Hanna reflects on what spurred her to start Bikini Kill in the first place. “I just think there’s this certain assumption that when a man tells the truth, it’s the truth,” she said. “I feel like I have to negotiate the way I’ll be perceived. Like, I feel like there’s always the suspicion around a woman’s truth, the idea that you’re exaggerating.” Which means there’s still plenty of work to do.
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