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Kathleen Hanna

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Kathleen Hanna

Kathleen Hanna (Born 12 November 1968) is an American musician. She is the former lead singer of Bikini Kill (early 1990s) and feminist electronic band Le Tigre. In 1998, Hanna released a solo album under the name Julie Ruin. Hanna has also written about feminism and art and has collaborated with a wide variety of musicians, appearing on records with numerous artists, such as Atari Teenage Riot, Joan Jett, the Rickets, Green Day, Internal/External and Mike Watt.

Life and career

Kathleen was born in Portland, Oregon and attended The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington in the late 1980’s when she worked as a burlesque dancer to support herself. She studied photography, worked at a domestic violence organization, and became involved with the burgeoning art scene in Olympia, doing spoken word performances and booking bands and exhibits for an independent feminist art gallery called Reko Muse. During this time period Hanna formed her first band, Amy Carter, with Reko Muse co-founders Heidi Arbogast and Tammy Rae Carland. Her second band, Viva Knievel, toured the United States and upon returning to Olympia Hanna began collaborating with fellow Evergreen student and zinester Tobi Vail after seeing a performance of The Go Team, a band made up of Vail, Billy Karren, and Calvin Johnson (of Beat Happening and K Records fame).

In the summer of 2006, Hanna married Adam Horovitz, better known as Ad-Rock of the legendary Hip Hop group the Beastie Boys. She was once involved with Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters and Nirvana. In 2004, she provided the vocal track for the opening of the song Letterbomb on Green Day's American Idiot and interviewed Amy Poehler for Interview Magazine.

Bikini Kill

Hanna and Tobi Vail worked on a zine called Revolution Girl Style Now and, together with another Evergreen student, Kathi Wilcox, wrote the zine Bikini Kill as a response to sexism in the punk rock scene. The three women decided to form a band to personify their ideals and recruited Vail’s bandmate Karren as the fourth member, naming their band after their zine.

Bikini Kill became part of the seminal Olympia, Washington music scene of the early 1990’s, which was characterized by political awareness, a strong artistic, do-it-yourself ethic, and an emphasis on local collaboration and support. The most famous band to come out of this scene was indubitably Nirvana; the name for their hit song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was inspired by Kathleen's spray painting “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on one of Kurt Cobain's walls. Cobain and Vail were dating at that time, and Vail wore Teen Spirit deodorant.

Riot Grrrl

In 1991, the band spent a summer in Washington, D.C., where Hanna began collaborating with Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman from the band Bratmobile on the zine riot grrrl, which became a call to action for increased feminist activity and female involvement in the punk rock scene. In a 2000 interview with Index Magazine, Hanna relates:

We wanted to start a magazine, and Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman from the band Bratmobile had started a little fanzine called Riot Grrrl and we were writing little things for it. I'd always wanted to start a big magazine with really cool, smart writing in it, and I wanted to see if the other punk girls in D.C. that I was meeting were interested in that. So I called a meeting and found a space for it, and it just turned into this sort of consciousness-raising thing. I realized really quickly that a magazine wasn't the way to go. People wanted to be having shows, and teaching each other how to play music, and writing fanzines, so that started happening. It got some press attention, and girls in other places would be like "I wanna do that. I wanna start one of those."

Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and zines like Jigsaw and Girl Germs defined the movement that came to be called Riot Grrrl.

Bikini Kill's first release for the Kill Rock Stars label was a self-titled EP produced by Ian MacKaye of Fugazi. Bikini Kill then toured the UK, recording a split LP with UK band Huggy Bear. This tour was filmed and the band was interviewed by Lucy Thane for her documentary, It Changed My Life: Bikini Kill In The UK.. Upon returning to the U.S., the band began working with Joan Jett, who produced their single, "New Radio/Rebel Girl". After the release of this record, Kathleen began co-writing some songs with Joan for her new album.

At the same time Kathleen produced several solo pieces for the Kill Rock Stars "Wordcore" series of recordings, including the 7" single "Rockstar" and the song "I Wish I Was Him" (a Ben Lee cover about alternative rock heartthrob Evan Dando) on the KRS compilation Rock Stars Kill. She was also in the band Suture with Sharon Cheslow and Dug E. Bird.

The first two Bikini Kill EPs were released on CD as the imaginatively titled The CD Version of the First Two Records in 1992. The band released two more full-length albums, Pussywhipped in 1994 and Reject All American] in 1996. In 1998, Kill Rock Stars released Bikini Kill: The Singles, a collection of the group's seven inch and compilation tracks. Bikini Kill broke up on April 13, 1998.

Between bands

Post-Bikini Kill, Hanna moved to Durham, North Carolina, home of Mr. Lady records, run by her old friend Tammy Rae Carland. She began working on several other projects. The first, The Fakes, was a project involving several other musicians, including Rachel Carns of The Need. The resulting CD, Real Fiction' was released on Chainsaw Records. Her next project, Julie Ruin was a sample-driven low-fi electronic project recorded by Hanna in her Olympia apartment using only a sampler, a drum machine and an 8-track recorder. It was released on the Kill Rock Stars label.

Le Tigre

In Portland, Oregon Hanna formed a band with a zine editor she admired, Johanna Fateman, called The Troublemakers, named after the film of the same name by G.B. Jones. This band ended when Fateman relocated to New York City; however Hanna soon joined her on the East Coast and with the addition of filmmaker Sadie Benning , they started another band, this time called Le Tigre. This band continued to pursue a more electronic style of music similar to the sampler-driven sound Hanna had begun to explore with Julie Ruin. The band began recording records for the Mr. Lady Records label, the first being the self-titled Le Tigre, which included the single "Hot Topic" and "Deceptacon." After the first record, Sadie Benning left the band and JD Samson joined before the follow-up CD Feminist Sweepstakes was released. The group switched labels for the release in 2004 of This Island to Universal Records in hopes that this could aid in the propagation of their message of empowerment for women and others marginalized by mainstream culture. They have also released two remixed albums.

Trivia

Kathleen Hanna was punched by Courtney Love backstage during the Lollapalooza tour on 4 July 1995, after Kathleen apparently joked whether Frances Bean, then a toddler, was in another room with an I.V., referring of course to the fact that Courtney was well known for having taken several dangerous narcotics, including heroin, even after she knew she was pregnant. It's worth noting the Kathleen and Tobi Vail, who dumped Kurt, knew him and his band years before he met Courtney.

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