Kathleen Hanna
speaker
68 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Kathleen Hanna’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
It's more important to remember that I've seen ugly basement rooms transform into warm campfires. Dank rock bro clubs become bright parties where girls and gay kids and misfits dance together in a sea of freedom and joy. Art galleries that had only ever showcased white male mediocrity become sites of thrilling feminist collaborations.
I also ate gelato on a street in Milan with my bandmates and cried because it tasted that good. But yeah, there were also rapes and run-ins with jerks who threw water on my shine. I keep trying to make my rapes funny, but I have to stop doing that because they aren't. I want them to be stories because stories are made up of words and words can't hurt me.
But the things I'm writing about aren't stories, they're my blood. They're the things that shaped me. The things that keep me up at night rechecking the locks on the doors. The things that make me afraid and ashamed. The things that inspire me to keep going.
Yeah, we wrote that one in the basement of this house called The Embassy. It was a punk house, and punk houses a lot of times have names. And this one was called The Embassy because it was pretty close to Embassy Row in D.C. And I'll always remember writing that song because it was one of those times where I was writing it as we were playing it.
So they started coming up with the music, and as it became more full-formed, I started hearing the first couple lines in my head, and I just stepped to the mic, and then they just kind of fell out. And I stepped back and started thinking, okay, what's the chorus going to be?
I was looking through poems and stuff I had in my notebook, and then I was just like, no, what are you feeling in this moment? I'm going to feel this moment because in that moment, Riot Grrrl meetings had just started in D.C. Our friends Bratmobile were playing shows and that we were just, you know, gobbling up like, you know, manna from heaven.
And Joan Jetta just called me on the phone and said, I like your band. And I was just like, I'm not going to look at my notebook. I'm going to feel this feeling. And then I walked back to the mic and I just sang. And, you know, Rebel Girl, Rebel Girl, You Are the Queen of My World came out.
That girl.
I mean, I was thinking about my friend Juliana Looking, who's a spoken word artist who really kind of mentored me. I was thinking about Toby. I was thinking about Kathy.
I was thinking about the girls in the Riot Grrrl meetings who were saying stuff like, you know, just crying because it was the first time they'd been in an all-female atmosphere. And they were just like, whoa, this feels really weird. I'm confused. And then like, wait, why have I never made this a priority before?
And just that feeling of, you know, a room changing, like, you know, just sitting at a crappy plastic office max table with a bunch of young women sitting who have been relegated to the back of the room at punk shows for so long, finally saying, I've always wanted to start a band. Or, hey, does anybody know how to play guitar? I'd like to learn.
That's an amazing feeling that really kind of changes the room into this beautiful place of possibilities.
We moved a lot all around Maryland. Like we moved every three years. So I changed schools every three years. You know, we lived in kind of suburbs where not much was going on. And then we moved back to the Pacific Northwest. And I changed schools even then in high school. I went to two different high schools.
So I really started seeing the game and how at every school there was like kind of the same group breakdown. Yeah. You know, like the popular rich kid clique, the stoners, the people who are into this kind of music, the people who are into that kind of music, people who are into sports, like these kind of different groups.
And how a lot of the ways the interactions were so similar at every place that it just started to feel ridiculous to me. And, and I didn't have very many friends. I just sort of experimented with like, what would it be like if I was in this group of people? What would it be like?
And I think it gave me a chameleon like quality that definitely served me later when I had to grin and bear it through a lot of nonsense in the punk scene. Um, But yeah I think the moving a lot made me really turn to singing as my home.
I didn't think of myself as a good singer, but I sang all the time by myself because it was a place that I felt safe. And I knew no matter where we lived, I could walk in the woods and sing or I could sing along to records in my room. Like, I didn't want anybody to know and I didn't think I was good or, you know, whatever. I just, it was something that was fun. And...
Then a friend of mine in, I guess it was fourth grade, Maureen Gaines convinced me to go with her to an audition for Annie for the school play, and I got the part. And so in that moment, I was like, wait, other people think I can sing? Yeah. Like it was this real shock. Like I was like, I didn't realize that I actually had any kind of talent at it or that it sounded good to anybody beyond myself.
So there was that kind of eureka moment. So I was like practicing, practicing, practicing, practicing. And then once it came time to be on stage, I just felt like it was the first time where I really expressed myself mainly sadness, in front of a bunch of people. You know? Like, even though, you know, I didn't write the lyrics myself, they definitely spoke to my situation.
And just the quality of my voice and what I could do with my voice... I felt like I was saying I'm having a really hard time at home to, you know, a whole auditorium full of kids and grownups. And that felt really like a relief.
Showing 21–40 of 68 · page 2 of 4
← Previous
Next →