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.
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Appearances
Yeah. I mean, I was feeling really proud of myself. And as we're getting to the car, my dad was saying, let's go get ice cream. And in my family, that really meant like you did a great job. You know what I mean? Like nobody said like, I love you or, you know, like, oh, I'm so proud of you kind of thing. It was more like we'll get ice cream. And that is code for we're proud of you.
So I was like, they're proud of me. My parents thought I did great. Like, you know, I read all this stuff into it. Like, they thought my singing was great. They thought, you know, blah, blah, blah in my head. And then as I sit down in the car, my dad says, anyone who can make such a fool of themselves in front of that many people deserves an ice cream. And I was just like, oh, my God. Like...
I just remember feeling like going from the top of the world to just like crashing, you know, on like concrete. And that was something that on my dad's side of the family, I have to say, I got to give them credit. They were so good at giving a compliment and then ripping it away and Like, it was almost a skill that they passed down from generation to generation.
So while I think it's a hideous thing to say to a child, that moment also inspired me to keep going. Because the fact that that didn't stop me meant I really wanted it. And also, I didn't like my dad. I thought he was a jerk. So, like... I learned really early, like, whose opinion matters to you?
You know, I came out the other end kind of being like more determined to get more involved in music at my school because I was like, this is what I want, despite you.
Yeah, I mean, there's also great things about my dad. My dad always said, you need to go to college. And he wanted me to go to college because he, I think, took like one or two semesters and had to drop out to get a job because, you know, my sister was born and he wanted that for me. And that was something beautiful that he gave me.
I think it's complicated and I think it's important to acknowledge that we can get positive things out of really negative situations. And like the experience of being shot down by my dad and keeping going was something that I still hold in my heart to this day in a way that is fuel.
You know, I moved to Olympia, Washington to go to college and had a really thriving music scene. And they really defined punk in that town in a different way than I'd ever seen. I'd gone to punk shows in high school and it was like, you know, kind of B versions of the Sex Pistols, you know, straight white guys who are like, I'm going to spit on you. Yeah.
And it just was like a lot of toxic masculinity disguised as, you know, radicalness. So it's kind of like the beginning of the edgelord era. But yeah, when I moved to Olympia, there were all these kids who were making music and putting out records on small indie labels.
And they sort of defined punk not as a genre or a sound, a loud, angry, aggressive sound, but as an idea, as the idea that, you know, we don't have to wait for corporations to tell us what is good music or art or writing. We can make it ourselves. So it's like, hey, let's put on a spoken word event. Let's put on a punk show at the laundromat.
It really was the town that gave me permission to do stuff. And I'd always wanted to be in a band, but sort of thought it was off limits. And this was the place that I saw people in bands just like walking around on the street. And I was like, well, they can do it. I can do it.
And at the same time, I was being really inspired by feminist performance artists like Karen Finley, who I saw live in Seattle and was just what this woman is doing on stage. going into from different voices, you know, getting naked and dumping chocolate and sprinkles on herself, you know, making fun of herself while also being incredibly powerful.
And so a lot of times when I first started being in Bikini Kill, I thought of myself as a feminist performance artist who was in a punk band.
Yeah, I mean, it was really pretty amazing because I was like, oh, this actually is a great way to continue the work that I'm doing at Safe Place when I'm not able to volunteer. So I felt like it was just working. I was still doing further work for Safe Place when I was doing counseling in an alleyway after a show. And that felt great to a certain extent.
You know, after a while, it's a job that is a heavy burnout job where you can just get burnout to the point where you feel like, you know, you've been vampired and you have no blood in your body. So it is a lot to be in a band and to not... We had no crew. We had no management. We had no publicist. And we did everything ourselves. And then on top of it, I'm doing social work for free. So...
That was like having a lot of jobs and then actually a real job and going to school. So at a certain point, and it wasn't until many, many, many, many, many years later that I said I need to pull back on this like kind of one-to-one social work, which is what it was.
You know, we did stuff like handed out lyric sheets that had the lyrics on them so that other girls and women would know these are the lyrics and what the subject matter was. Because a lot of times you couldn't understand what I was saying through the crappy PAs I was singing through. And sometimes even talking in between songs, you couldn't understand what I was saying.
And so that was one way that give them a souvenir to take home. you know, to read through and think about and maybe disagree with so that they start their own bands or it encourages them to write their own poetry or write their own zines. We also had zines that talked about a lot of different political issues of the day that we sold at our shows.
And I also, you know, we prioritized having girls and women come up to the front. Because a lot of the shows we were playing back then, it was, you know, straight, cisgender, white guys predominating and taking up all the space of the room. And we really selfishly wanted to build community so we had more girl bands to play with. And how is that going to happen if they're all stuck in the back?
And they can't see us play and they can't see, oh, you know, that's how you do a drum fill or, you know, that's how you play, you know, three notes on the bass and make them sound really interesting. And so I started saying, you know, inviting the girls to the front, hey, do you guys want to come to the front? And then it kind of became a thing.
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