What if girls owned the world? Bikini Kill once wrote a song about that deeply utopian idea. “For Tammy Rae,” the melancholy daydream of a closer from 1993’s Pussy Whipped, was the first Bikini Kill song I ever saw live. I sat on a plastic chair and watched in disbelief. “We can’t hear a word they say,” Kathleen Hanna sang vulnerably. “Let’s pretend we own the world today.”
It was November of 2017, and for three nights the feminist punks of New York City and beyond had overtaken the storied Manhattan art space The Kitchen. The occasion was a series of celebrations for the legendary UK punk band the Raincoats, loosely organized around my then-recent book on their 1979 debut album. At this final event, organized by Raincoat Shirley O’Loughlin and dubbed “The Raincoats and Friends,” I was slated to read in between a series of screenings and performances, including one from Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail. Just a few hours before doors, when the Raincoats’ live drummer, Vice Cooler, alerted me to the fact that “three members of Bikini Kill” were in the building, I spiraled quickly from puzzled to shook to awe to glee. No one knew this would happen. When Vail, bassist Kathi Wilcox, and singer-guitarist Kathleen Hanna took the stage together, linear time collapsed.
The members of Bikini Kill hadn’t played together, let alone hung out, in 20 years. But when the Raincoats asked Vail to do a song at the Kitchen event, she agreed, not quite knowing what she would do. The Olympia-based Vail asked Wilcox, who lives in New York, to perform with her; they floated ideas. “Suddenly Kathi emailed me back and was like, ‘Would you be opposed to playing with Kathleen?’” Vail recalled to me when I reached her by phone on Wednesday, the day before Bikini Kill’s first proper reunion show, held last night at the Hollywood Palladium. At the time, Vail was caught off guard: “I said, ‘I’m not opposed, why would I be opposed?’ [laughs].” She suggested they do a song from their early days as a three-piece. “For Tammy Rae” was, Vail told me, also a favorite Bikini Kill song of Kurt Cobain’s.
Reunions can be complicated, and Bikini Kill had turned down offers for years. But something shifted in 2017. They meditated on the ideal scenario: just a few shows, see how it feels. Rehearsals quietly began last spring between New York and Los Angeles, where Hanna now lives. “We’ve been working up to it for quite a while but in little bursts,” Vail says. They also recruited a new guitarist in underground punk hero Erica Dawn Lyle, since original guitarist Billy Karren was unable to participate.
When Bikini Kill announced the first string of shows in January, it was a legitimate shock. The wild demand for tickets and massive venue sizes were a testament to the several generations of all-ages fans for whom this band is not just like the Sex Pistols or the Beatles, but a kind of art-feminist scripture, ground zero of a way to live, like their peers Fugazi. In the late ’90s, Bikini Kill would have been more likely to play to several hundred people, not tens of thousands, as they will over their four-night run at the 5,000-capacity Hollywood Palladium, four sold-out NYC shows, and two in London.
Both Hanna and Vail said that the Raincoats were a big reason for the reunion (“We were all very moved by seeing that show,” Vail adds). I’ve had many of my own transcendent experiences watching the Raincoats play: They are in their 60s and 70s and still perform regularly, exuding total unselfconscious joy and resilience, forging inspired cross-generational dialogue with their work. The Raincoats have been a source of inspiration for Vail since her teenage years (and friends since Bikini Kill toured the UK in 1993), but at The Kitchen she saw something more: older women continuing to make art with humor, ferocity, and deep friendship. “Our struggles as feminists in punk have been different, but I see it as a sort of similar thing, where maybe the world wasn’t ready for the Raincoats at the time,” Vail says. “I consider their music to be pretty threatening to the status quo, if we consider the status quo to be patriarchy and the music industry.”
The two bands also share an “inherently anti-professional aesthetic,” Vail says, and both make work that highlights the process of punk. This has an instigating power: It was Bikini Kill’s goal to encourage all girls everywhere to start bands or make fanzines in order to help write the language of culture—to not just be consumers—and, in turn, help create the world. “In order to incite participation in the making of culture, it seems important to have an aesthetic that is a little bit messy or unpolished, so that girls and women can see the process of creating on stage as part of the performance,” Vail says. “It’s strange to see that move to the center of popular culture. Normally it would just happen in a basement or a squat. One question we’ve been asking is: What does it even mean that we’re doing this now, in this way? It’s interesting, we don’t know.”
Bikini Kill’s insurrectionism feels more vital than ever. Their cool protest songs predicted and shaped our current cultural moment, in which recognizing the politics in art is non-negotiable. “It’s a different time, but it is and it isn’t,” Vail says. “Patriarchy still exists, sexism still exists. The structure of society has not changed. Dominant hierarchies reproduce themselves, whether it’s capitalism or white supremacy or homophobia. Part of the project becomes: How do we use our voices to help move things forward? We’re being given a voice again, or seizing that platform, so what are we going to do with it? That’s what we’re trying to figure out.” She echoed activist Angela Davis throughout our talk: “It’s a constant struggle.”
The perilous state of the world created an urgency in Vail personally. In 2016, after both the Ghost Ship fire and the election of Trump, she fell into a depression. She found that she couldn’t read the news, couldn’t really do anything except play music every day. Vail learned Beatles songs on guitar, then turned back to the drums. “When I feel the least powerful, I try to figure out: What’s the most powerful I can be? What’s something I’m the best at?” she says. “It came down to a basic survival strategy: How am I gonna live? I realized that music is my survival strategy.”
Among a charged punk songbook that often reads like it was written yesterday, Vail particularly mentions the guttural Pussy Whipped cut “Lil Red,” an intense recasting of Little Red Riding Hood in which Hanna sings, “Here’s my life, why don’t you take it/Here’s my cunt, why don’t you rape it.” “Remember when everyone thought Trump wasn’t going to get elected because that video came out of him talking about grabbing the pussy?” Vail asks. “That just seems like the response.”
“I don’t think any of us were interested in doing some kind of nostalgic exercise, but the songs need to be out there—and personally, we feel like playing them. So it’s a way to keep these songs alive,” she adds. “We’ll be in practice, and I’ll just be playing drums and I’ll get chills thinking about how the lyrics speak to what’s happening today, or somebody will start crying while we’re playing a song. In the course of our band, that feeling probably wore off towards the end. But now we’re feeling it.”
That was palpable from the crowd. I came to the Palladium by myself, but this was not a show you really go to “alone”: Everyone was together. I had never seen a full Bikini Kill set—I was in elementary school when they broke up—but I have lived for at least a decade with the mythology of Bikini Kill shows from films like Lucy Thane’s It Changed My Life. Their shows were thought to be not just “the frontline of teen-girl pain” but a war against patriarchy, embodied by the men who would come to just hassle the band. “Girls to the front” seemed like a daring Fluxus art instruction. The oxygen in those rooms seemed symbolic: a life force.
My place in the audience was at an apex of wide eyes, shrieks, tears, neon hair, crowd surfers, and women collectively roaring—in the opener, “Carnival”—“I’ll win that Mötley Crüe mirror if it fucking kills me!” Everyone around me seemed very young, and when Hanna tried to compute the number of years it had been since Bikini Kill played a show (Japan, 1997), all the girls in front of me, who were clearly born in the late 1990s, shouted “22! 22!” The day before the show, I picked up my 14-year-old friend from LAX, who’d traveled from Olympia for the reunion; afterwards he told me it made him cry. This cross-generational aspect—extended by the opener, punk icon Alice Bag—added to the show’s electric purpose. Hanna sang a bit of Cher’s “Turn Back Time” before rendering the sentiment useless: She’d rather be here.
Music fans today are cynical about reunions, and not without reason. But as I stood near the front, alternately moshing and pogoing and just getting pushed around the sticky sea of bodies, I felt something direct and ideal. I may have missed Bikini Kill in their first iteration, but an audience with only a couple of punisher bros—it brought me no pleasure to have the authentic Bikini Kill experience of shutting one down, to cheers around me—was a fair trade. (This was also, I’d wager, the best-sounding set in Bikini Kill history.) I saw the past catching up to the present, a historical corrective, a hard-earned platform, and a thrilling “no” to the fraudulent idea that women “punk rock performance artists over 30” (Hanna’s words) should just go away. Part of the genuine excitement of a Bikini Kill set still comes from how they swap instruments constantly—Wilcox exploring the drums, Vail shredding a deviant scream—as if the stage were a merry-go-round, a curiosity, breathing. It made the set feel like a conversation between themselves and with us. There was no fossilized version of punk here.
They played 27 songs. Each one felt like real life, right now. “Resist Psychic Death” is the ultimate mantra of survival in the modern chains of mindless scrolling. “I Hate Danger” is a hammer to the plague of male condescension. “Capri Pants” is a Misfits-hop away from toxicity. In the brash anthem “Jigsaw Youth,” Hanna chants a quote from the James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause: “We go with the kids/Yeah yeah yeah yeah.” Vail, who wore a T-shirt for young Olympia glam-punks Rik and the Pigs during part of the set, told me: “Youth under capitalism is kind of a bankrupt idea. You’re allowed a sort of freedom and then you have to eventually conform and go back to the square world, to the machine. [...] What does it mean to take that kind of freedom that capitalism allows young people into adulthood?”
Every blazing note of this set was a potential response, ringing with triumph, with proof that there is a wrongness to everything real, with the vindication of having the exact right words to eviscerate someone who makes you feel smaller than you’ll ever be. To scream a Bikini Kill lyric is to let these emotions and philosophies coarse through your body. It is to locate the ecstasy of your heart and brain swelling in unison because of art that feels like it truly belongs to you. Every song was a celebration of that fact. “Your world has taught me nothing,” Hanna sang with fire on “Feels Blind,” a reminder of the grave inadequacy of society. For 90 minutes, it felt like we had built our own.
