Bikini Kill Returns Just When Women Need Them Most

The riot grrrl movement of the 1990s has never been more relevant.

Dia Dipasupil/Getty

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Less than a month after a spate of state legislatures voted to enact sweeping abortion restrictions, 3,000 people, mostly women, swarmed Kings Theatre in Brooklyn to bang their heads, shake their hips, and scream. It wasn’t a protest, but the audience was angry. Bikini Kill, one of the preeminent feminist punk bands of the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s, was playing one of four sold-out shows in New York—their first since they broke up in 1997, the year that I was born.

Singer Kathleen Hanna and her band filled the venue, an august 1929 movie palace, with raucous noise that seemed more fitting for a garage or an unfinished basement. The band that coined the motto “We want revolution girl-style now!” had returned in all its loud, angry feminist glory. Women’s ire was suddenly justified, and riot grrrl was back.

Standing in the audience, I recalled how nostalgic Bikini Kill had sounded when I listened to them in high school. When I first heard them, they sexism they sang of seemed outdated, a thing of the past, a problem that had been solved, at least in the United States. But despite the #MeToo movement, misogyny still thrives. Everyone in the audience understood why women were angry, even if they couldn’t discern the words that Hanna screamed into her microphone.

Between songs, Hanna, wearing a sparkly pink dress, spoke to the audience about feminism. At one point, she said that empathy was a superpower that could help women survive attacks on their rights.

“The scary thing is it’s really relevant right now,” she said. “I can’t sit here crying and smoking cigarettes and saying, ‘There goes Roe v. Wade. There goes Roe v. Wade.'”

The only alternative to tears—for Hanna and for the audience—was music.

Toward the end of the show, the band performed its most famous song, “Rebel Girl,” and Hanna invited onstage a feminist from another generation: Joan Jett. I remembered a photo I had seen of Joan Jett’s jacket from the eighties adorned with pins that said “KEEP ABORTION LEGAL” and “If she says NO It’s Rape.” There was the sense that these issues are never settled. Old feminists have to keep fighting battles that should have ended long ago. Sometimes all we can do is dance and yell.

Outside the venue after the show, people crowded on the sidewalk, chatting and smoking cigarettes, relieved. Under Trump, riot grrrl is catharsis.

Watch Bikini Kill’s performance with Joan Jett below.

Bikini Kill will play two more concerts in London on June 10 and 11.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate