Interview from Index magazine September 2000. If you want to read the full interview you can visit Index Magazine website. This interview is located at:

http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/kathleen_hanna.shtml

Index Magazine cover Sept. 2000. Photo by Leeta Harding

Kathleen Hanna, 2000    WITH LAURIE WEEKS

Kathleen Hanna is smart, funny, and breathlessly honest. She's also a musician of considerable talent whose first band, Bikini Kill, became the standard bearer of the Riot Grrrl movement in the early '90s. Punk rock and feminist politics found an intersection in Bikini Kill, injecting both with a roaring vitality they'd been missing for years. Great things seldom last, of course, and by 1998 Bikini Kill had disbanded. But Kathleen popped up later that year, unscathed, to release a beautiful solo album, Julie Ruin, which she'd written and recorded alone, holed up in an Olympia, Washington apartment. With a sound tangibly removed from Bikini Kill's urgent thrash, Julie Ruin was new wave-y and poetic, if just as necessary.

Last year Kathleen formed Le Tigre with two good friends, the filmmaker Sadie Benning and zine editor Johanna Fateman. Their eponymous first album takes the electro promise of Kathleen's solo work to delirious new levels, mixing bubblegum, punk, and very danceable beats with a more subversive approach lyrically. The album's calling card, "Hot Topic," for example, is an inspired roll call of radicals and artists over a killer Motown vamp. But it's also a syllabus of sorts, getting listeners to check out the likes of Gayatri Spivak, Valie Export, Billy Tipton, and Ann Peebles.

When we had the opportunity to talk with Kathleen, we knew just who to send. Writer Laurie Weeks' new novel, Zipper Mouth, is about a teenage girl trapped between internalized self-loathing and male sociopathology. She's also the screenwriter of Boys Don't Cry, and - by the way - one of Le Tigre's Hot Topics.

KATHLEEN: You know that movie, There's Something About Mary? Everyone was saying, "Oh, this movie's so hilarious." So I rented it, and I was like, this movie is about three guys stalking this woman. I mean, there were parts of it that were funny —
LAURIE: The dog . . .
KATHLEEN: The dog, and Ben Stiller getting his dick stuck in his zipper and just what he looked like sometimes, like retainer-face.
LAURIE: I'm a really cheap laugh.
KATHLEEN: Oh, me too. I'll watch Adam Sandler movies, I'm not above it. But at the same time, I couldn't get into it. I felt like I had no sense of humor. And I didn't even see American Beauty, because I knew it was going to be about this middle-aged man and this woman who, because she has a career, she's like cutting off his penis, and therefore he is forced to have fantasies about this 16-year-old girl. It was the same with Election. I kind of like Reese Witherspoon, and she played a really interesting character who's this control-freak, perfectionist person, but then it was overlaid with all these adult men fantasizing about adolescent girls. And I was like, it's the same in every fucking movie. The fact that people like this stuff makes me feel really alienated, so I don't feel like a part of popular culture ever. In our song "The The Empty," that was the point — "I went to your comedy club and I didn't laugh at any of your jokes" — feeling that sense of alienation and thinking we have to make something that we think is funny.
LAURIE: That's why Cecilia Dougherty's films are so great. They're truly hilarious.
KATHLEEN: I'd seen bits of Cecilia's films here and there, but when I finally saw them in progression at her Threadwaxing Space retrospective, it touched a part of my brain that never, ever got stimulated. It made me feel like my sense of humor existed in the world, because I never see anything that I think is really funny.
LAURIE: Did you start that Riot Grrrl stuff?
KATHLEEN: No. It was a group, collective effort.
LAURIE: ... that started in Olympia?
KATHLEEN: No, it actually started in D.C. 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."
LAURIE: Did you already have Bikini Kill going on?
KATHLEEN: Yeah. We'd already been in the band for maybe two or three years. Then when I moved back to Olympia, I went to a couple of Riot Grrrl meetings, but then I faded out of it, because I got sort of famous. I mean, at least famous in my own little scene, I got all this attention ...
LAURIE: I think you were really famous.
KATHLEEN: It was weird because here was this place I could go and say whatever I wanted, but then I'd go out to shows and hear back from other people things that I'd said in the meetings. Things that were supposed to be confidential. And not to point fingers or be catty, but it wasn't a safe place for me anymore.
LAURIE: You're not being catty. Let's avoid that stereotype. But you must have felt the same kind of thing performing with Bikini Kill.
KATHLEEN: Part of the thing that made Bikini Kill get a lot of attention was that we were confrontational, that I was seen as a confrontational personality on stage, whereas I didn't feel confrontational at all. I mean, if a guy was taking a picture of my ass the entire show and I told him to stop, and he wouldn't, and he's a frat guy with a backwards baseball cap, and I walk up to him and I'm like "Please, can you stop taking my picture? Please," and he smiles right in my face and takes a picture — I'm gonna grab him and throw him out the door. To me, that feels totally normal, but to everybody else it's like, "She freaked out for no reason, and she punched this guy." Then I hear about it for the rest of the tour. After every show people come up to me and tell me I'm just a reverse sexist. It was amazing to watch how many guys got away with such totally bad behavior that there was no reason for, while me acting totally ordinary in a weird situation was always seen as really aberrant and bizarre. And then people started to come just to antagonize us, yelling "Show us your tits," wanting me to get really angry, and I stopped getting angry, because I knew that's what they wanted. But that anger went somewhere, to me feeling totally sad all the time and getting really depressed.
LAURIE: And disillusioned?
KATHLEEN: The first time I was disillusioned was actually long before Riot Grrrl. I realized that a lot of women, myself included, involved in feminist activism were just as competitive and capitalistic and trying to one-up each other as in the rest of the world. Instead of going, "Okay, we have a lot of work to do," I became really despondent and pulled away for a long time. And it's sort of like art saved my life. I'd found out about stuff that other people were doing — like Felix Gonzalez Torres — and I'd think, there are other forms of art, there's other stuff going on. That helped me, because I was eating, breathing, and shitting feminist punk, writing, and zines. My whole scene — who I lived and ate with, what I ate, was about that. I realized the only way I could have a healthy relationship with my art and my activism was not to cut out my personal life and pretend it was apolitical, but to have other interests that are separate from it, you know?
LAURIE: That's the whole problem of the push and pull between activism and art.
KATHLEEN: Yeah. Part of the reason that it was so disillusioning was because I had this split, that it was like, either you're a total hedonist, or you're an activist. And if you're an artist, you're in the hedonist category. I thought it was a fake way out to say, "Oh, I'm mixing my activism with my art." I had to have everything be about my activism.
LAURIE: So how did Julie Ruin come into being?
KATHLEEN: I wanted to experiment and I didn't want to just do rock music. I'd always been interested in sampling. For like five years, I had it in mind that I needed to learn how to use a sampler. I did this band for a minute called The Fakes, that was like a bunch of different people, and in one of the songs we "sampled" "Music Box," to do this song about being a prepubescent girl. We didn't know that samplers existed, so we just looped this "Music Box" track over and over on cassette. A couple times in Bikini Kill I'd take lines out of other songs — "You spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record," from Dead or Alive — or Whitney Houston, "You get so emotional, baby." I would stick them into our song and sort of comment on it, as if it was a male voiceover on what I was already saying. Then I discovered samplers, so I could actually take the real song and insert it. I heard Public Enemy, and everything changed. I was like, oh my god. Just musically and politically it was totally interesting, and I said, "Oh, I want to be a part of that. I want to find out about drum machines and samplers."
LAURIE: You never used any of that stuff in Bikini Kill.
KATHLEEN: Well, I was part of this punk scene where I didn't see a lot of experimentation. It was pretty much just drums, guitar, and bass. We did some experimental stuff, and that's the direction I wanted to go in, like, in this one song, someone read a review of us into the microphone while there was screaming going on at the same time.

[If you want to read the full interview visit: http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/kathleen_hanna.shtml ]