They're grrreat!

>> From Bikini Kill to Le Tigre, Kathleen Hanna keeps fighting the good fight

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

After the seminal early '90s riot grrrl group Bikini Kill quietly bit the dust, singer Kathleen Hanna retreated to her bedroom with an eight-track to emerge as Julie Ruin, a budget electro alter-ego of sorts. Hanna recruited a pair of like-minded artist-musicians to take her show on the road, but the trio (Hanna, Johanna Fateman and Sadie Benning) swiftly ditched Julie Ruin and became Le Tigre. Last year's eponymous album, and its follow-up EP From the Desk of Mr. Lady, captured new-wave-pop-punk fans with its catchy, danceable anthems, while retaining the feminist vigour of the riot grrrl movement. With a new album out on Oct. 16 and the addition of J.D. Samson to the lineup (Benning quit to concentrate on her video career), Hanna and company are busy prepping the new songs, the imagery, and the "goofy" choreography for their multimedia show. A very pleasant Ms. Hanna took time out to tell the Mirror all about the electro-grrrl revolution.



M: So your next album is Feminist Sweepstakes. Where'd the title come from?

KH: If you look up sweepstakes in a dictionary, it's supposed to be everybody giving in a certain amount, then it makes a pot and someone wins the sweepstakes. Our idea was that feminism is the same thing, that everybody puts in their own different flavour and people can draw from that. And also, we're winning. Feminism is about everybody winning, not just women, but everybody.

M: Do you feel that this idea of community and a joint effort is reflected in the music scene right now?

KH: Oh, definitely. I feel a kinship with Peaches from Toronto, Chicks on Speed from Berlin, Tracy and the Plastics from Olympia, our friends the Butchies. A lot of different groups and all for different reasons, some more on an ideological level, some more on a musical level. I think it's a really great time to be in a band--to be in a feminist electronic band, especially (laughs).

M: What brought about your transition from guitar-based music to electronic?

KH: Actually, if you listen to early Bikini Kill records, I was already kind of sampling with my voice. I did Dead or Alive in the middle of a song off the first record, I was like, "you spin me right 'round baby right 'round." Then I did a Whitney Houston song in another one. I was already trying to incorporate elements from other people's music into what we were doing, to comment on it, and then I realized that there was this thing called a sampler. I always wanted to play with that technology, so it was something I was putting on hold while I continued to do Bikini Kill, and then, once it was over, I was able to pursue it.

Dirty pop technology

M: I read a reference to a project you have in mind called Riot Grrrl: The Remixes. Is that for real, or is it a joke concept?

KH: It's a concept, we want it to be a real thing but we just don't have any time, ever. Johanna and I actually did a remix for Hanin Elias, she's in Atari Teenage Riot and she also has a solo career. So we've started doing remixes and we were like, hey, what if we took these songs that totally changed our lives, like Heavens to Betsy's "My Red Self," and made them dance hits. Our idea was to do that and either give all the money to charity or give it all to the bands that don't have any money to pay practice space rent. It would be fun.

M: That also runs with your goal for Le Tigre, to make feminist pop.

KH: Yeah, I guess it's in keeping with the Bikini Kill theme of not being anti-pleasure. Political activism can be very pleasurable and joyous and it's not something dowdy and sucky and boring, it's really sexy and fun, and maddening and sad. That's what we're trying to do with our music and we're not ashamed to make it aesthetically pleasing. I really wanna make people dance. We're getting better at making dance music, we're not really great it at yet but we will get better. We made this one song that's supposed to be a dance song called "Dyke March 2001" and we have this dream of having it play in lesbian bars all over the country. It sucks when you go to a dyke bar and all the music playing is straight music. It's music about heterosexual coupling or dudes going, "Oh, she's so fine, look at her bounce," which is totally cool, I'm not saying I don't dance to it, but sometimes it's a drag and I wish there was dance music that could also be about a movement. That's what makes me excited.

M: I heard the new album is influenced equally by basement recordings and Top 40 pop. Top 40?

KH: Yeah, we're pretty into N'Sync right now. Well, not really. We use mini-discs, we use pre-recorded material in our set, and to us that's totally normal, it's like being conceptual artists. Not all artists actually paint their own pictures, and some people use a slide projector to project onto the wall--Norman Rockwell did that--and that doesn't make it not art because they don't do it freehand. Chicks on Speed use a mini-disc, we use a mini-disc, that doesn't mean we're, like, stupid, it just means that our goals aren't wanking off on guitar. Anyway, I think the whole thing about N'Sync that got caught up in my head was somebody yelled at us one time, "N'Sync!" or "Britney Spears!" 'cuz we had prerecorded music. But you know, if those people get to use that technology, why don't I? I need it more than they do. I'm not just trying to sell a million dollars so I can buy a Chanel suit, we're actually trying to affect culture in some positive way, so we're not gonna throw any tools out the door 'cuz they're not cool.

M: Mini-discs are cool.

KH: Yeah, and we travel with a mini-disc that has translations on it. Our friend Yuka spoke in Japanese and translated what some of our songs were about, so when we went to Japan we would play that between songs. We have a German one too, and we're trying to work on getting all the different languages. It's important to us 'cuz the music's easier to get into if you know what the songs are about.

The fine print

M: In Bikini Kills days, you were famously anti-press. Why the change?

KH: The main reason it changed is because, while I was really proud of Kill Rock Stars and I still am really proud of that label, we're on a very new label [Mr. Lady Records] and we really love it and we really wanna promote it and sell a shitload of records for them. We also wanna support ourselves doing this, which is really hard on a small label.

M: Are there any publications you wouldn't speak to on principle?

KH: Yeah, we don't speak to any men's magazines, and we actually look at everything we're gonna do and make the decision.

M: What about trash like Cosmo Girl?

KH: We won't do Cosmo Girl but we're pretty into doing Seventeen. We do wanna reach teenage girls. I think that they have a right to know.

With Tracy & the Plastics and Shebang at Cabaret on Wednesday, Aug. 22, 9pm, $15.50