Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (Bikini Kill & Kathleen Hanna)

Sara Marcus: Three days before the appointed Sunday in April 1994, Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered in a greenhouse in Seattle. I remembered that Newsweek had referred to Courtney Love, now Cobain’s widow, as the riot grrrls’ “patron saint,” but I’d never cared about Nirvana or about Love’s band, Hole. Fearing that a grief-filled meeting would separate me from the other girls right off the bat, I nearly stayed home. Still, I went, and when I finally stepped over the threshold of Positive Force House into its first-floor living room, I found that nobody else at the meeting cared about Nirvana or Hole either. We talked about sexual harassment from classmates and teachers, crushes on boys and girls, our favorite kinds of tampons and ice cream, and our outrage over the sexist stories and images we saw in the newspapers and on television. These girls weren’t all punk, they didn’t all have bands, and while they were the coolest girls I’d ever met, they were cool in a way that drew me closer instead of shutting me out. They were courageous, profane, and powerful. I was going to be one of them. A friend of a friend at school gave me a Bikini Kill tape—I knew that the band was somehow linked to Riot Grrrl—and for a while no other music mattered, just that breastbone-shaking bass line and Kathleen Hanna’s voice singing with all the concentrated fury of a firehose, “Dare you to do what you want! Dare you to be who you will!” 

Jessica Hopper FedExed a reporter a big package of zines, Hit It or Quit It as well as others. And she went on record in an hour-long phone interview. On the day the November 23, 1992, issue of Newsweek hit the streets, a regular Wednesday night Riot Grrrl meeting took place at the Emma Center. Jessica arrived late; she had stopped off at a newsstand to buy the magazine. The other girls had already picked up a copy of the issue—and although Jessica had warned them of an article—they were aghast at what they saw. “Revolution, Girl Style” occupied a two-page spread in the Lifestyle section, complete with a photograph of Jessica (the caption dubbed her a “prototypical Riot Grrrl”), a portrait Alice Wheeler had taken of Angie Hart and a photo of Courtney Love, whom Jessica had described as “Riot Grrrl’s patron saint.” 

That designation stemmed only from the fact that Love had passed out copies of Hit It or Quit It at Hole shows in England. Love actually had an odd antipathy for Riot Grrrl and especially for anybody associated with it who had been close with Cobain before she had met him, namely Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail. Love had recently left a long, rambling answering-machine message for a girl named Nina Cunzio, who was trying to get a Riot Grrrl group started in LA: “We should totally have meetings at my house, I’d love that a lot,” Love had said, sounding to Nina like somebody on drugs. “But you gotta lose this Kathleen Hanna bullshit.” Nina never called back. In just a few months, Love would write a vicious column in Melody Maker, blasting Bikini Kill. How could Jessica Hopper have done such a thing—spoken for the entire movement, to a national magazine, without even consulting with the rest of them? It felt like a gargantuan betrayal of trust, like Jessica had just been using all of them to gain more exposure for her own projects, no matter who else got hurt along the way. 

Another malignant rumors about Kathleen spread by Courtney Love: One thing that immediately comes to mind about what Kathleen Hannah's MO is when Mike Watt (from the Minutemen) asked her to be a guest on his first solo album and she wanted to prove a point that she didn't want to be in the company of bros so her contribution was to leave a message on Watt's answering machine with a fake story about how someone who was on the album had raped a girl. Really distasteful stuff. She called it her anti-contribution. To honor this offer, Watt put it on the album. She's just someone who seems to rotate around her own gravity. She's straight up falsely accusing someone of raping a 13 year old girl and calling it art. That's very distasteful at any level. Also she laughs it off as it just being during one of her lying phases, which is ridiculous. Did you see her interview with V magazine? She admitted as a child she would steal her dad's credit card and buy silk blouses. She sounds like a scammer and then she married to a guy who'd bragged about “fag-bashing.” Source:  www.hootpage.com 

But, unlike Courtney Love, Bikini Kill were always surrounded by controversy just because they were an outwardly and aggressively feminist band. They were very much needed in the 1990s punk scene and respected by all from that scene and Adam Horovitz changed his views considerably since his days in the Beastie Boys. Bikini Kill were one of the best bands of the grunge era, and way more important politically than Hole. Aside from their aesthetic and political differences, I think the motivation of Love to punch Hanna at Lollapalooza festival was mainly jealousy of Hanna's close relationship with Kurt Cobain. Although Cobain ended up dating Tobi Vail, it's between the lines that his main attraction was towards Kathleen, but she allegedly only agreed to a friendship because she was scared of Cobain's substance abuse and wary of his obsessive claim to fame. 

Kathleen Hanna: Bikini Kill and The Nation of Ulysses (I was dating Tim Green at that time) all drove back back to Olympia in late August to play K Records’ one-time-only convention, called the International Pop Underground (IPU). “Defeat the Corporate Ogre” was their slogan, and the repetitive mentions of being “anti–corporate rock” seemed pointed at Nirvana, since they’d just signed to a major label (Geffen) and had left Olympia. It felt like a line was being drawn in the sand: Nirvana was no longer welcome in K’s indie purist clubhouse. Kurt had been nothing but supportive of the Olympia scene (he even got a K Records tattoo) and it felt gross that they were publicly slamming him that way. Was it really so bad that a working-class guy who couldn’t afford to play five-dollar shows for the rest of his life had signed to a major label? Was it really so bad that his band wanted to reach an audience that didn’t have access to labels like K or Dischord? The indie vs major labels thing started to seem like a silly hill to die on to me. 

Sara Marcus: Ian MacKaye had introduced Jett to Bikini Kill, and she was instantly impressed by both the music and the zines. She was particularly heartened that a rock ‘n’ roll feminism was catching on; she could have used some of that in the late ‘70s, when she was a teenage guitarist playing in the Runaways. “The Runaways had nobody,” she said. “I felt like a feminist, but I felt completely dissed by other feminists, ‘cause they were like, ‘Well, you can’t dress sexy.’ Number one, I’m not dressing sexy—even though I did have my pants open from time to time. But what do you mean? You don’t tell me that girls don’t get horny and don’t wanna fuck! You know why they say that girls ‘can’t play guitar’ and ‘can’t play rock ‘n’ roll’? Because rock ‘n’ roll is sex. So meeting people like Kathleen and all those girls, it was really incredible, because I felt like maybe people were starting to get it.” 

Bikini Kill had recorded a full-length album that past October, titled Pussy Whipped, but it wasn’t due out till the following fall, and they had already written new songs to record with Jett—glammy, triumphal anthems that explored pleasure and play. And for the introduction to “Demirep,” Kathleen and Jett sat cross-legged on the floor, facing each other, and played a hand-clapping game they’d both learned when they were little girls: “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black.“ These two songs, along with a new version of “Rebel Girl,” would be released on a 7” in September 1993, a month before Pussy Whipped. Five nights later, the band played a sold-out Rock for Choice benefit to an audience of four thousand at the Hollywood Palladium. Stone Temple Pilots, King Missile, and Kim Gordon’s project Free Kitten were also on the bill, but the biggest buzz was around Bikini Kill. 

Kathleen performed in a dress with the words KILL ME printed on her chest, and some men shouted boos at the band. The Los Angeles Times ran a review noting that “while much of the audience seemed unsure of just what to make of this Olympia band, there was a contingent of female fans that seemed wholly enthralled—as if they had found that music really mattered.” Working with Joan Jett had been Kathleen’s first major-label experience, but now the big guys were starting to come calling for Bikini Kill. “Kathleen had a hot band,” Jett’s manager, Kenny Laguna, recounted. “Every label in the business wanted them! Warner Brothers, Capitol, Interscope: everyone.” Kathleen Hanna: Tobi had no interest in the meetings or going to LA, so Kathi, Bill and me met with Lenny Waronker at Capitol Records, Jimmy Iovine at Interscope, and Mo Ostin at Warner Bros. To show us how edgy Interscope was, Jimmy Iovine showed us a Marilyn Manson video that hadn’t come out yet. “You guys could do an edgy video like that!” he said. “Could I hang you from a meat hook?” I asked. Iovine pretended he hadn’t heard me and continued his spiel about how great his label was. Soon after, Jimmy Iovine signed No Doubt. Gwen Stefani celebrated on the cover of Spin with the headline “Riot Girlie.”

At the time, probably influenced by his abrasive wife Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain hinted to various press outlets that he didn't understand why "those riot grrrl groups took themselves so seriously." Kathleen didn’t think Bikini Kill should abandon Kill Rock Stars, but she was curious about getting wider distribution for her music and ideas. Plus, she explained later, “I wanted to say to myself, ‘I looked into it and it wasn’t the right thing,’ as opposed to just assuming things.” Tobi didn’t even want to look into it, though; she saw what Nirvana’s success had done to them. “I was very saddened to see that that success did not make them happy,” she said. “I knew that things were really really bad: Kurt was on drugs and the band was falling apart.” —Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (2010) by Sara Marcus 

Ione Skye, Kim Gordon, Bikini Kill, Grunge

At 18, Ione Skye met “the first great love of my life”: Adam Horovitz, a man she describes as “a sweetie pie.” They soon moved in together and, for a while, life was “one long daydream”. The pair tied the knot when Skye was 21 when they married in 1992, just as the Beastie Boys’ star was rising, pulling Horovitz away on months-long tours. Alone in LA, she began joyfully exploring her bisexuality, first with the British model Alice Temple, then with two of Madonna’s exes, Ingrid Casares and Jenny Shimizu. Skye’s infidelities became more indiscreet. One day Horovitz arrived home from a tour to find her in flagrante. "With Adam Horovitz I felt completely safe for the first time," Ione Skye wrote. "I didn't know how to be happy unless we were together." But the union wasn't meant to be. Skye described herself as "a serial cheater," and the pair divorced in 1999. Her anguish at hurting Horovitz is still apparent three decades on. “I secretly hope reading my memoir helps him and his family but I kind of know their personalities and I almost think it might be doing the opposite,” she says. Source: theguardian.com

Kim Gordon: Being a woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. Women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That’s why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. She didn’t care either way. The term "girl power" was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. I was four months pregnant but somehow I managed to wiggle into a skirt and T-shirt for our “Bull in the Heather” video. Bikini Kill and other Riot Grrl bands were still enforcing their media blackout, and asking Kathleen to appear in our video came from my perverse desire to have her infiltrate the mainstream. That way, people could see her also as the playful, intelligent, charismatic girl she is—a woman who controlled the action by dancing around us as we stood stationary in a rock stance, playing the song. It was courageous of Kathleen to appear in a mainstream MTV video and risk criticism from the alternative community she’d created in Olympia.

I’m not sure why, but I felt an immediate kinship with Kurt Cobain, one of those mutual "I can tell you are a super sensitive and emotional person too" sorts of connections. Thurston didn’t have the same thing going with Kurt; he’d be the first to say Kurt and I had some sort of good, inexplicable connection. We weren’t close the way he was to his friend Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, or Tobi Vail, who was his girlfriend, or any of his male friends that he grew up with. I didn’t know Kurt all that well, but our friendship was unusual. Onstage it was amazing to see how much emotional power came from the depths of his gravelly stream of vocal sound. It wasn’t screaming, or shrieking, or even punk vitriol, although that’s what it sounded like the most. Kurt seemed always to be working against himself one way or the other.

Courtney Love was utterly self-absorbed; Kurt probably did spend more time with Frances than Courtney did. Looking back, I can’t imagine what life was like in the chaos of their drug-fueled life, and it’s hard for me to remember that they were together for only a couple of years. It took so little time to forge a life, or in this case, a brand. Riot Grrl, the underground feminist punk rock movement that got under way in the early nineties, maintained a media blackout, and for good reason. Bikini Kill and other female bands didn’t want to be co-opted and turned into products they couldn’t control by a corporate, white male world. Later on, Courtney Love would take up the role that the press was always fishing for—a punk princess, thrilling and dark. No one ever questions the disorder behind her tarantula L.A. glamour—sociopathy, narcissism—because it’s good entertainment! 

From the beginning, I had a feeling that Courtney, who was cunning, smart, and ambitious, asked me along only because she wanted my name associated with the record. Courtney was the kind of person who spent a lot of time growing up staring in the mirror practicing her look for the camera. Some people are just born that way, and in the studio I felt she was performing for us. She was always sweet to Don Fleming and me because we were going to take her somewhere new and better, she hoped, but she yelled and screamed at everybody in her band. At one point during the recording, Courtney told me she thought Kurt Cobain was hot, which made me cringe inside and hope the two of them would never meet. We all said to ourselves, “Uh-oh, train wreck coming.” That Courtney was attracted to Billy Corgan came as a surprise, as she was clearly punk rock. But she was also very ambitious and manipulative, as Don and I learned well during the recording process, and knowing she could turn on me at any moment, I always kept her at arm’s length. There had been an incident in Rome, where Kurt had OD’d, but the details were never clear. 

Obviously, though, Kurt was headed down an even darker path, and after he hooked up with Courtney, it was only a matter of time before he completely self-destructed. But I was shattered and feeling as if I were moving slow-motion inside some strange dream. The words fell far short in conveying the feeling of loss that everyone, not just me, was feeling. The night after Kurt’s death, during a candlelight memorial service for the public, a recording of Courtney reading aloud Kurt’s suicide note was played. As the vigil continued, Courtney started handing out some of Kurt’s clothes to fans. It was as if she were stepping out into her destiny—a platform of celebrity and infamy. A week after Kurt died, Hole released their major-label debut, Live Through This, which elevated Courtney to a new kind of perverse stardom. The timing couldn’t have been better. If Courtney wanted something from you, she would use 100 percent of her charm and persuasion to get it. Back then Courtney had a ragged scar across her nose. In an otherwise charismatic face, it was hard not to notice. Years later, at Lollapalooza she described to me all the plastic surgery she planned to get. She said, “You probably didn’t know this, but I had a nose job once.” I think by then she’d had a couple more before.

To me, Madonna just seemed joyful, celebrating her own body. Most fun of all was her plucky attitude. She didn’t have a perfect body. She was a little soft, but sexy-soft, not overweight but not as sculpted or as hard as she would later become. She was realistic about her body type, and she flaunted it, and you could feel how happy she was inhabiting that body. I admired what she was doing, though I was also skeptical about where it would all eventually lead. In retrospect Madonna was riding a cultural wave that before the 1980s would have been a male’s idea of marketing and was reclaiming her image and power back. Even if one day dozens pass Madonna’s sales due to the dubious way they count streamings now, no one will ever have the hysteria, the phenomenon status, the organic saturation of our culture Madonna had. There has never been a female star with her reach—in the US or worldwide. Here’s the kicker: she never tried to be America’s Sweetheart. She did this by challenging the conventions, by having unpopular opinions, by daring to be seen in a negative light. 

No other pop star dared go there. Every other female wanted to be seen in the most positive light but Madonna did not. Yet, despite that, she continued to dominate the charts. Madonna was a pop star that carried herself like a rock star; it makes sense since she started out in rock bands. And that attitude carried over into her pop career. As a music critic wrote "Madonna's music was pop but her image was punk". That's true in a lot of ways. She wanted to be loved but also hated. That's why Madonna appeals to women across different genres, women from Tori Amos to Nikki Minaj love Madonna. Tori Amos has covered Frozen and Live to Tell. Courtney Love was always a subpar imitation of Madonna, but instead of joie de vivre, she brought dread and corrosive moods. —Girl in A Band: A Memoir (2016) by Kim Gordon

"Rebel Girl" (2024) by Kathleen Hanna

We opened for Nirvana on April Fools’ Day 1989. Even though it wasn’t billed as a “benefit show,” Nirvana let us keep the money they would’ve made, which kept us afloat for months. Kurt Cobain suggested we go grab a drink and let things cool off. We went to a bar in the back of a restaurant called the Chinatown. Kurt came to our rescue again in June. Tobi kept things local and specific, and she shared the stuff she was in love with (the Go-Go’s, the Pandoras, the Go-Betweens, the Raincoats, the Slits). She also made up words like “hypocrobrats” and “apokalipstick.” When I finally made it back to Olympia, I moved into the same apartment building as Tobi. Poetic lyrics were important, but it felt like women sometimes hid behind poetry as a way to say something without actually saying it. I was on a mission to just fucking say it. When Bikini Kill formed, I was closer with Tobi, but I always saw Kathi as the gravity that kept us tethered to the ground. 

Tobi and I are both complete hotheads, though she is more subtle about it than I am. I can count the times I’ve seen Kathi angry on less than one hand. Darren was a tan mountain biker with a short GQ haircut who talked like a Valley girl, so everyone thought he was gay. He was a few years older than me and had a cute squishy baby nose that was the perfect counterpoint for his fitness-model physique. Darren was always exercising outdoors. He was a great cook and started inviting me to eat with him a few times a week. “It’s hard cooking for one, easier for two,” he’d say. He taught me how to make his potato leek soup, which was so good I could smell it a block away. Darren was super supportive of Bikini Kill. I don’t think he loved the music, but he loved the politics. He was a sounding board for me when everyone was calling us man haters and telling us feminism didn’t matter in the punk scene. He loaned me books about race, class, and gender that we’d talk about over the many meals we ate at his desk. He lived in apartment #5, which was a tiny studio. Darren may’ve looked like a square, but he did the brattiest punk shit I’d ever seen. 

I’d sneak out of the building and walk up Fourth Avenue to Slim Moon’s house. Kurt from Nirvana lived in the apartment behind Slim’s, so when Slim wasn’t around I started hanging out at Kurt’s place. Spending time with Kurt took my mind off the whole stupid drama with my ex-boyfriend Luke. We’d drink beer and write lyrics on legal pads, handing them back and forth, underlining the parts we liked, and discussing possible changes. When we listened to music together, Kurt was obsessive. He would take the needle off a Vaselines record and place it back like he was sampling it, to hear the perfect intro or the perfect verse over and over again. He studied songs like they were medical journals and he was a doctor, always looking for new techniques he could use at practice. 

Kurt asked me if I’d want to put some writing in the liner notes and maybe do the cover art for Nirvana’s upcoming album, so he came to my apartment one day to see my ideas. When he got to the top of the stairs, he saw Luke standing in the hallway. Kurt knew about Luke’s behavior and he asked Luke what he was doing there. Luke said he could be wherever he wanted. I was working at my desk drinking a beer when I heard Kurt shouting in the hallway, “Why don’t you just leave Kathleen alone?!” I opened my door to see Kurt about to physically fight Luke. I pulled him away and into my apartment. After drinking probably my fifth beer, I showed Kurt some album art ideas and tried to act cool, but I was secretly elated that someone had stood up for me.

I wasn’t attracted to Kurt, but he definitely glowed. Like he had sounds bouncing off his skin. I always picture his sunken chest barely filling out his white T-shirt as he giggled at some stupid shit on TV. Kurt’s apartment became my escape hatch over time. The bubble I wrapped myself in to get away from Luke. Kurt used to joke that we were brother and sister and the Brawny paper towel guy was our dad. We would smoke pot while watching his turtle walk around his tiny living room. He was the first feminist man I ever met who never thought being an ally meant you couldn’t defend a woman in bold strokes because she was supposed to do it all for herself. He never even flinched. “SCUM” is said to stand for “the Society for Cutting Up Men,” and the book itself is super violent and funny as hell, which reminded me of Kurt. A few days after giving the book to him, I went to a barbecue in his backyard, but every time I came close to him, he’d go into his apartment “to get something.” I came by a few nights later and Kurt let me in. I asked him point-blank if he was mad at me. 

“I don’t need you to buy me books,” he said. “I’m not fucking stupid. I can pick out my own books.” It wasn’t the content that offended him, it was me. I was acting like Ms. Smarty Pants College Girl who had come to educate dumb working-class Kurt. And then it hit me. Kurt probably wasn’t financially able to go to college, even though he was one of the most intellectually curious people I knew. He was also treated like a local in Olympia even though he was from Aberdeen, because the town was divided that way—college students vs. locals. And now someone he thought of as a friend was telling him, “Here, let me educate you with this cool book because I’m so smart and you need my guidance.” Having being put down as a woman had blinded me to my own power to hurt people. I never would’ve guessed Kurt cared what I thought of him until that moment. I told him I was sorry but I didn’t ask him to forgive me. A few months after we’d started Bikini Kill, Kurt asked Tobi to be the drummer for Nirvana, and Tobi said no because she was convinced our band was going to change the landscape for women in music. I’m saying that again, for the people in the back: 

Tobi Vail could have been the drummer for Nirvana, but she chose to be in a feminist band instead. Kurt and I continued listening to records and hanging out. On one of those nights, we got drunk and talked about everything from how white the scene in Oly was to the massive new building that had just been put up down the street from his apartment on Pear Street. The sign on the building read, “Pregnancy Help,” but when I called to find out more, they let me know what they really were: a pro-life place that wanted to show me videos of infants in trash bags to scare me out of having an abortion. Kurt agreed we needed to take action via spray paint. Of course, he always had tons of stuff in his apartment—all kinds of art supplies. We went to the wooded area across the street from the fake abortion clinic like wasted feminist vigilantes. Once hidden, we staked out the “clinic” with Kurt’s binoculars and put on gloves so we wouldn’t have spray paint on our hands if the cops appeared. When the coast was clear, I yelled, “No cars!” Kurt ran across the street with his Kermit the Frog–in–jeans legs and spray-painted “GOD IS GAY” in ten-foot-tall letters.

After we did our “activism” on the building, we picked up Dave and headed downtown to my apartment in the Martin because I always had forty-ouncers in my fridge. It was springtime and my windows were open. My living room had two things in it, a shitty futon couch and a massive drafting table. That table was my HQ. I wrote both Bikini Kill zines there while listening to Rites of Spring and the Slits on heavy rotation. Pages of “Girl Power,” the second issue of our zine, were meticulously laid out on its massive surface. When Dave tried to touch it, I told him to step the fuck back. At some point, Kurt left Dave and me alone at the drafting table, talking drunk talk. Dave said he used to be in a band called Dain Bramage. And then I saw Kurt climbing through my window. He was holding yellow daffodils that I recognized instantly. “I picked them for you,” he said, like I was Darla in The Little Rascals and he was Alfalfa. “Oh shit, those are Darren’s,” I said. “He’s been trying to grow them for months. Oh shit, you got those from his window box!” Kurt dropped them. I explained loudly not to worry. “Darren is this guy who decided to take care of me,” I said. “He makes me dinner all the time. He’s my caretaker, basically.”

I was a young feminist and I was trying to sound cool, trying to fit into the tough-girl persona I assumed Kurt and Dave had of me. The undertone was: I hate and use all men except you, which makes you special. “I’ve got him wrapped around my finger. He takes care of me so I can make art.” Really Darren was one of my closest friends, my confidant and my lifeline. But I went on to describe him as if he were some loser I was just using. I wanted to give them what I thought they wanted—and I also wanted to make Kurt feel okay about rooting up the three flowers Darren had worked months to produce. We left my apartment and went back to Kurt’s. Kurt and I turned the lights off in his bedroom and went on a rampage, drunkenly destroying everything. We wrecked every inch of his room—his paintings, his blanket, the wall—because it was dark. Because we were drunk. Because we were young and angry and broke. I scribbled above his bed with the Sharpie from my back pocket: “Kurt is the keeper of the kennel. . . Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.” Earlier in the day, Tobi and I had been at the local supermarket looking at deodorants, and we both laughed hysterically when we saw one called Teen Spirit. What the fuck does teen spirit smell like? we wondered. Capitalism apparently knew no bounds.

After our rampage, I fell asleep fully clothed next to Kurt with the Sharpie marker still in my hand and woke up with the kind of hangover I can only describe as Did we kill someone last night? Kurt called a few months later asking if he could use the line “Smells like Teen Spirit” in a song. I was immediately transported back to that terrible night and wanted to get off the phone as fast as I could, so I just said, “Sure,” thinking it was no big deal. Outside, after the show, a guy walked up to me and said he wanted to make a record with Bikini Kill. He said he loved the show and felt we needed to record something ASAP. I assumed he was a creep. As I walked away, Kathi and Tobi said, “What did Ian MacKaye just say to you?” I was a big Fugazi fan but hadn’t recognized him. We were obnoxious feminist punks, and in the summer of 1991, DC embraced us. “Suggestion” wasn’t a perfect song. I never liked that Ian used the word “I” repeatedly in the lyrics, since it implied he was speaking as a woman. But when I first heard Fugazi play it in Seattle, it was a watershed moment for me. I had never seen punk men stick their necks out for feminism before.

We played with Nirvana at the Paramount in Seattle on Halloween of the same year. We were the opening band. I knew he’d called Tobi over the summer and asked if we wanted to be in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video as anarchist cheerleaders (an image he borrowed from a drawing in our zine). I responded with a HARD NO, because I wanted our band to be judged by the “meritocracy” of the time, not through the lens of association with an all-male band. Tobi, Kathi, and I talked about it and decided to decline. Kurt was hiding in the corner of the biggest dressing room backstage, and he seemed really far away. I assumed he was freaked out by all the attention. Nirvana was touring constantly and probably living out of hotels, so I tried not to take it personally and instead focused on how sweet it was that they’d asked us to open for them. I don’t think any of us realized how huge they were about to become, but something had clearly changed. I knew Kurt was using heroin, because he’d asked me to get him some the last time we’d hung out in Portland. After the show, I was sitting in the van next to the window when Tobi scrunched in next to me. I told her I felt like we’d never see Kurt again, and she knew exactly what I meant. I could tell by her expression and the cadence of her speech that she was also in a lot of pain, but she still played the big sister and calmed me down. She told me she’d lost people to heroin before and knew the drill. 

Tobi and Kurt had broken up, but it seemed like they were on good terms. We wore pajamas at the show I’d invited Joan Jett to. It was at the Wetlands in New York City. The owner put us in a room downstairs, and I immediately began snooping around, looking for a sneaky vault of chocolate bars, vintage records, or band shirts left behind. Joan Jett came to see us play that night, just like she said she would. She took me aside after the show and told me she could hear how she would produce us while we were playing. She wanted to make a record with us. The woman who’d produced the Germs’ first album wanted to work with us! She didn’t even ask about the pajama thing. It was like she already knew. Riot Grrrl had become like a hydra monster—super complicated, at times beautiful, but also potentially destructive. In LA Weekly, Emily White referred to it as “an underground with no mecca, built of paper.” In a way, she was right. Many of us had written the outlines of places where we could be heard in our zines and were now using physical locations like punk clubs and meetings to realize our imperfect dreams. In the punk tradition, we weren’t meant to have a mecca, a center, or a hierarchy. Except we did. 

And whether I liked it or not, I’d become the de facto leader. Not knowing what to do, I asked Ian MacKaye for advice. His answer was simple: “Keep your head down and do the work.” Tim Green had quit the Nation of Ulysses and had some downtime, so he offered to teach me to play guitar. But when he encouraged me after I made a mistake, I mistook his patience for condescension, put the guitar down, and stormed off. The thing is, Tim was genuinely trying to help me. He had this way of putting chords together that made me think of angels flying around with sunglasses on. He could bring everything great about Rites of Spring, the Wipers, and the Pandoras into one song. Tim lived at a punk house near the post office called the Red House. He converted the garage into a combination bedroom/music studio and we made a record, Real Fiction, there under the name The Fakes. Joan Jett made good on her promise to record us and we met her in Seattle to lay down our new songs, “Demirep” and “New Radio.” She loved “Rebel Girl” when we played it at Wetlands and had specific ideas about how it could sound better than it had on our album Pussy Whipped.

Joan and her manager Kenny Laguna had me in the vocal booth for hours. I was also sick of being in the fishbowl Olympia had become since I’d become indie famous. Tobi had no interest in the meetings or going to LA, so just the three of us met with Lenny Waronker at Capitol Records, Jimmy Iovine at Interscope, and Mo Ostin at Warner Bros. Needless to say, we did not sign with Interscope. Soon after, Jimmy Iovine signed No Doubt. Their first hit for him: “Just a Girl.” Gwen Stefani celebrated on the cover of Spin with the headline “Riot Girlie.” Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time hanging out with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, who I’d met on a previous New York trip when I was writing with Joan. Kim was working on lyrics for the first Free Kitten record. She would sit at their kitchen table for hours with headphones on, listening to instrumentals with mock vocals, writing and rewriting lyrics—a technique I quickly added to my repertoire. Sonic Youth toured with Nirvana, so I tried to get info from Kim and Thurston about how Kurt was doing. 

He’d married Courtney Love, who’d been putting Bikini Kill down in the press for a while, so it felt like seeing him with her around was a bad idea. But then Kim told me Kurt was going to be in Seattle without Courtney for a month and encouraged me to go visit him. The last time I’d spoken with Kurt was two years earlier when I was living at the Embassy in DC. He’d called for Tobi, but I’d picked up. When I told him Tobi wasn’t home, he asked if I had time to talk. As we began to chat, he brought up a Seattle show we’d played together at the OK Hotel a while back. After Nirvana’s set that night, a bunch of punk girls had yelled at him about Nirvana’s new song “Rape Me,” and he thought I was the leader of the campaign against him. I was confused by that song and had talked about it with some girls that night. We were all in agreement that a guy making a comparison between being sold out by a friend to being raped wasn’t the best idea, but I hadn’t spearheaded anything. I knew he was still doing heroin and wanted to at least let him know I cared about him and was there if he ever needed help, before it was too late. Just as I was packing my car to drive to Seattle to go see Kurt, I chickened out. I thought: He has a whole new life. He’s in one of the most famous bands in the world! 

After Kurt's suicide, everywhere I went I saw pictures of Kurt, which made me feel physically ill. I felt like he had died because he was sick of being exploited and treated like an object, and now that he was gone people were lining up to make money off his suffering. His death made me more secure in my strategy of eschewing fame whenever possible and working toward things that actually mattered. I was having a hard time dealing with the minuscule amount of fame I had; I couldn’t imagine how he had lasted as long as he did. But more than anything I was sad. Sad about the heroin, about the gun, about his not having the happiness he deserved. Sad we would never be old together, sitting on a porch talking about when we were stupid young musicians who thought we could change the world. Why hadn’t I had the courage to go see him when he asked me to? To tell him I loved him and to reassure him that I in no way thought he was a bad person for signing to a major label? I was a fucking coward. Scared of Courtney Love. Scared of Kurt rejecting me when he never had before. 

Courtney Love got in my face and started hissing like a cat. She began screaming stuff at me like, “Are you leaving now, Kathleen? Go home and feed the poor!” She held her lit cigarette up to my face and traced my features with it, like she was going to put it out on my face. Then she coldcocked me in the face. I’ll never know why she did it. Maybe because “trauma begets trauma.” Maybe she was on drugs and mourning Kurt’s death; maybe it was the fact that Tobi had dated Kurt while he was writing Nevermind, and it was widely speculated that Tobi was the inspiration for much of that record. Maybe Courtney was embarrassed because I’d seen her using my stage banter as an empty schtick. Whatever set her off, it was ironic that a woman attacked me for no reason and then claimed she was a better feminist than I was. As we left the theater’s parking lot, I got directions to the nearest police station. I just wanted the assault to be written down so no one could pretend it had never happened or say that it was a “fight,” like they had when Courtney assaulted singer Mary Lou Lord. 

Later Courtney told the media I provoked her by whispering “Where’s the baby, in a closet with an IV?” referring to her daughter. I absolutely did not say that. The “fight” became national news and was mentioned everywhere from Rolling Stone to Entertainment Weekly to the Washington Post. The media was pushing the narrative that Courtney and I had been in a “catfight,” which just reminded me that pitting women against one another sold magazines. When I handed in my rent check that month, the woman who opened the envelope read my name and said, “Aren’t you the girl who attacked Courtney Love?” A few days later we played the Warfield in Los Angeles, the same venue we’d played with the Go-Go’s a year before. Before the show, I went to a deli and looked at magazines. I flipped through Spin, the one with Green Day on the cover. Inside was an essay by Courtney about Lollapalooza. She claimed I was “Kurt’s worst enemy.” I looked up and saw Krist Novoselic, bass player for Nirvana, walking toward me. Even though we ran in the same circles, we didn’t know each other well. He made a beeline straight for me, sat down at the table, and started talking. And from what he said, it was like he knew I’d just read the interview: “Kurt would have been really upset to hear that someone hit you in the face. He loved you, I know he did.” —"Rebel Girl" (2024) by Kathleen Hanna

Say Everything: A Memoir by Ione Skye

Born in London in 1970, Ione Skye is the daughter of folk singer-songwriter Donovan and fashion model Enid Karl. Her father Donovan is known for the hits “Catch the Wind,” “Mellow Yellow,” “Sunshine Superman,” “Season of the Witch,” and “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” 

"My parents met in 1966, at the Whisky a Go Go in LA. She was twenty-one and Donovan was twenty. Mom had dated famous men before—Jim Morrison, Keith Richards, and Denny Doherty from the Mamas and the Papas. But the night she spotted Donovan across the crowded Whisky, that was it for her. The Sunshine Superman, as they called him, swept her off her feet and away to Greece, then London. When she got pregnant with my brother Dono, they moved into a fairy-tale house in the English countryside. Mom was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, but England was her happy place. As she once told me, sounding New Agey: “It was as if I’d lived there in another life.” Donovan was happy there chopping firewood and writing poems and songs about their budding family. His album A Gift from a Flower to a Garden is pretty much all about that time. In “Song of the Naturalist’s Wife” you can even hear my brother’s first cries. Donovan ticked all the boxes for Mom: creative, exciting, handsome, and a good provider. 

By the time I was conceived in Donovan’s gypsy caravan on the Isle of Skye, he was already drifting back to his ex-girlfriend Linda Lawrence. Then my father won Linda back from Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and initiated a new life. Mom hired a lawyer to get child support, using her first check to move us into a small apartment in Los Angeles, my first real home. Mom didn’t love her husband Billy the way he loved her, but it didn’t hurt that Billy was gorgeous—tall, dark, and shaggy, like a 1960s Keith Richards. After a dozen or so proposals, she’d agreed to marry him, and I was all for it. While shooting River's Edge I was careful not to let my hair fall over my face, I straddled Keanu Reeves and kissed him for real, moving around, parts to parts, missing sometimes and grinding on his leg or stomach. “Cut!” said Tim. “Nice work, kids. Stand by.” We pulled apart, a little bashful, a little breathless. “You good?” said Keanu, and I sensed by the husky edge to his voice that it wasn’t just me who wanted more. Tracing my lips to the side of his face, I whispered, “Can I come to your place after wrap?” On the way there, we stopped at an all-night retro diner, Norms. 

It was busy and bright inside, but the clatter and voices fell away as we slid into our booth. I could only marvel at every little thing Keanu did. The way he slung his arm across the back of the booth, tore a sugar packet with his teeth, licked a dot of ketchup from his thumb. Each gesture was sexier than the last. Spacey from lack of sleep and maybe even love, I felt the old diner drifting upward, lifting us into the sky. Just above the city. Just above real life. Keanu had his own barebones studio apartment to stay in during filming. A brown carpet, a mattress on the living room floor. We lay on our sides on his mattress and I ran my hands over Keanu’s smooth back as he kissed my face and neck. I felt both shy and proud of my body, my soft skin and full breasts in my Calvin Klein bra. I knew I was nice looking but wished I were the most beautiful girl in the world. This might have been the most beautiful boy. He was different from any boy I’d known, self-possessed and calm. But when I tried to maneuver him on top of me, he wouldn’t budge. “Let me drive you home,” he said abruptly, pulling up my bra strap. 

I wound my way up Mulholland, then Woodrow Wilson, finally pulling up outside the Zappas’ compound. The road was empty, but the canyon was rippling and alive. I sat on my hood and lit a shoebox joint, checking over my shoulder. I didn’t smoke often—yet—partly because you couldn’t at the Zappas’. It was no secret that Frank was staunchly against drugs of any sort, unless you counted the Winstons he chain-smoked. Anything stronger dulled the intellect and killed ambition, he believed. And because Frank was no ordinary father but something more like a cult leader to his kids, they were proud straight arrows too. Me, I was whoever they wanted me to be. Inside the compound, at least. You never knew who you might find there. That was part of the fun. Maybe it was Molly Ringwald on a pool float, pale and lovely as a forties Vargas girl. Molly and Dweezil Zappa were no longer together but still friends. Though newly famous, thanks to Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, Molly was wonderfully un-stuckup. 

I found her worldly and proper, in a vaguely old-fashioned way. “That’s what makes Hollywood so dynamite,” Anthony Kiedis said. “That desert energy, blowing in. I can really get down with it.” I liked that he thought Hollywood was great and wasn’t too jaded to admit it. But it was the thing about the wind that got me. I’d always had a connection with the Santa Anas. They brought up something in me, a wild yearning feeling. Anthony was now staring at me with focused intensity, his eyes tracing my hair, my mouth, my neck, as if memorizing me. No defensiveness, no beatnik shtick. For hours, we lay there, shedding layers, words flowing into kisses flowing into words. He stroked my face and said I was like an angel and I understood that we were falling under the same spell. And then, like it was Christmas in August, we shared all the things we loved: the Santa Ana winds, and perfect pieces of fruit, and Marilyn Monroe’s arched eyebrows, and the joy of a warm, still ocean, and getting comfortable after being shy and uncomfortable.

The Chili Peppers had just released their third studio album, The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, to not much of a bang. Anthony was broke and living with the band’s manager, Lindy Goetz, in the Valley. I’d pick him up at Canter’s Deli, or sometimes we’d just drive around, shouting our life stories over the radio. Anthony drove fast and reckless, and I was driving like a maniac too. Anthony would have to hit rock bottom to quit drugs, just as I’d have to hit my own rock bottom to quit the feeling I had to take care of Anthony. The need to save him was an addiction in itself. I was hooked. If Anthony’s sex drive had a soundtrack, it would be Fun House, the Stooges album he’d turned me on to. He liked to brag that he only exercised in bed and onstage, though I saw him doing push-ups all the time. He was obsessed with leading me to climax, and the pressure could be a lot. After five years of struggle, the Chili Peppers were finally moving on from being just a fringe local band to being played on KROQ. Tickets for the upcoming Uplift Mofo Party Plan tour were selling out and the record was sidling up the charts. If using was what kept Anthony alive, I was willing to help him. 

“If you’re going to do it,” I told Anthony that night, trailing him out the kitchen door, “just do it here with me, where you’re safe.” “I don’t deserve you,” he said, hanging his head. “I’m coming with you,” I said. In my pajamas and robe, I drove Anthony to meet a dealer on the corner of Wilton and Franklin Avenue. Then we came home and I watched, biting my knuckles, as Anthony shot up in my bathroom. The same bathroom where Karis Jagger and I used to stand on the tub’s edge, lip-synching in the mirror. That was the first of many times I went with him to score. He didn’t like me tagging along at first, but then we discovered I had a sixth sense for the fuzz. One time we were parked in the Mayfair Market parking lot and Anthony had just smoked some dope; I got a weird feeling and put the tinfoil in my pocket seconds before a cop car swooped up. They searched the car and questioned us separately, and miraculously, we had the same story: We were just going to the market to get bagels. Heroin would make Anthony remote but also snuggly. We’d curl up on the waterbed, listening to Neil Young or Lou Reed. Sometimes we watched old movies, and not just because I wanted to. 

Anthony had a thing for Veronica Lake and might have seen Sullivan’s Travels as many times as I’d seen The Blue Dahlia. But then there were the nights he shot speedballs, a mixture of coke and heroin. Those nights weren’t sweet at all. I’d try to sleep while he crouched on my floor. “Don’t look at me!” he’d snap when I tried to pull him into bed. “I’m bad. I feel like a demon.” I’d look away for his sake, but Anthony wasn’t a bad person, he was just in a bad way. In the New Year, Anthony and I moved our joint belongings—his duffel, my three suitcases, and whatever else fit into the Toyota—into a quite glamorous 1940s triplex on North Orange Drive. I loved the apartment, with its original pink-tiled bathroom and Art Deco moldings. Heroin was “the worst drug in the world,” the “crossing the line” drug, and needles were so gross. All the same, I’d grown curious about heroin, now that it was in front of me so much. I wanted to know how the drug felt from the inside, why it was so bewitching. “Can I try some?” I asked one night as Anthony laid his lighter and tinfoil on the bathroom sink. 

Anthony looked horrified. “No,” he said sternly. Thankfully I was one of the lucky ones who didn’t get hooked. Not long after Hillel’s death, Anthony had gone back to rehab and gotten clean again. My worst nightmare was that he’d relapse if he found out I was falling in love with Adam. People thought Anthony was indestructible, but I wasn’t convinced. I was bound by a strange belief that I had to be with him to keep him safe. Then one beautiful September day—just a perfect day, as the Lou Reed song went—everything changed. Anthony sent me a letter. He was working the Twelve Steps and making his amends.

Once it occurred to my brother Dono that he might actually be able to date the models he worked with, he went on a mission to woo his big crush, Kate Moss—and by God, he succeeded. I went to see Nirvana perform on MTV Unplugged in New York while Dono and Kate were briefly an item. That winter I met Anthony on Becky's in Brooklyn, I knew that would be our last date. When Anthony started to yell at me, I was on the verge of tears, but fortunately there was Lou Reed who was leaving the bar and stared him in disapproval, which shut Anthony up on the spot. While we were shooting Four Rooms, all the actors shared a makeup trailer, but Madonna was soon moved to a private space because we couldn’t stop staring at her. I mean, it was Madonna. I’d only seen her in the flesh once before, from the audience at her Blond Ambition concert in LA in 1990. Adam had scored prime seats because the Beastie Boys’ first tour had been opening for Madonna. He and I were secret fans. Commercial pop was uncool to us, so we were acting like, Oh, isn’t it ironic that we’re here at this mainstream pop show? 

But from the minute the Blond Queen strutted onstage in her Jean Paul Gaultier bondage gear, all our judgment went out the window. Madonna was very fun and a little bit of a mean girl too. She loved taking the piss out of Tim Roth, who played the bellboy in all four stories. My old friend Paul Starr was Madonna’s makeup artist. Near the end of one long day of filming, when he swooped over for a last touch-up, she playfully smacked his hand and snapped, “If you put any more makeup on my face it will crack!” Paul just laughed and went on doing his thing. “Go ahead, hon,” said Madonna, patting the bed. I’d been summoned! Cinching my terry cloth bathrobe, I lay down next to Madonna. Her eyes were still closed, so I closed mine and we lay quietly, side by side on our backs. Turning my head ever so slightly, I opened one eye to look at her. She was almost otherworldly, with her feathery black lashes and fantastic bone structure. I had the urge to wrap her in a maternal embrace but didn’t dare. 

Madonna took care of herself. Madonna might not have been a fan of my brother, but she took a small shine to me. When Four Rooms wrapped, just before Christmas, I was invited to a holiday dinner party at Castillo del Lago, her Mediterranean-style estate perched above Lake Hollywood. A few decades before Madonna, another bigwig, the mobster Bugsy Siegel, had lived there. It was magnificent, the whole exterior painted in ocher stripes inspired by a church in Portofino. The view from the grand dining room, with its honeycombed Moorish ceilings, stretched from Lake Hollywood to the ocean. Best of all, a Frida Kahlo painting, Self-Portrait with Monkey, hung over a small table in the foyer. It was a small group that night. Debbie Harry was there, with a spiky new haircut. I still worshipped Debbie but my attention was mainly focused on Madonna’s ex-lover and best friend, Ingrid Casares. A few years in the future, when Howard Stern asked me about our romance on his show, I’d say she was my true initiation into the lesbian nation. When I married Adam, my bridesmaids were Karis Jagger and Mick Fleetwood's daughter, Amelia. 

Adam and I had never once fought in our entire seven-year relationship. I’d always thought that was our strength, but in fact it was our greatest weakness. I was reading a letter that had been sent to Adam, handwritten. It meant something. I scanned the lines, trying to understand what. It was from Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill. They’d met at the Summersault music festival in Australia. They were only friends, Adam said. The letter was not overtly flirtatious or inappropriate. She knew he was married and was trying, at least, to be respectful. But I could tell she wanted to leave an impression by the way she wrote—cool and smart and witty. And he must have liked her too, or why else would he have shown it to me? I handed it back to him, my hand shaking. “Should I write back?” Adam asked, his voice soft. I couldn’t, in good conscience, promise to be faithful to him. If my husband was going to like someone else (“like” was as far as I could let my imagination go), at least Kathleen was a good person. I admired her punk feminist mission and loved her songs, especially “Rebel Girl.” —Say Everything: A Memoir (2025) by Ione Skye