Pitchfork: How did it feel when Bikini Kill started playing together again?

Kathleen Hanna: It felt like what I was supposed to be doing the whole time. More so than even playing, it was being together. There’s a certain shorthand you have with best friends you’ve been through hell with. When I turn around and see their faces, there are certain looks they give—I can’t describe it, it’s just beautiful.

I could go to therapy for 10 years and not get what I got out of the first day practicing with Tobi again. She was talking about stuff like call-out culture and the trajectory it’s taken since ’90s identity politics, and I felt like, “Oh God, I need this in my life.” It’s been complicated for us seeing how some of the not-great parts of identity politics have come back.

Is there anything you feel is missing from the current conversation around call-out culture?

I know a female musician who’s quitting music because people were contacting her constantly and saying, “You can’t play this show, this guy did this thing, he’s in this band,” and it’s like: What is she supposed to do? She’s a struggling musician. She barely makes any money. Is she supposed to be a detective now? It’s important to me to look down the end of the road and think, Where is this going? instead of being like, “Trevor Marks, who’s in the band Vaginasaurus, is fucked up. He shouldn’t be using that name. They’re playing the club before us, so we’re going to boycott.” Why is Trevor Marks my fucking problem? Or why should I, as somebody in a band, be litigating a situation in a different city where I don’t even know what the fuck they’re talking about?

When is a boycott going to work, and when is it actually negating what you’re trying to do? Will it be productive in the end? I see young bands with marginalized people constantly bearing the brunt of these kinds of accusations—like, “It’s worse to be a hypocrite than it is to be a Trump supporter, because you say you’re progressive.” When smaller bands are boycotted for some stupid-ass shit, I wonder, “Why are these women responsible for all of the ills of the world?” I really question when people don’t look at who they are actually going after.

Was there anything else that shifted for you personally that made it seem like the right time to reunite?

It was you. [laughs] It really was the Raincoats thing. [Ed. note: Bikini Kill played together for the first time in 20 years at a 2017 event surrounding Jenn Pelly’s book about the Raincoats.] After that, being home, I started having situations where I would receive emails from men who were angry at me for things that happened 25 years ago, which weren’t even real, and I was thinking in my head, [singing Bikini Kill’s “Don’t Need You”] Don’t need you to tell me I’m good. I was like, “This is really sad. I’m quoting my own lyrics to myself in my own life to get me through.” And Tobi’s lyrics were always there for me in my head: As a woman aging in public, I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve thought, “If you are gonna look at me, I am gonna get a prize.” After we played together [at the Raincoats event], the songs just kept coming back and back and back. I was like, “This is now. I need to do this.” I pulled up all our songs that I had bought on Apple—because I didn’t have them—and sang to them. And I was like, “I can totally do this. I want to do this.”

I emailed Tobi and said, “Hey, what’s up? I was thinking, what if we did something else?” I was really nervous. I was sitting at the computer waiting for a response. It was like having a crush on someone, and I was like, “Do they have a crush on me?!” But it was like I had a crush on my own band again: [frenzied] “Is she going to want to do it?! Oh my God. I hope she wants to do it!” She pretty quickly wrote back. A year later, after practicing with Erica, I was on an all-time high. I can’t even tell you how happy I was. We were all talking, we were all getting along. I was singing these songs that mean more to me right now than they did at the time. I just thought, This is exactly what’s supposed to happen in my life.

Are there any Bikini Kill songs that feel especially potent or relevant when you’re playing them now?

It depends on the night, but there’s a line in this song “Lil Red” that goes, “You’re not the victim, though you try to make it that way/Pretty girls all gather round to hear your side of things.” When we have a president who’s likening himself to an African-American being lynched... it’s only a matter of moments before he’s going to say that he’s being raped by the Democrats—that whole “I’m the real victim” thing we’ve been seeing so much with the right wing. When I sing those lines, it feels very pertinent.

But also, songs like “Jigsaw Youth” and “Resist Psychic Death” talk about how there’s more than two ways of doing things, or more than one way of being. A lot of the songs talk about not having rigid, binary ways of thinking, where something’s all good or all bad. It’s about gray area and question-asking, as opposed to some sense of purity: “This way is right, and this way is wrong.” In the beginning of Bikini Kill, that was a big thing Tobi said a lot that really resonated with me: “Look, we’re not a band saying, ‘Here are the things we’re trying to get across.’ We’re asking questions.” In the writing process, I always felt like: “I’m not trying to tell you how to think. I’m trying to raise questions and say things I’m going through.”

I was assaulted by a male feminist when I was in Bikini Kill, the day before we moved to D.C., in 1991. It was literally three hours after I finished [the zine] Bikini Kill 2, which was called Girl Power. I’m still processing that violence. I still feel that in my bones every time I sing “Star Bellied Boy.” I kept that to myself at the time because I was leaving on tour and I didn’t want to get pulled off my path. I was the loud, angry feminist, and I was really confused about what that meant.

Do you still relate to that idea in “Feels Blind”: “Your world has taught me nothing”?

Yes. People have taught me a lot, but I’m talking about mainstream culture and the fact that we live in the United States where the majority of people didn’t vote for Trump, but Trump was able to be elected. And the fact that I go grocery shopping with people who voted for him, that people in my family voted for him. So, yeah, that makes me feel incredibly alienated to the point where all of our songs make sense to me.

“Feels Blind” always made sense to me on a really visceral musical level more than on a lyrical level. The way the drums come in, the way it starts with just that bassline. There’s something sad about it, but also hopeful and angry. That combination of emotions can be applied to so many different situations, and definitely right now with where we’re at as a country. The Kavanaugh hearings were horrifying. I was thinking the whole time, This is the end of legalized abortion.