Two decades later, the Olympia-based punk band's debut EP still sounds like a revolution. The first reissue on Bikini Kill Records feels like an auspiciously timed opportunity to remember something that's come to feel almost secondary to their pervasive legacy: Bikini Kill wrote great punk songs.
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When you put the needle to Bikini Kill's newly reissued self-titled EP, the first thing you hear is static, followed by frontwoman Kathleen Hanna asking, "Is that supposed to be doing that?" It was the summer of 1991 in Washington, D.C., and the four members of the Olympia-based punk band were in a professional recording studio for the first time. The EP's de facto producer, straight edge monastic and Minor Threat/Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye, recalls in its liner notes when one member glanced at the mixing board and marveled, "It's like Star Trek!" In the middle of a tour riddled with heckling and violent threats, Bikini Kill were nervous, road-wearied and vulnerable, all of which comes through on the EP. "It [was] a way to demystify the myth of perfection that a more polished product perpetuates," drummer Tobi Vail wrote earlier this year, reflecting on the EP's aesthetic, "It's also a way to say, 'Hey! You at home! You can make a record too!'" Bikini Kill is purposefully, defiantly, invitingly imperfect. This is why some people thought it was the scourge of the underground ("It was sad to see a woman so desperately confused," one music critic wrote of Hanna at the time); it's also why some other people have its lyrics tattooed on their skin. And it's precisely why, two decades later, it still sounds like a revolution.
In 2012, Bikini Kill's legend is more widely known than their music. The spirit of riot grrrl is manifesting not so much in bands but in extra-musical phenomena influenced by the movement's ideas: from the rebel girls running the feminist teen webzine Rookie to the collective of Russian revolutionaries who plucked two pieces of the Bikini Kill lexicon and dubbed themselves Pussy Riot. So the release of the first EP on Bikini Kill Records (an imprint formed to reissue the band's discography) feels like an auspiciously timed opportunity to remember something that's come to feel, oddly, almost secondary to their story: Bikini Kill wrote great punk songs. Tobi Vail's drumming managed to sound both wildly anarchic and assertively tight; Kathi Wilcox's bass gave even their hardest songs an elastic, low-end pogo-ability. Billy Karren pivoted between sludge-coated surf riffs and piercing dissonance. And then there was Hanna, sassing, seething, and spitting the band's cumulative passion like hot bile.
Commemorative reissues of classic punk records present certain ideological challenges. Should a band that sticks a $200+ price tag on a box set of previously released material be banned from speaking about the evils of capitalism? Can liner notes explain why a certain album is great without discouraging the listener from coming to his or her own conclusions? Is it possible to glorify the past without shortchanging the future? Well, aging punks, take note: the reissue of Bikini Kill elegantly avoids these pitfalls. It provides context (a zine-style insert featuring photos, collages, and recent interviews with MacKaye and Bratmobile's Molly Neuman) but doesn't stifle you with nostalgia. It pokes fun at the scenester's eternal refrain of "I was there" (one interview's gently mocking subtitle: "Bikini Kill, You Really Had To Be There…"), and it's ticketed at the reasonable price of just 2 and 2/5 Fugazi shows (not adjusted for inflation). It's an uncommonly inviting reissue, letting the songs sound not like museum pieces but living documents. Somehow, this music still sounds throbbingly present tense, which levels the exclusiveness of nostalgia.
Bikini Kill touches on themes they'd continue to explore over the next half-decade. "Liar" draws a direct line between capitalism and forms of social oppression ("You profit from the lie"), "Carnival" extols the virtues and radical possibilities of seemingly trashy pleasures ("It's by the Lacey Mall! That's where you'll find me, yeah!"), and the opening manifesto "Double Dare Ya" manages to cram everything Bikini Kill stood for into two minutes and 41 gloriously abrasive seconds. "Hey girlfriennnnnnd," Hanna begins, "I gotta proposition, goes something like this! Dare you to do what you want! Dare you to be who you will! Dare you to cry right out loud!" It's one of their definitive songs: an explosive collision between didacticism and dynamism, a Bill of Rights you can mosh to.
And as Hanna treats each song like a cross between a political speech and a vaudeville act, her performance on this EP is nothing short of legendary. She can roar as powerfully as she can belt and over the course of the EP she adopts a wide range of personas: She's Barbie, she's Biafra, she's a drill sergeant and a (not-so) conscientious objector, she's artist and (on the incendiary and dryly funny "Thurston Hearts the Who") critic, victim and abuser; she's your dad, your mom, your little brother, and your big sister all trapped (or liberated) inside one body.
The elasticity of voice in a Bikini Kill song is visceral, cathartic, and occasionally even comic. But it's also inherently political. Shortly before forming Bikini Kill, Hanna was working at a domestic violence shelter where she'd founded a discussion group for teen girls. This experience had a huge impact on her songwriting. In Sara Marcus's riot grrrl history Girls to the Front, she says that these were the girls she was initially writing for, screaming out other women's pent-up silence. So the vocal theatrics Hanna delivers on the earliest Bikini Kill songs are sometimes declarations of resistance (during the chorus of the blistering "Suck My Left One", she voices a girl hurling the title phrase at her sexually abusive father like she's re-enacting a scene from The Exorcist), but they also find her exercising her freedom, acting on the challenge she issues in the first song: Dare you to be who you will!
"Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, having to claw their way out," Kim Gordon said in a recent interview. She was reflecting on the trial of Pussy Riot, who cite Bikini Kill as a major influence, but she might as well have been summing up the spirit of Bikini Kill's earliest recordings. They'd go on to make better records (The Singles remains Bikini Kill's defining document), but none invite the listener to re-think how records are measured quite like their insurrectionary first EP. So if Pussy Riot prove the continued relevance of Bikini Kill's ideology, this EP does the same for something that deserves just as much credit: their music. In its grooves, still, you hear the revolution.