Olympia, WA · riot-grrrl · punk

Bikini Kill

1 festival played →

The band riot grrrl was built around — Kathleen Hanna's shriek, girls-to-the-front stage politics, and a legacy that reordered punk's whole power structure.

Bikini Kill formed in Olympia, Washington in October 1990, with Kathleen Hanna on vocals, Tobi Vail on drums, Kathi Wilcox on bass and Billy Karren on guitar. Hanna, Vail and Wilcox met while attending the Evergreen State College, and the band's name was borrowed from a one-off performance staged years earlier by fellow Olympia musician Lois Maffeo, itself taken from a 1967 B-movie title.

The band's short, fast songs and confrontational lyrics made them the central group of the riot grrrl movement, which they helped organise through zines and direct engagement with audiences as much as through records. Hanna published her own zine, also called Bikini Kill, to accompany the band's first tours in 1991.

Their sets were known for Hanna calling women and girls to the front of the room, handing out lyric sheets, and addressing sexual assault and harassment directly from the stage. She would also dive into the crowd herself to remove male hecklers.

Their early EP was released on Kill Rock Stars and produced by Ian MacKaye; a UK tour led to a split album with Huggy Bear, and their debut full-length, Pussy Whipped, followed in 1993. Joan Jett produced their single "New Radio"/"Rebel Girl", and Hanna went on to co-write songs for Jett's album Pure and Simple.

The band broke up in 1997 and reunited briefly in 2017, then on a more permanent basis from 2019, playing the original material with Wilcox, Vail and Hanna again at the core, alongside other musicians in place of Karren.

Read more

riot-grrrlpunk