Rebel Girl
My Life as a Feminist Punk
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5,0 • 1 Bewertung
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- 15,99 €
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- 15,99 €
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AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
An electric, searing memoir by the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre.
Hey girlfriend I got a proposition goes something like this: Dare ya to do what you want
Kathleen Hanna’s band Bikini Kill embodied the punk scene of the 90s, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like “Rebel Girl” and “Double Dare Ya” are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from?
In Rebel Girl, Hanna’s raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood to her formative college years and her first shows. As Hanna makes clear, being in a punk “girl band” in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination.
But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her, including with her bandmates Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, JD Samson, and Johanna Fateman. And her friendships with musicians like Kurt Cobain, Ian MacKaye, Kim Gordon, and Joan Jett reminded her that, despite the odds, the punk world could still nurture and care for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her musical growth in her bands Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its exclusivity.
In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful—and how they continue to fuel her revolutionary art and music.
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Hanna, lead singer of the punk feminist band Bikini Kill, debuts with a no-holds-barred account of her turbulent life. Growing up with a violent, alcoholic father who once threatened suicide, Hanna began singing as an artistic outlet in college. After her roommate was attacked by a man, Hanna trained as a volunteer at a domestic violence shelter, awakening feminist convictions that she explored in punk band Viva Knievel and—starting in 1991—in Bikini Kill. Later chapters discuss the somewhat accidental origins of riot grrrl, a feminist punk movement that elicited anger from male concertgoers and sexist takes from the media (she'd held the meeting that established it partly to find writers for her zine). Also recounted are Bikini Kill's late-1990s breakup (they'd go on to reunite in 2017 and 2019), and Hanna's tenure as frontwoman for the band Le Tigre in 1999, a period during which she gained a measure of healing; though she'd informally counseled women about sexual abuse for years, she'd never processed her own traumas, including abuse by her father, stalkings, and rapes ("I just kept overworking and stuffing it down"). While the narrative feels unstructured in places—early performances, creative tensions between bandmembers, and feminist musings blend together—Hanna's visceral prose captivates, and she's refreshingly candid about the riot grrrl movement's failures, including its whiteness and her "tokenistic" efforts to diversify it (at one workshop, she realized that "BIPOC women were as disappointed in white punk feminists as I'd been by white male punks"). It's a raw and revealing portrait of a vital figure in the feminist punk scene.
