hanna

hanna At the Knitting Factory show, held in December and billed as the Kathleen Hanna Project, her legacy was in every note and cheerleading dance move. Anna Copa Cabanna, a performer in a stars-and-stripes leotard, giggled as she sang: “I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure, babe. I do, I do, I do!” In the greenroom, women chatted and warmed up, the teenagers under the watchful eyes of fathers in vintage band T-shirts. Twenty acts did one song each by Bikini Kill or Le Tigre, Ms. Hanna’s later electro-pop band. The movement’s foremothers were there too: Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth read the Riot Grrrl Manifesto and Joan Jett did interviews in a van outside.



At the end of the night, Ms. Hanna took the stage, in a skirt suit and low heels, to perform with her latest act, the Julie Ruin. She had fun but declared the proceedings sort of weird, seemingly uncomfortable with the notion of a tribute when she still felt very much in her prime. It was the “I’m dead but I’m not dead, concert,” as she put it later. But then, the complications of aging and self-assessment have always been a part of the riot grrrl movement. When it took hold in the early and mid 1990s, driven by bands from Olympia, Wash., like Bratmobile and Heavens to Betsy, it represented a new kind of youthful, D.I.Y. feminism, a grass-roots uprising aimed less at liberating women from the institutions that oppressed them than inviting women to create new ones. “A boy-girl revolution,” Ms. Hanna sang, that allowed women to be sexually free and simultaneously open about harassment and sexual assault, that encouraged them in pursuits traditionally thought of as male, like dancing in the mosh pit or thrashing on guitar, without having to give up their spirited girly-ness. Bopping around stages, high ponytail bouncing, Ms. Hanna became the face of this movement, which was small and short-lived but had a lasting effect on female-centric music and cultural critique.

hanna