Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna | Book Review

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Author & Title: Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna 

My rating: 5/5

Publication date: 14th May 2024

Publisher: HarperCollins

Blurb:

Kathleen Hanna’s rallying cry to feminists echoed far and wide through the punk scene of the 1980s, ’90s, and beyond. Her band, Bikini Kill, embodies this iconic time, and today their gutsy, radical lyrics of 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 home, to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As Hanna makes blindingly clear, being in a ‘girl band’, especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or a safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightening 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, and Billy Karren; her friendship with Kurt Cobain; and her introduction to Joan Jett – and they were a testament to how the true punk world nurtured and cared 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 later bands, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement and its decline, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its later exclusivity.

In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the darkest, hardest times along with the most joyful – and how it all fuelled her revolutionary art, from the 1980s to today.

Review:

I have always been a fan of Kathleen Hanna's (I think Deceptacon by Le Tigre was my most played song when I was fourteen years old) so I was excited to hear she had released a memoir.

If you aren't familiar with Kathleen Hanna, she is the frontwoman of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She is known for being a pioneer of the feminist punk Riot Grrrl movement. I listened to this book on audio, narrated by Hanna herself, as it is always my favourite way to read memoirs.

Hanna writes about her childhood with her father, sister and mother, right through to forming and performing with her bands, falling in love with husband Adam (Horowitz, of Beastie Boys) and her diagnosis of Lyme disease. 

I knew about Kathleen Hanna's life on surface level but in this book she delves deep into her life and shares some raw things. She writes about rape, violence against women, miscarriage, troubles she faced from male concert-goers due to how she performed and standing up for what she believed in.

You can tell that she went through a lot of self-reflection whilst writing this book. It is very honest. A great memoir.