Twenty-nine years later, the songs keep traveling
It still blows my mind when I think about how Bikini Kill were gone for more than twenty years and somehow their fan base continued to not only grow, but find new life in a crowd who weren’t even alive when the music took shape.
I feel like that is a pretty difficult thing to pull off. Plenty of bands fade and become attached to a particular stretch of somebody’s life. The records usually stay in rotation, maybe the shirts even survive in the back of a drawer. Eventually a reunion gets announced because enough people are willing to pay to remember what being young and angry felt like. Bikini Kill returned to something considerably less predictable. Kathleen Hanna has talked about expecting the reunion crowds to be filled mostly with people around her age. What happened instead was teenagers started showing up alongside the people who had been there from the beginning. The band now apparently spends some time looking into the crowd trying to figure out whether the parent brought the kid or the kid brought the parent. That’s a pretty interesting question to have to ask.
Their September 22 stop at Roadrunner should provide plenty more opportunities to play that game.
Bikini Kill formed in Olympia, Washington in 1990 and became one of the bands most closely associated with riot grrrl. That story probably deserves an article of its own. Kathleen Hanna, Tobi Vail and Kathi Wilcox are still at the center of the current lineup, with Sara Landeau on guitar, and the songs they made during their original run have had more than enough time to travel without them. “Rebel Girl” alone has spent three decades finding new sets of ears and angsty kids. They may have broken up in 1997, but the music apparently didn’t receive the memo.
I have two daughters, so I probably notice the generational part of this more than I would have a few years ago. They’re still young enough that sharing music with them is a completely unreliable exercise. I can put on something I think they might love and watch it die within thirty seconds. Then some random song I wasn’t even trying to introduce sticks around for weeks and suddenly I’m hearing it from the back seat. There is something pretty great about watching music leave your possession like that. It stops being the thing you handed somebody and starts belonging to them for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
Bikini Kill have had twenty-nine years since their breakup for that to happen.
Their return started taking shape after Hanna, Vail and Wilcox played together at an event honoring The Raincoats in 2017. Full Bikini Kill shows followed in 2019, with Landeau joining them, and what initially looked like one of those reunions you might have one chance to catch has continued much longer than expected. COVID cut a giant hole through the middle of it, but once touring became possible again they picked it right back up. At this point I hesitate to even call these reunion shows, seven years into playing together again I think it’s safe to say they’re just Bikini Kill shows.
The interesting part is that Hanna sounds like she is enjoying them in a way she wasn’t always able to the first time.
A lot of old touring stories get better with age when looked back on. The terrible van becomes funny. Sleeping on somebody’s floor turns into evidence that everybody was really committed to the cause. When enough time passes, even the worst parts start sounding almost romantic. Hanna’s memories of Bikini Kill in the ‘90s don’t always cooperate with that version of punk history. She has talked about men screaming at the band while they played, people insisting they couldn’t play their instruments, shitty places to sleep after the show and the general exhaustion of constantly having to defend why they were standing onstage to begin with. One story ends with Hanna waking up under a kitchen table with cat litter in her hair. That’s about where my appreciation for the romance of DIY touring would probably end too.
The current version of Bikini Kill has a crew. They have people helping them get from city to city. They can finish a show and go sleep somewhere that was actually designed for human beings to sleep in. Most importantly, they can get onstage and enjoy playing music that spent years tied to a period Hanna doesn’t seem interested in rewriting into something easier than it was.
Roadrunner also catches the band in the middle of a run that has been selling extremely well. Portland and Los Angeles sold out. Philadelphia is gone, Silver Spring is gone, and both Brooklyn shows following Boston are sold out. The Boston date remained available when the tour announcement went out, with Downtown Boys opening and the show kept all ages. That last detail becomes more interesting once you know how many younger fans have been turning up.
Bikini Kill spent years making music partly about who gets access to rooms like these. Thirty years later they’re still making sure younger people can get through the door.
The band also played Olivia Rodrigo’s inaugural Daisy Chain Fields Festival in California at the end of August, sharing a bill that makes the distance between Bikini Kill’s original world and the current one look absurd on paper. Rodrigo has spoken openly about the women who came before her and the festival directed ticket profits toward organizations supporting women and girls. Bikini Kill didn’t show up as some museum-piece acknowledgement of where feminist music used to be. They were just another functioning band on the bill, playing to people who have grown up with completely different reference points.
There are going to be people in that room at Roadrunner who remember Bikini Kill before the breakup. Somebody else may have discovered them during the twenty-two years when seeing the band wasn’t even an option. A teenager could be standing a few feet away hearing “Rebel Girl” live for the first time while somebody twice their age remembers exactly where they were when they first heard it. Nobody needs to agree on what the song means to them now, that’s probably part of why it has lasted this long.
Hanna has also been pretty clear that Bikini Kill won’t keep touring forever. She hasn’t dressed that up as a farewell announcement and there certainly doesn’t seem to be any interest in squeezing urgency out of people with a giant “FINAL TOUR” banner. Everybody in the band has other things they want to do, they’re playing now because they still want to play. Eventually that could change.
I’ve talked myself out of enough shows by assuming there would always be another chance that I’m hesitant to make that assumption anymore (Mr. BB King!!). Maybe Bikini Kill comes through Boston again. Maybe they don’t. Either way, they’re at Roadrunner on September 22 and I’m done pretending “next time” is guaranteed.
Bikini Kill with Downtown Boys plays Roadrunner in Boston on Tuesday, September 22. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the show starts at 8. The show is all ages.
Leave a Reply