An Interview with Kathleen Hanna

I recently talked with Kathleen Hanna in New York City, who was confused when I compared her to Bob Dylan. She thought I was saying she was old. So I explained to her that, like Dylan, people tend to talk about her like she’s dead. She’s this rare brand of living legend whose history is being written while she’s still alive—as the founding member of the radical feminist punk band Bikini Kill, Hanna is known as the matriarch of the early-90s Riot Grrl movement. Her papers have been archived in NYU’s Fales Library; she’s the subject of a new documentary, The Punk Singer; a central figure in Sara Marcus’ Riot Grrl chronology, Girls to the Front; and a few years ago, there was a big tribute concert for Hanna that featured icons like Kim Gordon. With all this focus on Hanna’s early career, it sometimes feels like she’s stuck in time.

The reality is that she’s worked on a lot of interesting projects since Bikini Kill, most recently “Run Fast”, the debut album out by her new band, The Julie Ruin—not to be confused with Julie Ruin, Hanna’s 1998 lo-fi electronic solo project—The Julie Ruin features five musicians, including keyboardist Kenny Melman of the legendary NYC cabaret act Kiki and Herb, and Kathi Wilcox, who played with Hanna in Bikini Kill. The album combines some of the punk rock style of Bikini Kill and the electronic edge of Hanna’s next band, Le Tigre, all under Hanna’s signature loudspeaker vocals. But it’s also very much a rock record.

I started out asking Kathleen Hanna about her nine-year disappearance from music after releasing albums pretty consistently from 1991-2004. Though many assumed she’d gone into early retirement, what few people knew was that Hanna was actually very ill and getting increasingly worse. After visits to many doctors, she was finally diagnosed with late stage Lyme disease, which explains the archiving and memorializing. In a way, she was helping to write her own eulogy.

—Jenna Weiss-Berman

THE BELIEVER: I wonder if you feel that all of these eulogies are premature, and that you’re kind of like, Look! I’m still making music. Let’s not do this yet.

KATHLEEN HANNA: It was really my choice to archive my material at NYU. A lot of it had to do with being sick and not knowing what I had for so long, and feeling like I was deteriorating in such a rapid way that I needed to really kind of put stuff into a package and put it away—just in case. When you say the word “eulogy”, it’s really exactly that. You...