“When I feel the least powerful, I try to figure out: What’s the most powerful I can be? What’s something I’m the best at?” she says. Vail learned Beatles songs on guitar, then turned back to the drums. She found that she couldn’t read the news, couldn’t really do anything except play music every day. In 2016, after both the Ghost Ship fire and the election of Trump, she fell into a depression. The perilous state of the world created an urgency in Vail personally. Part of the project becomes: How do we use our voices to help move things forward? We’re being given a voice again, or seizing that platform, so what are we going to do with it? That’s what we’re trying to figure out.” She echoed activist Angela Davis throughout our talk: “It’s a constant struggle.” Dominant hierarchies reproduce themselves, whether it’s capitalism or white supremacy or homophobia. The structure of society has not changed. “Patriarchy still exists, sexism still exists. “It’s a different time, but it is and it isn’t,” Vail says. Their cool protest songs predicted and shaped our current cultural moment, in which recognizing the politics in art is non-negotiable. “I consider their music to be pretty threatening to the status quo, if we consider the status quo to be patriarchy and the music industry.”īikini Kill’s insurrectionism feels more vital than ever. “Our struggles as feminists in punk have been different, but I see it as a sort of similar thing, where maybe the world wasn’t ready for the Raincoats at the time,” Vail says. The Raincoats have been a source of inspiration for Vail since her teenage years (and friends since Bikini Kill toured the UK in 1993), but at The Kitchen she saw something more: older women continuing to make art with humor, ferocity, and deep friendship. I’ve had many of my own transcendent experiences watching the Raincoats play: They are in their 60s and 70s and still perform regularly, exuding total unselfconscious joy and resilience, forging inspired cross-generational dialogue with their work. Michelle Groskopfīoth Hanna and Vail said that the Raincoats were a big reason for the reunion (“We were all very moved by seeing that show,” Vail adds). Tobi Vail at Bikini Kill’s first Palladium show. When Vail, bassist Kathi Wilcox, and singer-guitarist Kathleen Hanna took the stage together, linear time collapsed. Just a few hours before doors, when the Raincoats’ live drummer, Vice Cooler, alerted me to the fact that “three members of Bikini Kill” were in the building, I spiraled quickly from puzzled to shook to awe to glee. At this final event, organized by Raincoat Shirley O’Loughlin and dubbed “The Raincoats and Friends,” I was slated to read in between a series of screenings and performances, including one from Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail. The occasion was a series of celebrations for the legendary UK punk band the Raincoats, loosely organized around my then-recent book on their 1979 debut album. It was November of 2017, and for three nights the feminist punks of New York City and beyond had overtaken the storied Manhattan art space The Kitchen. “We can’t hear a word they say,” Kathleen Hanna sang vulnerably. I sat on a plastic chair and watched in disbelief. “ For Tammy Rae,” the melancholy daydream of a closer from 1993’s Pussy Whipped, was the first Bikini Kill song I ever saw live. What if girls owned the world? Bikini Kill once wrote a song about that deeply utopian idea.
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