Evelyn McDonnell

I was a 28-year-old punk fan and journalist who had pretty much given up on the pit when I walked into 924 Gilman St. in Berkeley, California, on a Saturday night in 1992 — or so I thought. In a decade-plus of attending shows, I’d been mashed in one too many mosh pits and resigned myself to straining to see bands from the safe confines of the back of the room.

Then I saw my first Bikini Kill show.

924 Gilman St. is a collectively run, all-ages, nonprofit performance space in Berkeley that has been the home of East Bay punk since the mid-80s. In 1992, admission was probably five or six dollars. Charging more would have been capitalistic. For a handful of green, we got to see three great bands: Bikini Kill, Tribe 8 and Pansy Division.

Bikini Kill was a four-piece that split its time between Washington, D.C., and Olympia, Washington, the towns that had been identified as the twin cities of what an LA Weekly cover story called “Revolution Girl-Style Now.” That title was a lyric from a Bikini Kill song — the first line of the first song on the self-titled debut EP the band released the day before the Gilman show. Having been identified as the flagship act of the riot grrrl movement, Bikini Kill had a lot of expectations riding on its young shoulders on Oct. 10, 1992.

Nonetheless, the group was just the most famous of an upsurge of bands reclaiming punk from straight white men. The queercore band Pansy Division made the kind of pop-punk that would in a few years turn Gilman into the epicenter of American DIY via Rancid and Green Day, but Pansy Division played it funny and pointed. The five women of Tribe 8 also played for laughs, but its music was unadulterated thrash. Like almost every male punk singer before her, Lynn Breedlove took off her shirt as soon as the scene got heated — which was pretty soon.

Tribe 8’s gender detonation probably primed the pump for the show’s headliners. Forget anger management: Anarchy management is the key to a great punk show. Bikini Kill’s simple act of revolution was to confront the punk-rock status quo from the moment it took the stage. “Girls to the front!” they shouted. And like that, the pit was ours.

Well, sort of. Not all men went willingly to the rear. The pushback Bikini Kill faced from its simple act of affirmative feminist action has been documented in histories of riot grrrl, including the 2013 documentary “The Punk Singer,” about the band’s vocalist, Kathleen Hanna. Shows frequently got interrupted by arguments, by the need to stop an overly aggressive audience member, by violence. I don’t remember anything specifically going wrong at the Gilman show. But I recall the sense of chaos — that anything could happen.

There was something about Bikini Kill that unleashed tethered souls, for good and for ill. Maybe it was the way Tobi Vail hit the drums like everyone’s lives depended on it. Or the way Hanna danced with fierce joy while bellowing from a place deep inside. She’d wear a bra, or a half-shirt, but even her midriff — sometimes with words like “Slut” scrawled across it — was destabilizing in a way that Breedlove’s bare torso was not. With her deconstructed cheerleader and stripper moves, Hanna still had one foot in the world of sexual objectification, while Tribe 8’s singer had broken through to the other side. The straddle was compelling and upsetting. As Hanna herself sang, “In her hips, there’s revolution.”

Time has not tamed Bikini Kill, but its ferocious response to assault and inequity has found a much bigger audience today than it enjoyed a quarter-century ago. At the Palladium, Hanna wore a cheerleader outfit as she led 5,000 fans in a singalong retort to a molesting father: “Suck my left one.” Hanna is one of the great frontpeople of all time, but she is best with this band behind her. The pounding of Vail’s toms doubled by Kathi Wilcox’s bass pushes Hanna’s voice into a roar that is primal and undeniable; she makes you listen.

Reunion shows are often just showcases for nostalgia. But the return of Bikini Kill feels less like a blast from the past and more like a superhero’s intervention. Its songs address sexual violence, harassment and exclusion in ways that are both cathartic and emboldening. Hanna directly spoke to the current political context, telling the audience to stay strong. “We’re still changing [expletive] and they can’t take that away from us,” she said, then tore into “Resist Psychic Death.” Words of wisdom indeed.

Like-minded acts are again sharing the dais with Bikini Kill. Opening night it was the Los Angeles punk legend Alice Bag, with special guests Allison Wolfe (of Bratmobile), Teri Gender Bender (Le Butcherettes), Francisca Valenzuela and Lysa Flores. Bikini Kill didn’t try to police the Palladium pit. “We don’t need ‘girls to the front,’” Hanna said. “I think that’s taken care of.” Thousands swarmed in front of her, dancing wildly in a space that was, once again, ours.

This article originally appeared in <a id="19c399a8-ab87-4ff6-a2ba-9b3d4bf07000" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/music/bikini-kill-live.html">The New York Times</a>.

Bikini kill, then and now: A front-row view of a punk revolution

(Critic's Notebook): When Bikini Kill took the stage at a packed Palladium in Hollywood on April 25, the band reclaimed a podium it had left 22 years earlier. For much of the audience, the show was a first chance to see the band they had discovered through books, or movies, or maybe even their mom’s record collection. For others, including myself, it was a jolt back to a defining moment in our lives. Time accordioned, and I realized: Bikini Kill is as vital as I remembered.

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Evelyn McDonnell

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Bikini kill, then and now: A front-row view of a punk revolution