Kathleen Hanna on ‘Hit Reset,’ Her Recovery and Her Feminist Path

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/arts/music/kathleen-hanna-julie-ruin-hit-reset-interview.html

Version 0 of 1.

In 1998, Kathleen Hanna, known then as the indefatigable riot grrrl frontwoman of Bikini Kill, released “Julie Ruin,” a lo-fi bedroom album made alone with a drum machine and quarter-inch tapes while her band was falling apart.

More than a decade later, during another moment of distress — Ms. Hanna, who also led the political electro-pop act Le Tigre, learned she had late-stage Lyme disease — she resurrected the project as a full band, the Julie Ruin, which used samples and synthesizers to make jittery, danceable punk music. (The group’s debut in 2013, “Run Fast,” coincided with the release of “The Punk Singer,” a documentary about Ms. Hanna’s career and health.)

Ms. Hanna, 47, is in a much better place now, although you might not know it from the Julie Ruin’s new album, “Hit Reset,” released last week. (The band also features the keyboardist Kenny Mellman, the bassist Kathi Wilcox, the guitarist Sara Landeau and the drummer Carmine Covelli.)

Bookended by emotionally draining songs about her parents — “Drunk from a mug shaped like a breast/Punishing the people he loved best,” she sings of her father on the title track — Ms. Hanna confronts her abusive childhood and illness (along with that old foe, the patriarchy) with as much fury as ever.

“It’s easier to look back on stuff than to talk about it while it’s happening,” Ms. Hanna said. “Now that I’m much better on the wellness spectrum — a 9 out of 10 — I feel like I can look back and be like, ‘Oh my God.’ I can see the devastation.”

In a phone interview, Ms. Hanna discussed coming to terms with her own story and the current state of punk and feminism. These are excerpts from the conversation.

What’s the through line between your original “Julie Ruin” project and this band?

Depression. [Laughs.] Things can still be pretty bad for any musician who’s not a straight white male. Back then my band was breaking up — there’s only so many times you can be threatened and harassed and yelled at onstage. You get no sleep as a touring musician who books your own shows and drives your own van. That was the Bikini Kill experience.

Then after Le Tigre, I got really sick. Dealing with that was yet another really bad struggle where I started to lose myself again. Now I’m not the man-hater from Bikini Kill; now I’m the sick person. I just needed to remember who I was besides being sick, and I started rediscovering that through the original [“Julie Ruin”] project.

You address your father in pretty raw terms on “Hit Reset.” Was there a point when you realized that you were ready to tackle those subjects?

This record is pretty free-form. I wanted to find out what was really going on in my head instead of what I wanted to be going on in my head. The songs would start to build, and I was like, “Man, this is such great material — thanks, Dad!” It felt like turning a negative into a positive.

Your health has been a dark cloud hovering over the later part of your career. Do you feel you’ve overcome that?

I feel like I’ve gone through the worst of it. What a lot of people don’t know is that people get addicted to drugs for all different kinds of reasons. [Laughs.] I was put on all this medication, and getting off of it is now the last part of my journey. The withdrawals are really bad. Klonopin is no joke. I just did what my doctor told me and it alleviated my symptoms enough that I could function, but now I have to get off those meds.

You’ve been an activist musician for more than 20 years. Is it ever dispiriting to still be railing against the same sexism on a song like “Mr. So and So” that you were calling out as a young person?

No, it feels euphoric, actually. Now I’m the one in control. I get to go out and sing that funny song. People might think, “She’s such a tough-as-nails, feisty little firecracker feminist” or whatever, but I’ve had to be nice to sound guys who were treating me horribly because I didn’t want them to turn my vocals down during the set. That’s just the nature of the work. But I’m able to deal with the emotions that have to do with keeping quiet and all of the more insidious forms of sexism.

I just think it’s totally hilarious that I get paid to sing about it. Back in the ’90s these were things we didn’t talk about. I would sing songs about mansplaining before that was a word. But I’m really happy that mansplaining is a word! All of a sudden it’s this thing that everyone gets, and that’s expanding our ability to talk about things.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the commodification and marketing of feminism. How does this wave of trendy feminism differ from what you experienced with riot grrrl?

The second fanzine my band wrote was called “Girl Power,” and then, what do you know, three years later, the Spice Girls were like, “Girl power!” I’ve seen the commodification thing. But that’s why we’re artists — we just keep coming up with new ideas. People are going to steal them. That’s how rock ’n’ roll was invented — get real. This isn’t the first time or the last time that things are being appropriated. I don’t consider myself a victim in any way. I’m very lucky as a feminist artist to get the attention that I’ve gotten.

I understand people who are [upset] when things like the Stanford rape are still happening. You can’t wear a Sleater-Kinney T-shirt or be really into Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” and be like, “Everything’s O.K. now.” I totally get it. But the fact of the matter is that I got into bands because I wanted to make feminism cool. I mean, “Ally McBeal” was cool; feminism was not cool. So I said, I’m going to be the Pied Piper, the gateway drug, and try to get people into this because I was lucky enough to go to college and be given a feminist book.

If Beyoncé is going to have the word “feminist” written behind her in lights and she’s going to write “Formation” and talk about black power, I’m not going to say she’s fetishizing stuff. It’s not a good career move. It’s not like you go through the record books and see all the feminist musicians who just really cleaned up. Let’s not put down people who have enough power to spread stuff beyond our little punk-rock world or our feminist academic world. Everyone is invited to this party.