Kathleen Hanna, a leading figure of the riot-grrrl feminist rock movement, describes her voice as “a bullet.” Not only has it ripped through numerous anthems for the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, but her powerful voice acted as a weapon against aggressive dudes in 1990s punk clubs, when Hanna would grab the microphone and issue her rallying cry: “Girls to the front!”
But in 2005, the bullet was silenced. At the time, Hanna told bandmates and fans that she was done with music, having fought the good fight against homophobia, sexism and racism. That was not the whole story, as revealed in the new documentary “The Punk Singer,” out this past Friday. While making the film, Hanna, 45, discovered that her debilitation was due to late-stage Lyme disease, which was causing seizures, speaking problems and other health issues.
“When I was in the throes of it, I never pictured myself onstage again,” she says by phone from her Flatiron District home. “[Making] the movie — imagine watching yourself be young and vibrant and jumping around onstage in this archival footage, thinking to yourself, ‘I didn’t know if I’m going to live to see the end of this movie.’ That was so depressing.”
“The Punk Singer” traces Hanna’s history as a punk musician in Olympia, Wash., where the Maryland-raised singer attended Evergreen University. It covers her rise as a mainstay of the early ’90s alternative scene, as when she famously scrawled “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on Kurt Cobain’s wall, inspiring the name of Nirvana’s first hit song. And it touches on her marriage to Adam Horovitz, a k a Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys.
The documentary makes clear — through interviews with luminaries ranging from Joan Jett to Carrie Brownstein (of the band Sleater-Kinney and IFC television show “Portlandia”) to Tavi Gevinson, the teenage editor of the Web magazine Rookie — that Hanna’s influence is still potent.
“I remember being completely blown away by [Bikini Kill],” Kim Gordon, the former bassist and singer for Sonic Youth, tells The Post. Gordon first learned about Bikini Kill from Courtney Love — ironic, Gordon says, as Love later punched Hanna out of nowhere at a Lollapalooza show in 1995. “It was clear that Kathleen was such a force. She was really inspiring and exciting.”
When Bikini Kill broke up in 1997, Hanna went on to form Le Tigre, turning her punk energy toward upbeat pop tunes. The band’s tune “Deceptacon” was featured in a Nivea cosmetics commercial, and became an indie-rock party anthem that still gets played at any respectable Williamsburg dance party today.
Hanna’s struggle with Lyme disease is a chief turning point in the documentary, but it’s not the end. Although she does not exactly when or how she contracted the tick-borne disease, she is undergoing treatments and is now in remission.
The story builds to her eventual return to the stage, with new band the Julie Ruin. The band’s record, released in September, makes it clear Hanna still feels connected to the artsy, do-it-yourself scene that thrives in Brooklyn today. In the song “Kids in NY,” she sings reverently about the young people “making feminist fanzines in Bushwick” and how the sheer cost of living in New York has inspired a new breed of hard-core attitudes.
“It’s not like I turned 40 and I’m dead in the music world, or something,” she says.
In fact, she’s returning to touring in the spring. And she and Horovitz have written a sitcom about a bus driver, which is in final talks to go to pilot.
In their downtime, the couple play softball and check out shows at Joe’s Pub. When she gets stressed, Hanna likes to answer e-mails while sitting in the window of her apartment, from where she can just see the Empire State Building through the fire escape. It’s a long way from when she showed up in New York City as a 19-year-old with $40 in her pocket, looking longingly at food through the window of a Dean & Deluca. In those two decades between, the girls have successfully come to the front.
“A young feminist in a band said this thing at a panel discussion when someone asked: ‘Do you feel this pressure to sing about feminist issues?’ she says. “She said ‘Bikini Kill already did that. I don’t have to.’ ”