Day 129: Bikini Kill – Revolution Girl Style Now
There seems to be a bit of a riot grrrl renaissance happening at the moment. Fantastic, couldn’t have come at a more opportune time – with the rise of this weird neo-conservative back-to-the-kitchen movement, I’m really hankering to see women be a bit more abrasive than we’re currently used to. I feel like there was a big racket where a choice few 4chan dorks declared that women should be quiet again and some of us actually listened, now it’s a social media trend to be an obedient wife. Interesting times. Anyway, I thought I’d go back to explore the canon of the riot grrrl movement, and I had to start with Bikini Kill.
Album cover courtesy of Bikini Kill Records
Riot grrrl was a feminist punk movement in the ‘90s that started in Olympia, Washington and spread across the globe into being a worldwide movement with a DIY-ethos. It was spread through music and zines, or non-commercial homespun publications that people were making, including artists from groups like Bratmobile and Bikini Kill.
In the second Bikini Kill zine, the band’s singer and guitarist Kathleen Hanna set out the riot grrrl manifesto:
BECAUSE we know that life is much more than physical survival and are patently aware that the punk rock "you can do anything" idea is crucial to the coming angry grrrl rock revolution which seeks to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere, according to their own terms, not ours.
BECAUSE we are interested in creating non-heirarchical ways of being AND making music, friends, and scenes based on communication + understanding, instead of competition + good/bad categorizations.
BECAUSE doing/reading/seeing/hearing cool things that validate and challenge us can help us gain the strength and sense of community that we need in order to figure out how bullshit like racism, able-bodieism, ageism, speciesism, classism, thinism, sexism, anti-semitism and heterosexism figures in our own lives.
BECAUSE we see fostering and supporting girl scenes and girl artists of all kinds as integral to this process.
Released in 1991, the legendary punk band’s self-published duo Revolution Girl Style Now is described by Bikini Kill’s drummer Tobi Vail as a call to action, or "a call for all girls to start bands, start 'zines and participate in the making of independent culture." The version I listened to is a reissue from 2015 that has three previously unreleased tracks on it: "Ocean Song", "Just Once", and "Playground".
The sound of the record is unpolished, sharp and aggressive, as you’d expect, and the lyrics aren’t easy to process, defiantly speaking about difficult topics like sexual or domestic abuse. What’s most refreshing about the record is that they’re not trying to sound likeable and palatable – they’re making noise, they’re angry, they’re challenging you, they’re not afraid to piss people off. It feels fresh in 2025. There’s a reason why it’s coming back now, and we need it.
But as you can expect, it didn’t go down well at that time either: Kathleen Hanna says they were hated for what they were doing, saying that they were “vilified during the '90s by so many people, and hated by so many people, and I think that that's been kind of written out of the history. People were throwing chains at our heads – people hated us – and it was really, really hard to be in that band." Something to remember when the backlash begins for the new generation of riot grrrls. I’d imagine even saying something like “girls to the front” today wouldn’t go down well either.
I hadn’t really listened to Bikini Kill since I was a teen, I had just as good of a time doing it now Some 35 years after its release, there’s still something revolutionary hearing women express themselves like this, and call other women to band together to start making art just as unapologetically as them. 8/10. I’m hoping the new generation of bands are as fearless.