Rebel Girl by Kathleen Hanna

Annotations from "Rebel Girl" by Kathleen Hanna

My war is between the me who thinks she already died and the me who cries while touching the garden wall. My war is between the me who has suffered trauma and is trying to deal with it and the me who wallows in self-pity as a way to not reckon with my own privilege.

Mrs. Matthews looked like she was watching a squirrel on water skis when I hit the high notes at the end of the last chorus with ease.

This Li’l Goodtimes could sing every lyric to “More Than a Feeling” while skating backward. She was a ten-year-old motherfucker, a bat outta hell, a hokeypokey monster who could drink 7Up by the gallon.

Hard rock bands from Seattle came to Olympia and were loved by many, but Olympia ran on lo-fi DIY punk. It was the type of place where people were always saying stuff like “Let’s put on a show in the old barn.”

Her initial reaction to us taught me that some people were going to be mad at us for publicly saying things they weren’t able to say, maybe even to themselves. But Eric, he was just a fuckhead.

So much of my life I’d been numb, checked out, hiding from my dad, hiding from sexist men in cafés, hiding from guys I’d rejected, hiding from my own feelings. That day reminded me that I wasn’t gonna let life happen to me anymore. I was gonna make things happen.

We barreled through our set like a steel tumbleweed in a wind tunnel.

While Olympia had taught me I could do anything, it wasn’t always friendly to bands with feminist agendas.

We’d started talking about canceling for safety reasons when we heard girls’ voices chanting something quietly. It got louder and louder, and eventually we realized the girls in the audience were singing the chorus of “Rebel Girl” to drown out the assholes who were fucking with them. I love imagining the moment the first girl had the idea to start singing and actually did it. These girls built a wall between themselves and the fuckheads with their voices. We ran down the stairs. Tobi jumped behind the drums and began playing the opening beat of “Rebel Girl” in time with their voices. Billy, Kathi, and I joined in too.

I still told him I forgave him, though, and said something like, “I know you’re a good person and I can’t imagine how hard it is for you to live with what you did.” When he started to cry, I reached out to hug him, but a voice inside me screamed, DO NOT HUG YOUR RAPIST! I stood up and said, “I will always love you, Darren, but I can’t be the one to work through this with you. I never want to see or hear from you again.” I wasn’t going to let him step on the gas pedal of my

I was in the kind of love that starts driving the car of your body

I looked up “paradoxical breathing” on the internet and the word “trauma” came up over and over. It’s like I was unconsciously denying myself air and living in a forever-clenched situation. As I began to breathe correctly, I had fewer problems with my voice, and I also became less high-strung and stressed out. I stopped holding everything in and learned to work with my body instead of against it. It was like being reborn.

DECEPTACON” WAS A THROWAWAY SONG I WROTE IN A HALF HOUR. I wrote it when I was pissed off at a singer who made tons of money off “the look of rebellion” while her songs remained super status quo. Later, when I stopped being a jealous asshole, it became a snotty song about all the dudes I hated.

Maybe the struggle for language was the moment we were trapped in. Why were we always supposed to answer ignorant questions with thoughtful, articulate answers? Why were we always explaining ourselves? Maybe that was what third-wave girls were about: speaking back to power with sounds that didn’t always make sense.

Tobi mentioned in an interview after we broke up that I always listened to the kick drum and had a singing style based around it. She was right. It was like her kick was the sound a jump rope makes when it hits the ground and my voice would leap to just miss it.

When I was younger, I believed a lot of the mean shit men said to me, even as I visibly fought against it. On some level, I felt worthless, like I was a dirty napkin or just a body to be fucked. For years and years, I didn’t have the self-esteem to say, “I’m worth it and my art’s worth it too.” Sometimes I wondered how many more records I would’ve put out if I wasn’t so busy dealing with male violence. And then I’d wonder, If not for male violence, would I have ever written anything at all?

Every time I had a good day writing, or successfully kept up a decent health routine, or made a cool video for Le Tigre’s upcoming show, I celebrated by rolling a joint or drinking beer or smoking a few cigarettes—all things that would make me feel like shit the next day

while I still had stalkers and people acting like dicks to me on the internet, I wasn’t internalizing the hatred in the way I used to or coming home from tour full of unresolved crisis. I didn’t want to face the things that kept me moving like a shark and stopped me from enjoying the magical moments life was handing me.

Could I really prevent bad things from happening by making bad things happen? No. Bad shit is going to happen whether I’m smiling and waving while hanging off the side of a moving train or cowering in a boxcar. I cannot stop bad things from happening now, and I couldn’t have stopped bad things from happening then. I realized that no matter how many girls I had said “It wasn’t your fault” to, I’d never really internalized that message myself.