Kathleen Hanna’s ‘Rebel Girl’ Book: Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, and Riot Grrrl

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The Bikini Kill rocker’s searing new memoir, “Rebel Girl,” tells intimate stories of trauma, sexism, fame, and everything in between.

, arrives on Tuesday and finds Hanna writing both searingly about men who abused her, and humorously about everything from clueless record execs to her friend. Along the way, she traces her life from her difficult childhood growing up with a sadistic and alcoholic father, to her ’90s notoriety as the front woman of Bikini Kill, the punk outfit that spearheaded the third-wave feminist movement known as Riot grrrl.

Hanna got pregnant when she was in high school, but the ex who’d impregnated her, Trent, refused to help her pay for an abortion. Not wanting her mom to find out about her pregnancy, Hanna got a plane ticket to Virginia, where her sister lived, and got a job at McDonalds to make the money she’d need for the procedure.

Kathleen Hanna lies on her back on stage as she performs in Bikini Kill at the Las Palmas Theatre in Hollywood on November 18, 1994 in Los Angeles.She writes humorously about getting a job at a strip club to pay for school. Cobain also stood up for Hanna against a nasty ex-boyfriend named Luke, who would frequently show up at her apartment unannounced after they broke up, seemingly to intimidate her.

“I responded with a HARD NO, because I wanted our band to be judged by the misogynist ‘meritocracy’ of the time, not through the lens of association with an all-male band,” Hanna writes. “Tobi, Kathi, and I talked about it and decided to decline.”People in the punk scene eventually found out about the strip club where Hanna worked as a dancer, and she recalls one embarrassing night when “a well-known scenester” named Shelby and her boyfriend showed up to the club.

“When Kenny set them up, he told the labels that we had one request: the band would like to review the company’s sexual harassment policy,” Hanna writes, adding that they met with Lenny Waronker at Capitol Records, Jimmy Iovine at Interscope, and Mo Ostin at Warner Bros., and “not one of them had a sexual harassment policy ready for us when we arrived.”

But she eventually decided to pay Cobain a visit in Seattle on a weekend when she knew Love wouldn’t be there. “I needed a plan in case I did, so Kim and I came up with the sentence ‘I would be happy to debate you at the college of your choice.’ I figured if she yelled at me, I would just repeat it like a force field,” Hanna writes, adding that she’d never met Love until that point, but the Hole frontwoman had “gone to great lengths to insult me in interviews.”

Music Beastie Boys Punk Rock Book Rock Music Nirvana Kurt Cobain Celebrities Courtney Love

 

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