Real Life Rock Top 10: June 21, 2024
How the punk singer found her calling in a Christmas carol, the goth Robert Johnson, the face of ‘Olympia,' and advertising as hate speech
1. Kathleen Hanna, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk (HarperCollins). This book by the singer for the 1990s Olympia, Washington, Revolution-Girl-Style-Now band Bikini Kill—and later the Julie Ruin and Le Tigre—is a marvel. It’s made up of dozens of two or even three-page chapters that flash by like punk songs where out of the hail of noise and fast singing you catch only half a line that sticks in your head like half of a slogan you have to finish yourself—except this is a book, so you can stop and look at the words and fold them back into the whole story being told, as in the arc between Hanna’s discovery of her own voice and her discovery of her own calling.