The Punk Singer

            The documentary about Kathleen Hannah was both inspiration and filled with exciting chaos. I personally found this really interesting to watch, especially to learn about the feminist movement that they were trying to start. I think that Kathleen Hannah was always a feminist deep down, especially in college when she made a fashion show about feminism and domestic violence based on her friend who was attacked by a man. She was a very powerful women who stood up and talked about a lot of people tried to sweep under the rug and avoid. She didn’t care what anybody thought about her or what she believed in.

            When she first formed Bikini Kill in the early 1990’s,  it was just her and a couple of friends that performed songs to empower women and get their message out, but soon became really know and inspired women to basically not give a crap about men and just express what they felt like saying. My favorite part of Kathleen’s performance would have to be the way she would jump around, scream till veins popped out her neck because it was both entertaining, and informing of how serious she was about her lyrics.

             I remember in the documentary how she would wear certain clothes with messages on them, for example, when she wore a t-shirt dress with a muscular man wearing only speedos to basically show that this guy is wearing these tiny speedos, does that mean he’s asking for it? Also when she was in the band “Le Tigre”, Kathleen and JD Samson wore suits that stated “stop Bush”, which I think happened around the time of Bush deploying soldiers to Afghanistan, and she was really anti-war so she decided to protest.

            Even though when Kathleen Hannah sung her songs I couldn’t really understand her because of the screaming, but when I read the lyrics, they were really powerful because of the way she expressed it was in a very angry manner which made her stand out more. In the song “White boy” she’s talking about domestic violence and opens it up by quoting a guy from the crowd saying how girls ask for it by the way they act and even though they say it’s not true, it is. A quote that stood out to me in the song was “I'm so sorry if I'm alienating some of you
your whole fucking culture alienates me” because she’s not really sorry, she just wants men to see how women feel in these kind of situations.

                        The ending of the documentary really shocked me as to why she stopped singing, because I thought it was just something with her vocal chords or she got old and tired. Out of all of the diseases in the world, I never would have thought it was Lyme disease, and I can only imagine how much pain she was in, considering they caught it at a time where it was really hard to cure. I could see how uncomfortable and sad she was because she could do what she did most, which was sing, but at the same time I have a lot of respect for her to go through so much ,and still come back to make another album (The Julie Ruin).  This album was sort of like Kathleen’s comeback to shoe that she hasn’t stopped her movement and she will continue to spread the word of feminism.