I talked to their oft-out spoken vocalist, Kathleen Hanna (I now wonder how accurate that statement is), in her apartment in Olympia, Washington last week. Most press I've read on the band has her coloured as a violent, hard-to-deal-with fireball liable to turn irrational and obnoxious at the drop of hat. The Kathleen I talked to couldn't have been further removed! Contrary to popular perception, I found her to be a sensitive, open, honest and very real human being who, more than anything, reminded me why I got into this job in the first place. Like the band say Don't believe everything you see or hear "cuz in most cases it probably isn't too accurate." They got that right. I make no contrary claims for my own interview - all I can tell you is, I stuck as closely as I could to what Kathleen actually had to say. Still think about whatever you read. I'll apologise in advance for any mis-spellings of some people or bands she may have talked about. I tried. Anyway, what started as something for public consumption turned into something very personal. By the end it was more like a casual D&M between new friends (I'm not intending to be overly familiar, just honest). Writing some of this feels like a betrayal of trust - but we both knew what the call was for and she wanted to let you all know that she was a real person, just like all of us - and hopefully encourage you to come to the show. So here goes. We'll take it from me actually calling the number they gave me. This one's for you Kathleen, hope you like it…

I'm looking for Kathleen?
"This is her [laughs]. I'm alright. Are you from Rip It Up?"
Sure am.
" RIP IT UP!!! [sings loudly to the tune of Kiss' Lick It Up] Are you guys named after that song?"
No! Are you sure you don't mean the Ace Frehley (Kiss' lead guitarist) song Rip It Out? We're not named after that either but…
"No, the one I'm thinking of is from when they took the make up off. Oh it was Lick It Up! But I think Ace Frehley was the most talented of all four."

Hey! This girl's good! I think I like her already. She's friendly, warm and funny. To be honest, even though I love the records, I had no idea how she'd be to talk to. This is a pleasant surprise.

Are you still making the film In Search Of Margot Go?
"No. I'm no longer starring in that film [laughs]. I just didn't have the kind of time they needed 'cos of the band. We wanted to go to Australia more!"

Did you enjoy it last time you were here (for Summersault in '96)?
"Yah! I had a great time. Where are you based?"
Adelaide.
"Adelaide!!!" She shouts enthusiastically. "I was gonna say that's my favourite place. I went skateboarding there. I loved it. I went skateboarding in the [the word's hard to make out but sounds like 'movernight'] in Adelaide and met one of my very best friends and it was awesome."
You know, my old band, Flood, played with Sleater Kinney (a Kill Rock Stars band) when they toured here? We didn't even know they were coming. They had no equipment and just appeared on a bill with us so we lent them some of our equipment…
"[laughs] Are we playing with you anywhere?"
No… I wish! Apart from the obvious, anyone who's a big Jam fan is OK in my book [Kathleen is wearing a Jam t-shirt on the inside cover of Reject All American].
"You love 'em huh? Me too."

How's this year been for the band?
"Ohhh… it's been good. We've been practising a lot. I have fun playing bass and singing so I hope they are! I think they are."
Has anything we should know about happened to you since last time you were here?
"We changed from Coke™ To Pepsi™ [I laugh]. No, nothing really exciting professionally. We've been having fun and I think that's the most important thing."
Has Reject All American been selling well?
"I think so. I mean, I don't have to have a job right now so I think that means yes! [Laughing] I also don't have a Ferrari sitting outside or anything but yeah. I still can't believe more than 10 people have heard what we do. I don't know the numbers though. I've never asked. I don't care that much."
I ask 'cos for a while there, there was an upsurge in popularity for tame-ish punk stuff, like The Offspring and Greenday. It worried me a little but the upshot of it seemed to be more people where getting into the good stuff too. I was just wondering whether you've noticed any difference?
"That's how I got into punk rock. I saw the punk rock Quincy episode. Did you get that? He's a coroner - who also fights crime - Jack Klugman from The Odd Couple. Anyhow, there was a punk rock episode and I thought 'Ooh they look cool.' I'm sure lots of kids had that same thing with Green Day. 'Ooh, they have weird hair!' Then they maybe got a catalogue from Lookout and maybe checked out some of the other bands on Lookout. Maybe they went to a show and saw Peechees opening for a Lookout band. Peechees are one of my favourite bands and they're on Kill Rock Stars too. Do you know what I mean? One thing leads to another and they actually are part of a scene that's more about generating our own information instead of feeding the capitalist system.
"I think maybe Green Day is a good doorway. Sleater Kinney is too. You mentioned them earlier and they're doing a lot of press lately and I just think it's great. I can go to a magazine store and see the pictures of them and read the articles without buying it - and they know that [laughs]! So I don't have to support Rolling Stone™ to read stuff about them. I can just read it and leave it there and they're giving people, especially women, all over the world information they may be interested in. They have means to pay for advertising - so more power to 'em!"
I'm glad it happens. People whinge a lot about all this stuff but it's just elitism - I'm talking about the Green Day thing here, not Rolling Stone™! We all worked our way up to the music we like. I mean the first band I loved was Adam and The Ants, then I discovered Motörhead.
"Minor Threat that's a big jump. Oh Motörhead! That's even weirder! Awww that's sweet."
Maybe they'll go to one of these big outdoor festivals and get introduced to some good stuff like yourselves…
"Right! In the parking lot [laughs loudly]!"
Summersault would have been a classic example.
"Yeah, we got lots of good mail from that."
Good. You know we have a really cool public radio station that has been supporting you a lot too? They're called 3D.
"Awesome [sounds genuinely touched]."

Onto Reject All American. The song RIP (Rest In Pissed-off-ed ness) is dedicated to a friend of yours, Gene Barnes, that passed away. Could you tell me something about him?
"Oh I'd love to. I love talking about Gene. He was a radical fairy. He was sorta like a hippy who was into the Earth and stuff like that. He would go out in the woods with a bunch of other guys (called the Radical Fairies) and do these rituals of putting lots of mud on each other and having hot sex [laughs]. That was part of Gene's trip. I'm probably describing it wrong but… he was also a scholar and really amazing person. He was one of the first people to support my writing and take me seriously as a writer - 'cos I write as well.
He was just really funny, smart, had a really good sense of style and smoked really good pot [laughs]. He was an all round cool guy. He did a fanzine called Hippy Dick. Did you get that name? [Says it slowly, I think for her own amusement as much as mine] Hippy Dick [laughs]. He was a pro-porn faggot and he wanted to have pornography that touched him and turned him on. He liked some older '70s stuff but the stuff that he saw of the modern stuff, where the guys all look like Calvin Klein™ models didn't do it for him. He was into hairy men so he made a fanzine with pornography and stories and stuff like that about hairy men getting it on in the woods [laughs].
"It was amazing and he distributed it through prisons and to all sorts of men all over the world and did an amazing job with it - right up until a few days before he was… gone. [Goes quiet] He was still doing that…
"I wanted to write a song for him because I knew he was the kind of person who… He also was a film maker and made a film called Mercury Rising about what happens to all the gay men dying of AIDS. When they die they're really not dying they're going up to Mercury and this really foxy Mercury guy comes down and takes them. It was a way to make things more interesting and glamorous. He just was so glamorous I knew he'd want me to write a song so everyone knew who he was when he was here. So I did it 'cos I knew he'd love it!
"It was also a way to heal myself because he died right in the week when I was finishing the lyrics for the album. So I really didn't have a choice 'cos he was all I was thinking of. Sorry I just went on and on…"
Don't be. When it comes to loss, it's really important to take as much of their spirit as you can and tell everyone about them. When they've really touched you, they deserve a certain amount of immortality. That way it's positive and you also get to talk about your friend a lot… Do you perform it live?
"We did for a few months but we've stopped. I don't know if we're gonna do it in Australia. Probably not, 'cos it puts me through a thing I can't go through every night. I talk to him when I'm alone now, y'know what I mean? It's really emotional and I know it's hard for the rest of my band to know it upsets me - an' they wanna protect me from it."

Speaking of the rest of your band… I'm speaking to you now so I'm really only getting to know about a quarter of your unit. Could you tell me something about each of them to give me an idea of what they're like as well?
"They're doing the same thing I'm doing at their apartments. [She laughs in an almost embarrassed way] Oh my Gawd, I don't think I can do that. I could never do that. I could never define them, I'd just be too scared, I wouldn't wanna. We all change all the time so I couldn't put a sentence on any of them. I could maybe draw a picture [laughs]. I don't think I could do it with language, it's one of the things I can't do with language.

"I could say though that Tobi [Vail, drums and vocals] is a really, really amazing writer and that she's done some fanzines called Jigsaw and that she's written a lot of things that've changed the way I've written an' the way I've thought about writing in general. Also that the three of them are in another band Frumpies that've got a single coming out soon. They're a really really good band and people should check 'em out."
That's a good answer.
"I can't describe them! I could go on and on about them to you for hours and I'd be too embarrassed. Then they'd read it and I'd probably say really nice things and that would be even more embarrassing."
Speaking of the writing, Jigsaw Youth was your essay wasn't it?
"Yeah, but it's named after Tobi's fanzine."
Well, that's one of the only things I've ever read that captured the true duality and natural hypocrisy of real life and real personalities. It actually changed me as a person - no shit - and I still carry around some of that philosophy now. I've only been a fan for a relatively short time (ie, not years and years) but you made an immediate impact. I knew instantly you were an important band - I don't say this to put you on a pedestal 'cos that's a shitty thing to do to someone. You deserve better than that. You deserve to be treated as a human being. I thought I was a pretty good writer and I have read plenty of good books, but I never really heard the everyday contradiction captured so well.
"Thank you! That's a compliment coming from another writer."
Will there be anything more? Will you bring anything out with you on tour?
"Maybe I will now you're flattering me enough [laughs]! I might make the leap and carry my fanzine with me on the plane.
About a year ago I finished a fanzine, called April Fool's Day, about addiction and politics. Do you have it?"
Nope.
"Well I might bring those, 'cos that's the most recent thing I have. I'm still writing and occasionally I submit things to fanzines and stuff like that. I just submitted an essay about food and feminism to a cookbook [laughs]. I'm still writing, I just haven't been showing it to anyone - except for my fanzine. I think my fanzine's really good. I have a bunch of copies so maybe I'll bring some out."

Were you asked to contribute to the book Rock She Wrote?
"Uh uh no. That's Evelyn McDonnell's book? Yeah she's a good friend of mine. She asked us to do it but we were really too busy."
Are you still doing your spoken word thing?
"Yeah, I just did a couple of pieces last week. Every so often I do it. It's just hard 'cos I do so much stuff. I actually gave a lecture in New York a couple of months ago. I spoke at a music conference for 20 minutes or something. I talked about image and performance and capitalism. It went really well. That's my new gig. I'm really into lecturing right now. I think it's a really good thing to come to after doing spoken word, y'know, trying to convey this information."
Does everyone contribute to the lyrics?
"Oh yeah. Especially on Reject… It used to be, I wrote all the lyrics I sing, Tobi wrote all the lyrics she sings and Kathi [Wilcox, bass and vox] wrote everything she sang. When Billy [Karren, the sole boy, on guitar] sang a song he'd write all of his lyrics too. On this record, 'cos we had a bunch of the music done, a lot of stuff happened and I didn't finish all the lyrics by the time the album was ready.
"Me and Tobi worked on the introduction song, which is called Statement Of Vindication, but we always call it Introduction - 'cos it's exactly the same as the Finale song except for the words. It's at the beginning and the end [laughs] and it's the same song - we thought that was cool. So we all wrote the introduction and conclusion song together and Reject… too.
"That was really fun. It was a really cool process, sitting there and going 'How can we explain what we're trying to say in a better way? No no no that doesn't sound right.' That's a whole new working process we haven't tried in the past. So I was really happy with it, an' I LOVE that song. I like how it came out."
The new record sounds really good. At first I thought it was a bit slower…
"Yeah. Oh yeah."
After a while that passes. It seems just as fast and aggressive only dipping into different, sweeter places you hadn't been before. You said you've been writing new stuff? What's that like?
"I've got no idea how long you'd be waiting in terms of an album. We just write when we feel like it - but the new songs are good. We're planning on recording a single when we come back and then we might release a compilation with all the singles on it. I only have record player but I know some people only have a CD players so they haven't been able to hear any of our singles. We'd like to put it out so they could at least hear 'em."
Yeah. I think they'd like that. If they're anything like me, they're probably completists.
"I'm like that about the Peechees and Nick Cave."
Yeah. Music should be important to people. When it is, it can fill you ideas and energy and inspire you to do something yourself. I wonder whether it's becoming the new literature? I don't know whether people are reading as much as they used to.
"They should be. I think literature and music can so bounce off each other. There's nothing like reading a Kathy Acker book to make me wanna write lyrics. She just totally, like, inspires me. Karen Finley too, you know how funny she is, or Belle Hookes and her ability to communicate so effectively. She's a total teacher in terms of strategies for writing and communicating with an audience - for me. She's largely responsible for the Jigsaw Youth article, 'cos I was reading her every night every night around that time going 'She is able to say really complex things in a way that's really understandable to me'.
"That, to me, is the goal as a writer. I love it when I can use language in a texturing kinda way. I'm not saying it right but, use language artistically, in terms of what sounds are like and what the words look like on a page. There's also the thing of: giving people analyses they can use in their own lives that can help them survive their oppressive situations and give them the gumption to fight back. (If you can do that) Then you've done a remarkable job as a writer. That's what I try to do."
If I use you as an example, let's say I hear one of your songs and it makes sense of something I thought was senseless, as I have…
"Thanks!"
Then let's say I write something because of it (as I have) in this very magazine or in a letter, then someone writes back to me saying 'Thanks so much for what you wrote.' I'm thinking 'Someone else pumped me so full of ideas that I couldn't help myself!' They feel inspired. Hopefully they write or do something too then we've all been joined in some way - even if it's only temporarily. That gives me confidence about the future of communication. Especially considering how easy it is to mis-communicate, purposefully or not. I was very frightened of mis-communication as a kid.
I'm so sorry for going on! Did I make any sense? I bet I didn't.
"Oh no! It was beautiful. I really liked they way you described hearing something or seeing something and writing to friend and having them say something. I have been a witness to that phenomenon and that's exactly the thing. I mean, what a challenge to capitalism! It is!!! Because you're not just making something for someone to consume, you're making something that can help them to create something themselves. You create a chain reaction. That means things are much more recyclable - is that cheesy and politically correct? I don't know what you'd call it but it goes somewhere and it's not just like they eat it and shit it out. It becomes something else."
I'm a balance person myself. If I see too much 'clever-ness' I just wanna be dumb - and vice versa. If people are too serious, all I wanna be is silly. I see a lot of vicious music without any simultaneous tenderness. I hear that a lot with you.
Tony Randall's (from Reject All American) playing in the background at the moment! You do it in this very song: '…Spit out another picture of a girl with a gun to bore me… I see a punk club, he sees a strip bar. Somethings can't be photographed.' You don't even say what can't be photographed because it's universal and you don't need to. I love it when lyrics don't insult the listeners' intelligence. Ahhh! I'm getting lost now!
"[Laughs] I know what you mean! Sonic Youth do that a lot. They don't hand hold you through the song. That's something I kinda learned from them, is that I started thinking a lot more about audience inter-activeness an' stuff.
"I saw a lot of bands that were political bands beside my own (which is also termed a political band). Basically, if you're in a band and you profess to having politics - which everyone has. You can have the status of the status quo but you're not called political unless you have politics that run contrary to the status quo, and you want world wide oppression ended. Once you do that you're termed a political band and then all these weird stereotypes start appearing like: every song needs to have a specific political message, you need to have one message, it has to be very concrete and didactic, and it has to fit - you know? You get all these slogans and you have to stick by the exact same ideas you started out with seven years ago! All these kind of things!
"Anyway, I saw all these political bands and I didn't like the way they were using lyrics because there was no poetry in it or something. Sometimes I do just say something like in Bloody Ice Cream [also from Reject…: 'The Sylvia Plath story is told to girls who write/ They want us to think that to be a girl poet means you have to die/ Who is it that told me all girls who write must suicide?/ I've another good one for you, we are turning cursive letters into knives.']. It's totally concrete and just says this one thing - for those people who need that [laughs]. I wanted to give them something too, 'cos there are some people who need that.
"Other than that, I also don't want to insult the intelligence of people. I feel like that's what advertising and TV are always doing.
"There's a lot of strategy involved in being an artist or a musician. It's so embarrassing to call yourself an artist. It's not a magic thing. It's not down from Heaven or some other fucked up place, like someone imbibed us with this magic ability to make music and have ideas. I'm not one who believes in divine inspiration. I do have dreams - and I dream lyrics. I'll wake up and write them down. Sometimes they fit and sometimes they don't but I'll use them. I do have moments of inspiration and I use them but I also know music has a certain amount of math and strategy to it. You say: 'I wanna do this thing, how can I do it? How can I be effective?' Anyone can do that. That's what the major label and people in the big rock groups and stuff don't want you to know. You can totally do it yourself. Create your own music if you have some pots and pans."
Remember that illusion in the '80s that you had to be a virtuoso to even pick up a guitar? That annoyed the hell out of me.
"I totally grew up with that. What a lie. All you need is the fire…"

My tape ran out there, but I can tell you she was gracious to the last and the conversation went on for quite a bit longer. She thanked me for the interview telling me it was a lot of fun. I asked a bit about why she didn't do interviews normally and she told me she felt more like that in the past. She also said that she's been really hurt by things people have written about her and she can be a very sensitive person. Then she told me my questions really entertained her. I must admit, somewhere along the line there, I stopped noticing it was an interview. How unprofessional of me…

Just as we said our goodbyes she said 'It's cool. I'm gonna go to Adelaide and I already have a friend there! You gotta come up and say hello. I'm the one with the brown hair. I'm the only one with brown hair! Mine's the longest. Promise me you'll say hello. Promise!' Of course I did. I consider her a friend too - even if that's a temporary thing. How could I not?

So much for the 'hard-to-interview' image they tell you about. She was absolutely lovely, and one of my favourite interviewees thus far. She's a rare individual, one we're lucky to have looking out for us all. When she speaks she may talk/ sing about what's important to her, but her voice is one of the closest I've heard to the one inside us all. Thanks for caring enough to take a stand. It IS appreciated.

Go see Bikini Kill when they come here. Please treat them with respect (no 'Show us yer tits!' this time thanks lads - you're the one who'll be sorry. Trust me). They're warm, thinking human beings who'll surprise the hell out of you given half the chance.

Bikini Kill play Adelaide Uni this Fri April 25 with Fur and Helga. It's gonna be big.