Bikini Kill Has News For You

by Diana Moskovitz

The riot grrrl legends Bikini Kill were never here to tell you that everything will be fine or it will all work out or to stop your worrying. Bikini Kill is here to tell you that the world is unfair, quite possibly fucked, and you should be pissed off about it. An explicitly feminist ’90s-era punk rock/zine movement, riot grrrl combined politics, third-wave feminism, punk, and boiling rage into an irresistible countercultural force that (like many another antifascist punk outfit of the time) turned out to have been right all along.

This is a band that came out swinging against authoritarianism and against the patriarchy from the start, putting out the song “George Bush Is a Pig” while George H.W. Bush was still president. Which might not sound radical now, but was deeply subversive in the early ’90s—a time when a TV storyline in which a teenage girl lost her virginity and happened to like it was enough to create controversy and panic. I’d argue it’s still radical to tell women who have been gaslit their entire lives that they are, in fact, getting a bum deal.