Bikini Kill Burns Bright at Marathon Music Works

Even though music exists in the moment you’re hearing it, it’s a form of art that lends itself to finding new life again and again. Olympia, Wash.’s Bikini Kill didn’t get swept into the mainstream of American culture before they ended their original run in 1997, but they’ve been far more influential than a lot of bands who took up a lot more airtime and moved a lot more units.

One reason the group has remained influential is the sound: Singer Kathleen Hanna’s ferocious, melodic screams, erstwhile guitarist Billy Karren’s street-walkin’-cheetah riffs and the hand-in-glove rhythm section of bassist Kathi Wilcox and drummer Tobi Vail crystallized into a format that’s been a foundation for tons of young rockers. The other half of the recipe is their unapologetic revolutionary feminism, reflected in their major role in the riot grrrl feminist punk movement. Hanna candidly notes that riot grrrl’s original incarnation wasn’t perfect and could have been far more intersectional. But their unapologetic dedication to calling out sexism within punk music and in our culture generally — in a way that you have to try pretty hard to ignore — never really stopped generating aftershocks. And just when the world needed them most, Bikini Kill got back together. Their reunion tour, launched in 2019, finally brought them to Marathon Music Works on Thursday.

While the prospect of seeing Bikini Kill was exciting to me, I have to say that the openers were just as much of a draw. Hurry Up is composed of Maggie Vail from Pacific Northwest punk champs Bangs, plus Kathy Foster and Westin Glass who make up two-thirds of The Thermals — a band that has clocked a lot of time on my turntable during the past 15 years. But while those two defunct groups relied on earworm riffs and clever lyrics, Hurry Up is much bleaker and more angular. Their lo-fi sound is an homage to The Wipers that captures the primal urgency of a Crass Records 7-inch. Playing in drag, the trio lived up to their name by cramming their set into less than 40 minutes.

Bikini Kill’s show was announced just before the pandemic and rescheduled a couple of times thanks to COVID, giving fans old and young three years for the anticipation to build up. The last time the band played Nashville was in 1994, in the early days of Lucy’s Record Shop as a youth culture center — a show immortalized in Stacy Goldate’s documentary Lucy Barks! For reference, the stage at Marathon is larger than the entirety of Lucy’s. Looking around, I noticed a large number of people who brought their kids, elementary- and middle-school-aged. Some of them were the children of folks I’ve known for more than 20 years. I thought about the world these youngsters live in, just days after three 9-year-olds (as well as three adults) lost their lives in the Covenant School shooting. I thought about how they live in a state where the legi slature seems hell-bent on continuing to strip away their human rights. Yet here they were, with hope and energy and excitement bubbling out of them from being at what was likely their first punk show.

Billy Karren decided to abstain from the reunion, and Hanna’s The Julie Ruin bandmate Sara Landeau is filling in on this tour. If the group has recorded any new music, they haven’t released it yet, and the set list brimmed with classics like the leftist chant “Reject All American” and the feminist rage anthem “Suck My Left One.” The players occasionally switched instruments, with Vail or Wilcox taking the mic from time to time.

Some things have changed so disgustingly little since 1994, and the band members’ firsthand accounts of misogyny and the crowd’s chants of “Girls to the front!” feel just as timely now as they did decades ago. Hanna & Co. celebrated the indictment of Donald Trump that was announced just a few hours before the show. With each song, I watched a trio of my friends’ elementary-aged kids hold hands and run in a clockwise loop, bouncing off the adults around them — like a hybrid of a circle pit and a game of ring-around-the-rosie. Behind the children were hundreds of fans screaming and bouncing, thrilled to finally see Bikini Kill in the flesh. The show wrapped with the riot grrrl theme song “Rebel Girl,” spawning a sing-along with Gen X punks and their young’uns together.

In a world where marginalized people have an increasing amount of things to fear, artists like Bikini Kill offer both an outlet for rage and a space of comfort for the folks who need it most. The foursome’s special brew is making something smart, vulnerable, confident and liberating all at once. As long as there’s a world in need of a revolution, it’s good to know Bikini Kill is here to provide a score for the uprising.