Bikini Kill, Then and Now: A Front-Row View of a Punk Revolution

When Bikini Kill took the stage at a packed Palladium in Hollywood on April 25, the band reclaimed a podium it had left 22 years earlier. For much of the audience, the show was a first chance to see the band they had discovered through books, or movies, or maybe even their mom’s record collection. For others, including myself, it was a jolt back to a defining moment in our lives. Time accordioned, and I realized: Bikini Kill is as vital as I remembered.

I was a 28-year-old punk fan and journalist who had pretty much given up on the pit when I walked into 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, Calif., on a Saturday night in 1992 — or so I thought. In a decade-plus of attending shows, I’d been mashed in one too many mosh pits and resigned myself to straining to see bands from the safe confines of the back of the room.

Then I saw my first Bikini Kill show.

924 Gilman Street is a collectively run, all-ages, nonprofit performance space in Berkeley that has been the home of East Bay punk since the mid-80s. In 1992, admission was probably five or six dollars. Charging more would have been capitalistic. For a handful of green, we got to see three great bands: Bikini Kill, Tribe 8 and Pansy Division.

[Listen to a playlist of 25 essential riot grrrl songs.]

Bikini Kill was a four-piece that split its time between Washington, D.C., and Olympia, Wash., the towns that had been identified as the twin cities of what an LA Weekly cover story called “Revolution Girl-Style Now.” That title was a lyric from a Bikini Kill song — the first line of the first song on the self-titled debut EP the band released the day before the Gilman show. Having been identified as the flagship act of the riot grrrl movement, Bikini Kill had a lot of expectations riding on its young shoulders on Oct. 10, 1992.

Nonetheless, the group was just the most famous of an upsurge of bands reclaiming punk from straight white men. The queercore band Pansy Division made the kind of pop-punk that would in a few years turn Gilman into the epicenter of American D.I.Y. via Rancid and Green Day, but Pansy Division played it funny and pointed. The five women of Tribe 8 also played for laughs, but its music was unadulterated thrash. Like almost every male punk singer before her, Lynn Breedlove took off her shirt as soon as the scene got heated — which was pretty soon.