Happy 25th Anniversary to Le Tigre’s eponymous debut album Le Tigre, originally released October 26, 1999.
It’s the late ’90s, it’s four in the morning, and I’m doing the running man in my friend Tony’s living room off campus. I might even be wearing one of those ’70s headbands, à la Richie Tenenbaum. I can’t remember if it’s “Deceptacon” or the rapid-fire “The The Empty” that’s blaring, but nonetheless it’s a sweaty college dance party, and Le Tigre has become the fitting soundtrack of a life that includes Feminist Film Theory, guest lectures by Gloria Steinem and The Guerrilla Girls, and my own feminist band inspired by Riot Grrrl. Up until now, it’s possible that the whole Riot Grrrl thing has seemed a bit quaint and dated—like clinging too tightly to high school. But suddenly it’s 1999, it’s all relevant again, and the revolution is infinitely more danceable.
The raucous feminist dance party that is Le Tigre never would have happened, however, if it hadn’t been for the more private, interior-facing sensibilities of Julie Ruin, a pseudonymous project Kathleen Hanna had undertaken a couple years prior in 1997. Burned out on Bikini Kill’s band dynamics, the infighting in Riot Grrrl, the claustrophobic scene in Olympia, and being dragged through the mud by the media, Hanna took to her bedroom and decided to create music that wouldn’t force her to interact with anyone.
“That record was made as Bikini Kill was breaking up, a guy who worked across the street from my apartment building was stalking me, and I was being treated, in my own community, like a historical oddity. The solo record helped me remember that I was just a fucking person who liked being creative,” Hanna told Everett True in 2014.
Hanna had begun dating the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz, a.k.a. Ad-Rock, long-distance at some point in the middle of her whole world falling apart, and the two had stumbled upon a serendipitous piece of musical equipment on a shopping trip one day. “I went to visit Kathleen and we went to some music shop and they had a Drumatix drum machine,” Horovitz recalls. “Kathleen bought it for 40 bucks, then she recorded the whole Julie Ruin record. For me, the Julie Ruin record is what really changed Kathleen. She was like, ‘Now I’m a musician, fuck it.’”
“For Kathleen’s music to have grown in a direction towards electronic music completely makes sense to me,” mused journalist Ann Powers in The Punk Singer, the documentary about Hanna’s career. “When you’ve disconnected from your community or lost your community, it’s amazing if you can seize the means of technology yourself.”
In addition to that fortuitous drum machine, another element that would have a profound effect on Hanna’s transformation from punk singer to electronic musician was a fanzine called Snarla In Love. It had been handed to her by a young woman named Johanna Fateman after a Bikini Kill show at the X-Ray Café in Portland in 1993. Hanna absentmindedly stuck it in her bag, found it a few days later, and knew after she’d read it cover to cover that she wanted to be best friends with its author. Snarla was abstract, hilarious in a quirky way, and it included an interview with the writer’s insomnia rather than the customary musician Q&A.
Around this time, Bikini Kill had begun experiencing its first signs of dysfunction and Hanna couldn’t stand being in Olympia for one more second (she was being called a sellout for recording a single with Joan Jett not long after Bikini Kill’s debut Pussy Whipped). So she decided to drive to Portland to find the woman who had penned Snarla In Love. She found her working at a weird little wig shop downtown. They got to chatting, and Hanna spontaneously told her she was looking for a room to rent in Portland. Fateman said a spot would be opening up at her place, a women-only punk house called The Curse, in a couple months. Hanna jotted down her number, and Fateman told her to stuff a wig in her purse and casually walk out. They’d end up living together for a year, becoming incredibly close in the process.
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But then in 1994, Hanna’s long-time friend Kurt Cobain died. After his death, she moved back to Olympia and began practicing in earnest again with Bikini Kill. She was particularly worried about Bikini Kill’s drummer Tobi Vail, who had dated Cobain prior to his Nevermind (1991) fame, and in that moment of tragedy it felt natural to make another go at closeness with her bandmates. No matter how that ended up panning out, one major upside of reuniting with Bikini Kill would arrive a couple years later in 1996, when the band played Australia’s Summersault Festival and Hanna met Horovitz who was there with the Beastie Boys.
Horovitz was still married, but his marriage was on the rocks, and Hanna was smitten. After the tour, she couldn’t stop thinking about him, even going so far as to buy a Beastie Boys poster that she kept tucked away in her closet so she could take it out from time to time and gaze at it. “And yeah, I kissed him all over his gorgeous pouty mouth,” she admits in Rebel Girl, her new memoir. “I hoped that someday I would get to kiss him on his actual lips.” (They’re married now, so it all worked out.)
Despite the good things happening in Hanna’s life, Riot Grrrl had been devolving into the oppression Olympics, no one in Bikini Kill wanted to experiment with the Drumatix and so Hanna became more and more engrossed in her Julie Ruin alter ego, and Olympia was becoming even more of a petty, gossipy nightmare. So Hanna threw in the towel. Bikini Kill—done. Riot Grrrl—over. Olympia—adios.
After a dismal afternoon spent crying in Fateman’s car as it characteristically poured outside in Portland, Hanna and Fateman decided they should move to New York. They were broke—they had approximately $400 between them—but by that time Hanna and Horovitz were official, and of course they could stay at his apartment. “You know, I was psyched about everything—psyched about riding the subway, going to the museums, being near Johanna, being with Adam,” Hanna recalls. “Everything was good again for me.”
It was in the middle of this energizing new chapter that Hanna started to think about how she might perform the Julie Ruin record live, and she asked Fateman for help. Soon, though, their collaboration morphed into its own thing entirely. “Kathleen had a bass and she really wanted to play drums. I had bought a sampler—I was interested in making sample-based electronic music,” Fateman recalls. “Our whole ethic was about making something that had politically radical content that you could dance to.”
The idea was to leave behind all the depressing shit of the past several years, and to celebrate the good things. They used equipment that was new to them—samplers, drum machines, turntables, and Farfisa organs. And they purposely took a rudimentary, cut-and-paste approach that used Snarla as somewhat of a blueprint. “With the way we were piecing it together and just our ideas about sampling and about how to use drum machines and stuff was that we wanted to maintain kind of a fanzine aesthetic,” Hanna explains. “We didn’t want to make something that seemed impenetrable or closed or like there’s no space in it.” Eventually, they recruited their artist friend Sadie Benning to also contribute odds and ends to the music.
However, the band they had begun calling Le Tigre wasn’t just about the music, but also about the show itself. A photography major in college, Hanna had been heavily steeped in the Olympia art scene, even opening her own feminist art gallery called Reko Muse. So Benning was also recruited to help create visuals and to translate the music into a multimedia extravaganza. (Not long after the release of Le Tigre’s debut album, Benning would leave to return to their art career, soon to be replaced by JD Samson.)
Later, when I moved to New York after college, I’d see Le Tigre open for the Pixies in 2004. I remember walking into the Hammerstein Ballroom and being completely mesmerized by the band’s colorful matching costumes, the whimsical images flashing behind them on an enormous screen, and their amazingly choreographed dance moves. Hanna, then in her mid-30s, was still a tsunami force, belting it out about the revolution at the top of her lungs. She was even known to do cartwheels—and the splits. No one in the audience was rationing their energy in anticipation of the Pixies either—the entire venue was a joyous, roiling dance party.
But sadly, even though Le Tigre were trailblazers—making electronic dance-punk in the ’90s before it even started to become a thing in early-2000s New York—they’re barely ever mentioned as part of that New York moment (often dubbed “indie sleaze”) as chronicled in Lizzy Goodman’s oral history Meet Me In The Bathroom and the documentary of the same name.
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“Part of the reason we weren’t considered a New York band is maybe that we didn’t have the veneer of coolness,” Hanna told The Los Angeles Times in 2022. “There’s all these books and films and whatever coming out about the New York sound, and we’re never mentioned. We’re always the mashed potatoes, and they’re the steak.”
In fact, even though Hanna respects LCD Soundsystem and is on good terms with its frontman James Murphy, she’s a little bit miffed about how Le Tigre is regarded in relation to that band. “James Murphy, one of the first big things he ever did was a remix of ‘Deceptacon.’ James stayed at our apartment and we spent time at his studio. We were breathing the same musical air. No one ever calls them Le Tigre for men, but we’re wannabe LCD Soundsystem feminists? That’s the placement it feels like we get.” She was even more candid with queer magazine Them the following year: “It’s not like we were born out of LCD Soundsystem; they were born out of us.”
Nevertheless, Le Tigre’s debut Le Tigre was New York’s frenetic energy and boundless excitement bottled and personified for me, and no doubt for countless other fans. It perfectly encapsulated the zeitgeist, before it even happened. There’s simply no way you could hear “My My Metrocard,” bounce around like a maniac to it, and not want to immediately move to New York City.
The album starts out with the diss-track banger “Deceptacon” where Hanna’s vocals are ragged and rageful, offset by infectious beats and zigzagging synths. It actually began with less than feminist intentions. “‘Deceptacon’ was a throwaway song I wrote in half hour,” explains Hanna. “I wrote it when I was pissed off at a singer who made tons of money off ‘the look of rebellion’ while her songs remained super status quo. Later, when I stopped being a jealous asshole, it became a snotty song about all the dudes I hated.” “You bought a new van the first year of your band,” she sings with a valley girl sneer about a guy who’s a total poser.
The next song, “Hot Topic,” was clearly written in the joyful, celebratory vein that was Le Tigre’s mission statement, embodying Hanna and Fateman’s ethos of focusing on the good stuff. It’s a feminist-fiesta roll call of the band’s friends and role models (there’s an explanation of every name check here), including writer Dorothy Allison, Tammy Rae Carland (Hanna’s best friend from college, and the founder of Le Tigre’s record label Mr. Lady), drag-art performer Vaginal Crème Davis, and tennis champ Billie Jean King. Stereogum even had an interesting take in relation to James Murphy: “Three years before ‘Losing My Edge,’ ‘Hot Topic’ shouts out friends and influences and heroes. And unlike James Murphy, Hanna and her friends aren’t being sardonic; they’re saluting fellow warriors.”
The grungy, stormy “What’s Your Take On Cassavetes” shifts the mood, and Le Tigre takes us deep into the debate of: Can you enjoy an artist’s work without approving of the artist himself? The song asks whether or not movie director John Cassavetes is a misogynist or a genius, an alcoholic or a messiah, ultimately allowing listeners to form their own conclusions. It’s the type of conversation that takes place increasingly often as we contemplate the art of Marilyn Manson, or Michael Jackson, or Phil Spector, or anyone else with a controversial reputation. But the song was also somewhat groundbreaking, considering that these conversations weren’t nearly as common outside of feminist academia 25 years ago.
In a similar spirit, “The The Empty” contemplates empty art and boring hipster culture to a relentless, punishing, and purely danceable beat. All that glitters is not gold. Meanwhile, “Eau D’ Bedroom Dancing” takes the album to a contemplative, introspective place in a meta examination of Julie Ruin, where it all began. At its heart, the song is about being safe from the critical eyes of others. It’s about the desire to hide, as well as courageous vulnerability.
“Girls’ bedrooms sometimes can be this space of real creativity. The problem is that these bedrooms are all cut off from each other. So how do you take that bedroom that you’re cut off from all the other girls who are secretly in their bedrooms writing secret things or making secret songs?” Hanna explains. “I wanted the Julie Ruin record to sound like a girl from her bedroom made this record, but then didn’t just throw it away. Or it wasn’t just in her diary, but she took it out and shared it with people.”
The centerpiece love letter to New York, “My My Metrocard” calls out Rudy Giuliani as “a fucking jerk” while chronicling the joys of navigating the city by subway. Meanwhile, “Slideshow At Free University” is an experimental collage of found monologue, which in the early days of the band, Le Tigre would use as background audio for a slideshow displaying newspaper headlines, protest footage, and other thought-provoking visuals. Its inclusion on the album nods at Le Tigre’s greater context as a multifaceted, multimedia band.
Only a couple years after I was lucky enough to see Le Tigre in all their colorful, aerobic, energetic glory at the Hammerstein Ballroom, the band broke up due to Hanna’s ongoing battle with late-stage Lyme Disease, which wouldn’t be properly diagnosed for another six years. In their very short time together, however, the band still managed to carve out a lasting legacy.
“Le Tigre seemed like it was much more sophisticated and mature. It understood what people needed at that time, in terms of danceability and still maintaining a really interesting message,” observes artist and professor Anna Joy Springer in The Punk Singer. “A message of non-competition, a culture of praise, but sophisticated in understanding what a good pop song is. Bikini Kill understood song structure too, but Le Tigre just fucking nailed it.”
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