#Kurt Strider | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bikinikillarchives · 2 years ago

Photo

kathleen in the short-lived lgbt/riot grrrl magazine, Princess Magazine. cover photo found through riotgrrrlbible.

EDIT: full interview can be read here, or in transcript underneath!

“Like there's some people you shouldn't fuck, because the fantasy of fucking them is way better than actually fucking them will ever be. It takes a mature person to figure that out. (...) Sometimes people use stars, though, to mediate relationships. The star is on stage and the audience is on the floor because you need to be on stage so people can see you. But while people are looking up at you, they're not looking right next to them at the person they might really need to be talking to. In some instances, the stage/fan set-up prevents relationships with each other. People focus on the star and live vicariously.”

The following is a conversation between Kathleen Hanna and Kathy Strider discussing the concepts of stardom and fandom--attempting to define them and figure out what they mean socially.

KATHY STIDER: So let's start with a really basic working definition of what you think a star is.. what role does a star play in society, why do stars exist?

KATHLEEN HANNA: I think part of the idea of being a star involves how it separates people: stars are superhuman, or "real" people and everyone else is supposed to be obsessed with their lives. Everyone else is supposed to be following what the "real" people do, which means that everyone else is less than real.

KS: Yes, there is a weird hierarchy that seems to be created. It seems that, if you've achieved some kind of stardom. People think that you've gained some kind of legitimacy or success that they don't have. This can apply even if people don't like or don't care about your work. I'm thinking, for example, of some older guy who's sitting in his house on a Sunday, opens up a magazine and sees a picture of Kim Gordon. He doesn't necessarily know anything about her or her work, but there’s still going to think in some way that she has something that he doesn't, or has some kind of agency that he doesn't. You made a good point in an earlier conversation about stars being in a way, both superhuman and 'dead or cartoonish, not allowed to be real'.

KH: Right, I mean any form of duality is dehumanizing for those involved. In this case, there is this idea that there are "common" people in one place and "royalty" in another. Although I wouldn't say that the "royalty" is oppressed, I'd say that both sides are dehumanized, because they both work in opposition and reaction to each other. And it's not like either side is necessarily recognizing full human agency, although the "royalty" can do that to a greater degree, because they're afforded privilege and position. Both of them become inhuman, like the royalty becomes a cartoon character.

KS: But I think it's important to make this distinction though, that a person who becomes a star is not in reality becoming a cartoon character. They really are people who live in houses and eat food, etc. But to others they [are] becoming less human, even to the point where people throw shit at them on stage, when they wouldn't throw shit at people on the street. I guess what I'm asking you is, why do you think that people feel a need to have people like that in society? What kinds of responses and experiences have you had with people who you think were seeing you that way? What was going on with them?

KH: I guess I can talk about a common interaction that I have with people when they ask me for an autograph. I used to try to disrupt thing by being like, 'well I'm not more important than you.' I talked to them about the idea of autographs, stardom , and fame. I mean, obviously that's not always practical. But then I realized it was kind of condescending, because it was assuming that they were stupid, that they might not know that already. Then I started thinking, 'Wait why are they approaching me?' Approaching someone and asking them for their autograph assumes certain things, like that that person is valuable.

KS: Like you want their name written on something.

KH: Right. I think it was Salvador Dali who said something about how it was the last form of human cannibalism or something. But anyway, I started thinking, 'Well maybe they just want to talk to me' and sometimes they only wanted a friend's phone number or something. But some put me into this idea and if I venture out of it, they get really angry. I mean, I think a lot of people in every day life totally experience that in terms of crushes. You have a crush on somebody, you build them up in your head. Then you actually hang out with them and they're not what you thought they were or what you wanted them to be. People are really creative and imaginative. We reinvent stuff. The thing is we have to be careful not to turn others into objects. Because you need to get some clay or pens or something like that, instead of objectifying people, why don't you just use actual things, and objectify them, rather than using Courtney Love to play out your fantasies.

KS: But I think there's a certain dynamic, there's a reason why people need others to do this. There's something really intense about what happens between a star and a fan , where the fan really sees something about the star (as opposed to a lump of clay) as something they can really work themselves out through.

KH: Yeah, well I've done that , I did that with Evan Dando.

KS: I think everyone does that. I know I've done it. I think it's completely normal. the thing is I just wonder why, what is it about our society that has set up this particular structure. I just wonder how it works into the idea of capitalism, the idea of people selling their performance and others buying it . But then, you know, when it comes time to talk to them you're unable to speak. Like there's this time when I met PJ Harvey and I was unable to speak to her. I felt like such a nerd.

KH: I had that with Karen Finley, too.

KS: She seems really approachable though.

KH: Yeah but it's my idea, I was really afraid that she would disrupt my idea of her and I didn't want her to. Her work changed my life, and I realized I just wanted to keep her in that context. Like there's some people you shouldn't fuck because the fantasy of fucking them is way better than actually fucking them will ever be. It takes a mature person to figure that out. Ha ha ha . Sometimes people use stars, though, to mediate relationships. The star is on stage and the audience is on the floor (because you need to be on stage so people can see you). But while people are looking up at you, they're not looking right next to them at the person they might really need to be talking to. In some instances, the stage/fan set-up prevents relationships with each other. people focus on the star and live vicariously. I think that has to do with capitalism, which dehumanizes everyone into robots. The more people get abused by their families and by sexism, racism, classism and homophobia, and able-body-ism and stuff, the more numb people have to become. And the less we can actually deal with any real confrontation, because confrontation may remind us of all this other stuff, and that's real scary. So we avoid being healthy enough or safe enough to feel a lot of stuff.

KS: Yeah, I think you're very right. So it's like this safe method of exchange, and the fact that it involves someone who you make in to superhuman. You project all your social needs onto this album, or something that you'll never actually deal with. That's kind of scary.

KH: That's a part of it. Also I don't even think of myself as a star, I think of myself as a performer , or a musician, or an activist, or a cultural worker, different things everyday. The people I want to perform for are people who are dealing with themselves when possible. I do want to entertain people out of their misery sometimes because I think that's important and valid. If it allowed them to escape in their own head for the while that they needed to take a break, I think that's really valid. I mean, people don't have to be dealing 24-7.

KS: I think that could be really constructive. I wrote my senior thesis on how I thought a fan/star relationship could possibly work positively in someone's life. I used myself as an example; I had idolized someone for a long time. I didn't go nearly as in depth as I had liked to , but it was a really positive thing.

KH: When we perform in Olympia it's a really different situation from when we perform in New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco because people see me walking around. A lot of people have seen me in other capacities, possibly serving them food somewhere. I think it's really positive for people to see us in the community, and then in this other way on the stage. It's like, 'Oh I saw that girl in the park and then I saw her on the stage' and it's not like I am Iggy Pop and I flew down in a helicopter. They're like 'Oh I could do that.' That's how I started doing things. And that's why I try to, when I can, remain as accessible as possible.

KS: So you're saying that a star thing can work positively if the person is seen as a star as well as part of the rest of the world.

KH: I just hope there's some sort of suture between those two things, between being a star and being a person. I mean I've had to somewhat separate them just for me to be able to function. I had to do the same thing when I was a dancer, which is another type of performance. It was a similar separation, in order to maintain some sort of a livability in the situation. But I just hope that it doesn't always have to be a stripper/customer relationship even in punk rock. That's what I'm trying to navigate right now.

KS: You said earlier that You think or yourself more as a performer and an activist, but in the Evan Dando 'zine, although that was a very contextualized piece, you did talk about yourself as being a star, and obviously there was a reason for that. Although you described yourself as a " superhyper Evan Dando groupie", what made you refer to yourself as a star?

KH: I guess it was just because I wrote that during our first stay in England. The pop-star idea is really big there. We were dealing with media on a really immediate level. The press people, right in your face, trying to talk to you a lot. That's when I felt like I was a star because we were in the papers. And I was like 'Whoa, this is big shit for me'. But I don't really think that. I just wrote that in the moment of ,'Oh yeah, I'm a slutty punk feminist star,' or something like that.

KS: But there's something to it, I think.

KH: Yeah, I know, I'm not saying that I'm totally isolated and don't know what's going on, but it's really hard for me to understand (stardom). It's like when you're in a really bad relationship and everyone's telling you so, but you don't listen. You can't see the situation 'cause you're in it. And that's how I feel sometimes; I don't really understand. I mean I've got a pretty limited amount of notoriety. I'm not like fucking Demi Moore or something. I don't really focus on it that much. I did for a while, mainly because I'm interested in figuring out problems.

KS: It seems like we're still circling around what a star really is. And I'm not thinking of a star as you as a person, I'm thinking of it as a shell, a thing you put on, or that other people put on you. It's even separate from the performance to some degree.

KH: Well I see it as analogous to focusing (o)n a character in a novel. I think in certain ways, because of the media culture now, tabloids, etc., rock stars and movie stars and stuff have replaced characters in novels. And I think that people, including myself, follow stars as if they're characters in a novel and their lives are unfolding in front of you. Is there going to be death, is there going to be addiction, will there be affairs?

KS: What's scary is that it's not fictional characters, they're real people.

KH: Right.

KS: And a lot of people can't seem to tell the difference between what they read in tabloids and the real person. And even me, I try to be really sensitive. I can say that I understand my relation to a star as a fan, but I'll see someone in magazines, etc., and I'll see them on the street and I get really nervous or weird because there's something really intense about them to me. Something about their performance has touched something in me and it's almost like you imagine there's some sort of connection between you and something they they've put out there as work.

KH: There can be a lot of misplaced anger in the way people treat stars. It's really hard for me to deal with the fact that Kurt Cobain killed himself. There's a record store in my community right next to the coffee shop where a lot of people who were close to him go. The day after he died, the store hung up this big poster and t-shirt as a Kurt Cobain Memorial in the window. I'm not saying that I expect everybody to be thinking of [their] feelings a million times a day, but it was really, really insensitive. I went in to try to talk with the guy at the record store. It was interesting because he's met me all these times but he never knows who I am. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm female, so obviously I'm no one in music. I 'm not saying that there's a claim that I am someone or something, but I have been involved in the music scene in Olympia for 7 years.

KS: Well it's your career. I don't think there's any shame in saying that.

KH: So I go in there and it's just the thing of saying, 'You know I live in this town, and I think that's really insensitive and I don't want to have to walk by it.' It's not like I'm trying to censor anybody, or that I'm freaked out about death. It's just about how I feel that when people get into positions like Kurt did, it probably had to do with depression and all kinds of things we can speculate on. But I think part of it has to do with the fact that he was totally dehumanized by everyone. He was really exploited. Sure he was a rock star, but he was also a worker; he was fulfilling a function and getting paid a certain amount of money to do that. And I think that a lot of other people make a lot of money off of him. It was really frustrating to me that they day after he died he was still being exploited. Maybe I'm just really sentimental and goopy, but I just felt it was fucked up, and the guy was like, 'Oh I understand, you're just this little fan of his.' I realized how totally condescending people can treat those who are supposed to be fans. It was like 'oh you cute little groupie.'

KS: It's really funny that he would interpret it that way. Cause the way I see it he was totally projecting onto you. He saw you as the person who couldn't really understand what was going on because you were blinded by your fandom and your girldom combined, while he couldn't see that he was hurting real people. That's exactly what I'm talking about: some people just have no idea when they cross the line, especially when it comes to stars. And I think that relates to regular life, too. There are a lot of people who don't know how to treat others.

KH: I think there's anger involved, because I think people tend to treat stars as if they are an endless resource, that's supposed to just keep giving, and gibing. People are like, 'Well I'm paying you for it.' And it's a negrophilic, fuck-the-dead-body idea. I think it's fucked up, boring and not what I personally want to do. So how are do we fight against it? How do we challenge that idea?

KS: Well, it's like we're saying that there are two things going on. There are people; who idolize people and are shy around them, but they are learning about how they want to be or something, and then there are people who are really fucked up about it, people for whom it 's like a death culture, the star culture. It's a way for them to remain numb, to dehumanize others...

KH: Sounds really pornographic, doesn't it? I mean there are a lot of similar elements, like object identification, commodification and money exchange. It's also about power. I grew up totally ascribing to middle class values, one being that I'm supposed to have a certain amount of control in my life, but in reality don't have a lot of that. I 'm constantly told, if I go out walking, somebody can just totally grab my ass and get away with it, and if I'm at work I can totally get shit on by my boss and have to take it. I'm constantly taught that I don't really have control over what happens, like the government... and hating all the decisions, hating this new fucking Proposition 187 in California, which is basically murdering immigrants by denying them medical care. So I feel like I have no control or power. I find an area that I can get control or power in. I could beat people up. Or I could abuse my one body with alcohol, cigarettes, heroin, or whatever. It's this whole mad rush for getting power and control. But I think that there are healthy ways of getting power. And I don't think having control over everything is necessarily the way that I would want to lead my life anyway. It's boring.

KS: I thought it was really interesting when you said earlier that one of the reasons that people want stars to be cartoonish and never change is because they want control over that person. In a sense it's like being dead, if you never change and never contradict yourself.

KH: Well if you just sell your life for safety, then what kind of safety is that? (laughs) But I just don't want to entirely define power in then negative, and say that's the only possibility because I'm really not into the idea of all power being oppressive. I don't think it has to be that way; I think when we start believing that all power is oppressive that we've lost hope.

KS: You become Catherine MacKinnon.

KH: Right, I just think it signals a loss of hope and I'm just not into it. But we're still in this fight, expecting to have all this power and control, and trying to get it any way we can, even in these really unhealthy ways, like controlling our bodies through not eating or using a person in the public eye. I've had negative fame at certain times ,because I've had really abusive things happen to me in the press. A Flipside article said, "Fuck you, Bikini Kill" 11 times in one article. The Washington Post wrote that I claimed I was raped by my father, but I never talked to them. They completely coined that from songs I had written; I guess they assumed that because I wrote about incest, I had to be speaking from first-hand experience because obviously I'm a woman and I have no imagination. There was a Newsweek article that printed a photograph of our band in bikinis, and that was a private photograph of us together. A girl took that picture of us and then sold it without our permission. And then it was said that I was a feminist, a stripper and incest survivor. That was really difficult for me as an erotic dancer to deal with because my full name was printed and a lot of my customers read it. In the picture of me in a bikini you could see my tattoos which meant that I could be positively identified, and my stripper name was now connected with my real name. That meant I basically had to leave that job. They fucked up my livelihood; I mean they made me lose my fucking job.

KS: It's showing complete insensitivity and people especially don't think of sex workers as having any rights at all. They kind of think about stars in the same way...once you get "out there" in certain ways, people think that they can use you in unbelievable ways.

KH: Right, although I do think that fame and notoriety can actually open doors for me oar allow me to access stuff I never had access to, whereas being a sex worker hasn't afforded me the same privilege. There's a huge, huge difference. What I was getting to was – I've gotten a lot of unhealthy attention...Do you know what I mean?

KS: Yeah, well I've seen it happen at every single show; I mean something seems to click in people's heads when they see you up there. There are certain things about you that they know or interpret, and they decide that you're going to be the one they're going to bother. Why does that happen?

KH: I think part of it is that I won't fit a smooth notion of identity because I contradict myself very boldly...I'm not trying to say that I'm this rad martyr fucking person, but I also haven't been willing to say, 'Okay, I'm a feminist and therefore I'm going to wear these really drab clothes and I'm not going to be sexual on stage and I'm going to sing lyrics that are really dogmatic and obvious, that are right out of feminist theory.' although sometimes I do do that. If I am what these guys think as being somewhat sexual, I'm actually being a whole person, not just a cartoon character of what they think a feminist is, or what they think a feminist is, or what they think a feminist performer is, or whatever. I think that's really offensive to them. They see me as contradictory and therefore my whole project is invalid; therefore I suck and I deserve whatever kind of abusive behavior I get. People see that you are a performer whose not reading off of a script, you're not in a movie; you're challenging the idea of one constructed identity when you stray outside of that, basically what it means is that you're alive and you're experiencing things right here and now. I think some people want to kill that, because it 's threatening. It applies to many things. I can't really afford the purity of never doing anything for a major label, or never doing this or that . I negotiate my decisions based on a lot of factors, economic, emotional, etc. I think that can be really threatening. What is really frustrating is that a lot of people have gotten, like, 'Oh, you're really fucked up, you're this big rock star now' and it's confusing to see me as an individual when people are angry at me for being a rock star when I still have to deal with a lot of shit. If you're angry at me because the Washington Post said that I was raped by my father, and it did a lot to destruct my family, that's fucked up it's not glamourous to go out on stage and have guys call me a cunt. To have to deal with that kind of shit and simultaneously have to deal with people saying, 'Well you're a rock star" and blaming me is hard. I didn't create that. You know what I mean?

KS: It 's true that a lot of people are obsessed with this certain kind of purity in the punk rock world or in feminism. It's a very immature attitude because they can't accept you moving forward or changing your mind about things or not just always saying the same thing over and over again.

KH: Or that there's more than one kind of fucking feminism.

KS: Yeah, it's very threatening. It's almost as if you could draw a line between different kinds of stars and why people like them. There are those who stir things up and those who placate their audience, someone like- I mean I don't want to trash people, but she'll never read this anyway- like Whitney Houston, who I think is robotic in her performance. And a lot of people flock to it, they desperately need it..

KH: I love Whitney Houston.

KS: You love Whitney Houston?

KH: I think Whitney's incredible. For my birthday this year we got a hotel and I watched the Whitney Houston "Live in South Africa" performance, and she did two of my all-time favorite songs, "The Greatest Love of All" and the one that Dolly Parton wrote.

KS: Alright, well... that's how I feel about Whitney Houston, okay?

KH: Don't call Whitney robotic!

KS: She is, too; she's robotic!

KH: She is not.

KS: Well obviously, we have a lot of different ways of looking at things here. It's clear to me that what fans like doesn't have to do with the person as a performer in a way. There's something really different that you and I see in her performance. Not that her personality doesn't inform her performance, but I see a separation between the two. A person can be very different from who they are as a star, and people can see really different things in the same star.

KH: We don't really know what a fan is because threw are a million different readings that can come from a text, a performance, or whatever. Each person brings their ideas, background, privileges and system of identification to it. Whitney does maintain a really big gap between her and her fans. She's probably not reading her mail. She seems to have a pretty complete separation, it seems whereas I'm really navigating that relationship, because I don't really want to commodify myself or be commodified. Especially because I'm an abuse survivor, and it's a traditional position for me to be in, to objectify myself and kind of turn myself into a lamp. I think a lot of performers come from backgrounds like that, have taken a lot of shit as kids or as women or as boys or...

KS: Why do you think people do become stars then, do you think they thing that they have to take the abuse and that it's an abusive thing or do you think they get good things out of it, or what?

KH: Well, all I can talk about again is in terms of me. I don't know why Whitney became a star, and I can't speak for other people, I know that I learned as a child to leave my body for certain reasons which I'm not going to discuss.

S: No, you don't have to.

KH: It's known in the domestic violence/sexual assault community as 'disassociation', although it's not like you have these really severe abuse situations to do it; a lot of people do it. You're able to leave your body and do whatever you have to do, like pretend you're running through a jungle or whatever people do to stay OK. You do it during a painful experience or trauma, when maybe somebody you really love or trust is abusing you, taking advantage of you, objectifying you, or using you in a way that isn't cool with you. That's a survival mechanism and it's completely valid. I see it as a skill, to a certain extent. I don't want to glamorize abuse in any way but I do know that I have learned things from it that I'm not going to belittle, because that's my life.

KS: Well in your life that's the way you learned it , but maybe you would've learned it another way if you had a different experience.

KH: Right. But at the same time, I've learned how not to be in my body for various reasons. What I'm interested in right now is creating safe enough spaces that I can be in my body so that I can deal with painful things that I couldn't deal with maybe when I was a child, or maybe even last year, even at shows where guys assault me. But you know it's hard, because I got really good at dissociating. When I was working as a stripper, that skill really came in handy. People could touch me and I wouldn't feel it. And I think that translates nicely into the performance personality and the star personality of objectifying yourself and being consumed.

KS: But you make it sound like performance is a really bad thing.

KH: I think it is to a certain extent. I've just realized that there's a lot of unhealthiness there and right now, I'm resisting the idea that I'm consumable. I don't always make the best decision. I'm not always doing the most radical, subversive thing. I'm just navigating that and always trying to find a new way to subvert the status quo. If you're doing anything somewhat interesting, you're gonna come up against opposition. Because of that opposition, sometimes I have to numb out. I can't take seriously everybody who calls me rock star or bitch or cunt or slut or whore. Kathleen Hanna cannot deal with internalizing that and sometimes I have too... Kathleen has to go away.

KS: I'm just saying though that there must be things about being a star or an activist/performer that make you believe in it enough that it is worth it for yo to have to deal with that kind of stuff.

KH: Right. These are the things that are the benefits to me: a) I can earn a living with this now, because people will know who I am, b) I can get things done and I can help my friends hook up with other people because I travel a lot and I get told about a lot of things that are going on. I get handed a lot of resources. So I can play intermediary between an activist in one place and a performance artist in another who want to do a benefit. I can be this little point on a map and in between these other people.

KS: Don't you think that your performance itself makes you feel better or helps you work out things or that it does that for fans to some extent?

KH: They say it does, but it's hard for me to say. It does for me sometimes. It's totally powerful for me to be up on stage, to have this microphone and say whatever I want, taking up sonic space. That can be very powerful.

KS: That's very punk rock.

KH: Being female and doing that can be totally powerful. Even the fact that I can do things that are interesting to me and which push me further philosophically and politically makes me cream. I mean it's good, I like it.

KS: Good, that's what I thought.

KH: I say thumbs up.

KS: I say thumbs up, you and Whitney just keep it up.

#kathleen hanna #bikini kill #princess magazine #1996 #Kathy Strider #tw's for mentions of sa/incest/abuse #kurt cobain #writings

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