Kathleen Hanna

I like art with a sense of humor. I don't have a huge art education to understand everything. I don't think that means that art has to be watered down to the lowest common denominator, though. I don't think you have to go to college to be able appreciate great art, but I like art that doesn't take itself too seriously.

I know I love sexy surf guitars, I know I love loud snare. I love really simple repeating bass lines, and I love weird mad scientist keyboard sounds.

To make riot grrrl move into the future in a new way with a bunch of new names and a bunch of new energy, younger people have to learn about it and apply it to their own lives and own modern conversation. And they are.

That's the great thing about music. You can find some '60s pop record and feel completely invigorated by it, even though it's so old.

I wanna be a legend; I wanna be a cult hero. I do!

I feel so lucky that I met the love of my life. You know somebody's in it to win it when they're changing your IV bag or you're having a seizure and they're holding you. And helping you to the bathroom. You know that they love you.

I'm not a goddess, for crying out loud. I'm a regular person who took feminism - which I have a deep connection to - and mixed it with music, which I really love to do.

Facing sexism and racism and classism and transphobia, there are ways to choose to act in those situations, and there shouldn't be a prescriptive list of things that you have to say.

Feminism rotates between backlash and interest. And the cool thing about the Internet is that it's allowing women more access to their own history. Part of the problem before the Internet was that we didn't know which books to read. Someone had to tell you.

If I had to choose between the band or the friendships, I'd choose the friendships at this point.

There are so many great artists that are doing interesting things, that I don't want to focus on boring people.

I think as a culture, we don't like conflict or looking at icky stuff - especially in our downtime.

It's unexpected for women's issues to be brought up in places other than women's centers on college campuses or crisis places.

I just write what I want to write.

I wanted to say to myself as much as anyone else that we made art.

People have always had these weird things about how you have to be really good looking to be a singer.

I felt it was really, really important, not just in the vein of feminist erasure or whatever but also just as an artist that I honored my work.

I was in a band in the '90s called Bikini Kill, and we were so freaked out about documentation then, and there was the whole thing, not just about the male gaze, but that people were going to misrepresent you... a kind fear of the mainstream that a lot of us had.

I'm just working and having a good time and seeing what develops, which is so awesome, because you don't know what's going to happen, and I'm letting myself do that a lot more than I ever have.

Since I loved underground music, I tried to carve a space for feminism within it. Those were my hopes.