Check This Out! has moved

Home| Features & Interviews |Lusty Lady |Candles |Lollipops | Music Reviews |Book Reviews | News | Contact Us |

March 1, 2000

Le Tigre

---

By Gerry Belsha

Le Tigre's self-titled debut was the best album of 1999. Kathleen Hanna (ex-Bikini Kill, a.k.a Julie Ruin), zine creator Johanna Fateman, and videomaker Sadie Benning, combine their different media backgrounds with a polemic founded in community-based action and control, punk aesthetics and feminism, to create a sound that is totally unique. Combining punk and hip-hop DIY ethic, samples, turntables, Gang of Four-like guitar attacks and girl group might - the impact never misses. But what makes Le Tigre so powerful and dangerous is a blatant aim at destroying pop structure and style.

Lyrically Le Tigre attack art and class structure attempting to dispel the myths of the spectator and the spectacle. When Hanna sings "I went to your concert and I didn't feel anything" she means it! Le Tigre know that pop consciousness is interwoven in the the banality and extraordinary events that make up everyday life. The trio attempts to smash preconceived notions of art and the boundaries that have been erected between the many multi-media and tear down the pedestals that prop up the many mystical guitar heroes. Check This Out! recently spoke with Fateman and Hanna about art, polemics and fuckface politicians.

Check This Out!: How long have the three of you know each other and how did Le Tigre begin? What was the genesis?

	tammy rae carland photo

Johanna Fateman: We've known each other for about seven years, I think. I met Sadie at a screening of her videos at the museum in Portland, Ore. I read something about a 17-year-old girl who made movies in her bedroom and was fascinated. I went with a bunch of my friends and we hung out with Sadie afterwards. She was traveling with the band Fifth Column and we went to see them play the next night at the punk club and they stayed at my house for a night or two. We lost contact for a while but then re-started our friendship as a pen pal thing mostly (we've never lived in the same city). She sent me giant drawings and the coolest pause-tapes ever in the mail!

I met Kathleen at a Bikini Kill show probably around the same time I met Sadie. After the show I gave her a fanzine that I had made with my friend called Snarla in Love and a few months later she walked into the Halloween Warehouse where I worked and we started hanging out. She moved in with me and we started a band. We kept in touch after I moved to New York and she moved back to Olympia and then to North Carolina for a while. Now we're both in New York playing music together again!

The three of us began collaborating at first because Kathleen had just put out the Julie Ruin record and needed help putting together a live show to tour with. I was going to help perform the music, and Sadie was going to add visual stuff - slides or video projections. But once we got started we realized that we really wanted to write new material. . . that's how we became Le Tigre.

CTO: Are all three of you living in New York now, or is Sadie still in Chicago?

Kathleen Hanna: Jo and I live in New York. Sadie lives in Chicago.

CTO: It seems that your roles are intertwined musically and instrumentally but at the same time you have different sources and beliefs conceptually. What is unique about the three of you and what do each of you bring to the band that is unique.

Johanna Fateman: As experimental artists, what we have in common is a commitment to feminism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism and queer rights. Our respective backgrounds in music, visual art, video making, and writing multiply the strategies available to us in this project. So far in Le Tigre we have worked within a kind of post-rock framework to fuck with pop structure and pop pleasure by contaminating it with political content and simplistic uses of techno apparatus. But I think that as we continue as a band, it will be come more clear how we are as interested in evoking cinematic and literary ideas as well. It's hard to say who brings what to the band, because the truth is we are all multi-media artists and don't feel particularly tied to one form, genre, or tradition.

	tammy rae carland photo

CTO: Who does what instrumentally? Describe your songwriting process. Does it vary widely from song to song?

Le Tigre: We all sing and play guitar on different songs. Kathleen does most of the singing. Sadie and Johanna do the programming (beats and sample-sequencing). Johanna plays keyboards, and Sadie punches in some samples live. Sadie did the turntable stuff on the record. Since we use recording processes and programming to experiment with ideas, sounds, and structures, the way we play the music live doesn't necessarily reflect who made up which part, etc. We all collect samples, make tapes, write down ideas to talk about when we get together. The process is also a sort of strange because of our long-distance relationship.

CTO: What inspires your songwriting?

Kathleen Hanna: Everything inspires my songwriting but a lot of what I've written lately tends to be about the current state of music, certain scenes I've been involved with and people who I hate but can't talk to directly cuz I don't want any involvement with them at all. A lot of times I will write a song about it so I can express my anger instead of wrecking myself.

CTO: You are one of the few bands around that really seems to be connecting the dots. What I mean is that you bring across the idea that everything in everyday life is connected - art, politics, work, being a spectator, the spectacle, being the artist and the line between artist and audience. Why is it so difficult for people to realize that everything is connected and why are so many bands out there just clue less and shallow?

Johanna Fateman: We're working on a new song right now that's called "Mediocrity Rules." It's about how mediocre things are seductive because they are easy, familiar, undisruptive. But what we want to say is: don't mistake the comfort of the mediocre for the pleasure of revolution, you know? It's better to take risks and fuck up, look corny or foolish than to just kind of coast along with formulaic approaches to cultural production.

CTO: One of the things I find most inspiring about the cd is that it is so simple. There have been numerous people who have told me that after listening to your music they have gone out and tried to make some of their own. And I don't mean that in a negative way, like "Oh this is shit, I can do better," I mean that it is inspiring in "hey, I have the power to do whatever I want." Have you been getting that kind of response from people and is that one of your aims?

Kathleen Hanna: One of the things that really bummed me out about certain shows I used to go to is that guys would take up all the room relegating women and the shorter, sweeter men to the back of the room. This meant that as usual, we had no idea how the music was being made! I have a total investment in terms of sharing information with people who have been traditionally kept down, creatively and otherwise. Also I am somewhat reactionary against the static guitar hero - technology has cured us of that right??? I mean who has eight extra hours to practice guitar anyway? I like music that encourages creativity rather than consumption, I'm glad if the cd expresses that.

CTO: I love the old school hip-hop feel to your music, sort of like the first De La Soul record. Do you listen to much hip-hop?

Johanna Fateman: Well, I love De La Soul for sure. In terms of what I listen to at home, I am into a pretty varied range of music, mostly electronic music, including a lot of hip-hop. I think a lot of the most incredible musical innovations are happening in hip-hop and rap. And in terms of content, hip-hop is really inspiring to me because there is more of a tradition of community representation and historical documentation than in other pop music (i.e. rock music is still very much involved with the expression of supposedly universal emotional situations rather than culturally specific political situations).

CTO: Isn't it scary to watch and hear Giuliani? I swear if he was born in Italy and was alive in the 30s and 40s he would have been a big-time follower of Mussolini.

Johanna Fateman: He's a pathological fuckface, for sure.

CTO: Have you done many shows and what have they been like? Is it difficult to do some of the stuff live?

Kathleen Hanna: We played our first ever show at Dumba, a warehouse in Brooklyn and it was super fun. It is weird for me to not play with live drums just cuz the sound can seem kind of empty without them, but we're working that out.

CTO: What are you plans for touring?

Le Tigre: We will be doing a short East Coast tour with The Need from April 7-28. Check out the tour page of the Mr. Lady website for the most updated info. www.mrlady.com.

CTO: It seems that your music is based in a real sense of community. "Hot Topic" is a good example of that. Do you think that music, any art for that matter, can be a moving force for a person or for a community. Do you even think that is an obligation of musicians? How does politics enter into the equation?

Le Tigre: For "Hot Topic" we wanted to make a song that was about community and history. Notions like "community" can seem so totalizing and problematic that we retreat to irony or oppositional self-definitions, and we wanted to say fuck that. Instead let's be sincere and take risks and just talk about who we are and who gives us strength as feminists and as artists. The idea of making a list song with the names of artists and thinkers that are really important to us was daunting because we knew it would be impossible to include everyone, and of course not all of us would agree on each name. The song is partial, unfinished, a snapshot of recurring conversations, books on our nightstands, records on our turntables. We didn't want to be elitist or obscure, we wanted to get the word out about stuff that not everyone knows about, i.e. "I fucking love Yoko Ono and Angela Davis, maybe I should look up Carolee Schneeman and Mab Segrest next time I'm at the library." And even though "Hot Topic" is recorded now and exists in a finished form, we hoped that it would be understood as having an open structure for other voices to shout out their own list of names.

CTO: Do you think music can be instrumental in making any type of meaningful political changes?

Johanna Fateman: I don't think that art or music can replace political activism, but I think that it can bind together a culture of resistance so that social change feels possible.

CTO: What is on your turntable these days? What have you been reading and what films have you seen that are special.

Johanna Fateman: I just got an incredible cassette of this band called the Thunderinas. They should have a record out soon on the London-based record label Home Wreckers Foundation.

Kathleen Hanna: Chapter One by The Upsetters.

CTO: Are you able to make a living wage through your music?

Johanna Fateman: No, I have a full time job at an art gallery. Kathleen and Sadie scrape by with freelance gigs and other projects.

CTO: How can you relate to your fans on a one-to-one basis? Or is that even possible?

Kathleen Hanna: I like to answer my mail as often as humanly possible. A lot of our "fans" are artists, musicians and just in general interesting people in their own right so its cool to hear about what they're doing. Obviously we can't have personal friendships with everyone but it is really awesome that people tell us what they think of what we're doing.

CTO: Looking back now at album, what do you think about it? What are the things you are most proud of on it and are you disappointed with anything?

Kathleen Hanna: When I think of the album I think about how hard we worked on it and how much we learned. I also get excited about making another one.

CTO: How do you picture the next album being different from this one?

Johanna Fateman: I think it'll be even dancier.
Kathleen Hanna: I'd like to use samples more as a way to express content and less as a musical device.

CTO: Tell me about your 'zine. I have heard many references to it but I really don't know anything about it?

Johanna Fateman: I did a fanzine with my closest friend from high school for three or four years called Snarla. I think we did about six issues. It circulated mainly through girls in the west coast punk scene. In terms of content, it would probably be grouped into a confessional genre of zine associated with Riot Grrrl Press in the early/mid 90's, although we tended to deal with stuff in a slightly more aloof and abstract way.

When I moved to New York to go to art school the terms of my work shifted away from the identity-politic issues of a punk scene to more theory-driven projects - I was fascinated by the sexual politics of conceptual art's recent history and the social structure of art school and the gallery system. "The Opposite, Part I" was "a fanzine about art," my first attempt to deal with disparate areas of culture (for example, modernist painting and feminist underground punk music) with the same language. "ArtaudMania!!! the Diary of a Fan" was along the same lines, but a more specific project: I chose a figure (Antonin Artaud) that punks and academics shared an interest so that a collision of their discourses made sense. "My Need to Speak on the Subject of Jackson Pollock" is actually the transcript (in zine form) of a semi-facetious lecture I gave to accompany two paintings I made. It was my final semester of art school, and in a lot of ways the lecture was a final "fuck you." It was intended to ridicule the retrogressive values of a couple of the teachers in the painting program I was in, and continued valorization of Abstract Expressionist art and ideology among fellow students.

I am working on a new fanzine that will hopefully be done before Le Tigre starts touring extensively.

Find more information about Le Tigre

Home| Features & Interviews |Lusty Lady |Candles |Lollipops | Music Reviews |Book Reviews | News | Contact Us | Copyright 2000 Check This Out!