Fail Again: Kathleen Hanna’s Music is Her Message

Fail Better with David Duchovny

Grace Cohen-Chen

Society & Culture

4.6 • 534 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2026

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This episode originally aired August 16, 2024 Being “indie famous” is complicated, and Kathleen Hanna isn’t here to water it down. Her career making feminist punk music — most notably in the band Bikini Kill — meant she was attacked for her activism by some and objectified as a symbol by others. But Kathleen and her bandmates continued to fight for respect and wrangle messy topics into punchy songs. Her new memoir, Rebel Girl, is a real treat, and it shows just how much change in the music industry and beyond can be traced back to those efforts. Does that mean Kathleen loves seeing her trailblazing messaging plastered onto throw pillows at Target? As you might expect, that, too, is complicated. Lemonada has teamed up with Apple Books to bring you the Lemonada Book Club. “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk” by Kathleen Hanna is our July/August 2024 audiobook of the month! For more details, visit http://apple.co/lemonadabookclub. Follow me on Instagram at @davidduchovny. Stay up to date with Lemonada on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia. Joining Lemonada Premium is a great way to support our show and get bonus content. Subscribe today at bit.ly/lemonadapremium. And if you want to continue the conversation with other listeners, join the My Lemonada community at https://lemonadamedia.com/mylemonada/ For a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this and every other Lemonada show, go to lemonadamedia.com/sponsors. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's morning in New York.
0:02.8	Oh, God.
0:06.2	Hey, everybody.
0:07.3	I'm Mandy Patinkin.
0:08.7	And I'm Catherine Grady.
0:09.8	And we have a new podcast.
0:11.7	It's called Don't Listen to Us.
0:14.1	Many of you've asked for our advice.
0:16.1	Tell me, what is wrong with you people?
0:19.2	Don't listen to us.
0:20.3	Our Take It or Leave a Device show every Wednesday out now.
0:24.7	A Lemonada Media Original.
0:30.0	When I was thinking about getting on an interview with Kathleen Hannah,
0:36.2	I was thinking about punk music,
0:37.7	which is not a music I ever gravitated towards when I was a kid.
0:42.3	And I was thinking about this one.
0:43.5	We're talking with Fred Armisen as well.
0:45.9	And there was something about punk sound
0:49.3	that was abrasive to me, that I didn't like.
0:52.7	And as I've learned more about the situation in which punk arose and the people that were making
1:00.0	it, I started to realize that it wasn't just the music, it was the sound of a rebellion in the
1:06.0	sense of it was trying to explode this kind of gorgeous song sound machine of popular music from the inside
	...

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