Le Tigre on DIY culture & their live return

“When we made the first record, I didn't think anybody would listen. I thought everybody would hate it!” jokes Kathleen Hanna from her home in California. She’s joined on our video call by fellow bandmates JD Samson and Johanna Fateman who together formed self-pegged “feminist party band” Le Tigre in the late 90s.

You might be familiar with Hanna as the lightning rod leader of riot grrrl band Bikini Kill. With the group’s imminent dissolution in her sights, Hanna decided to shake things up, moving in 1998 with zine-maker Fateman from their hometown of Portland, Oregon, to New York City to form the band. Although it wasn’t until 2000 when the lineup of the Le Tigre we know and love today came to be, with JD Samson replacing filmmaker Sadie Benning. 

Despite the early lineup changes, the band’s mission remained fixed: to write political pop songs and be the dance party after the protest. These seismic moments in their city, but also the globe, punctuated Le Tigre’s timeline, as Fateman recalls. “The attack on the World Trade Centre happened on one of our press days for Feminist Sweepstakes. When we released [that record], we entered a period of endless war.” Hanna continues: “I remember we were going to perform at a drag show and we were in a cab when they first started dropping bombs in Afghanistan,” she says, clearly moved by the retelling. 

In the early noughts, those moments only continued to dominate the headlines. Le Tigre’s third and final album, This Island, landed the month before George Bush won a second term as President of the United States. At the launch party of its release, the band posed against a backdrop of records mounted on a hot pink wall in matching outfits emblazoned with the slogan Stop Bush. They weren’t the only recording artists passing comment on the current state of the world. Some tackled matters in a more explicit fashion (see Green Day’s scathingly entitled, American Idiot), others more subtly (Björk’s Medúlla countered outbreaks of racism and patriotism following the 11 September attacks three years prior). 

“With the title, and specifically with that song [The Island], there was almost this feeling of ‘We have to create an island on an island that we can survive this through’,” says Hanna. “We made a video for that [to play behind us when we played live] and we had all our friends dancing in the back. We knew we needed our community.” Their desire to lean on their fellows wasn’t without conflict at the time though as This Island was the band’s first release on a major label, Universal. (The rest of their discography came out via San Franciscan queercore indie label, Mr. Lady.) Hanna admits they knew it was a risk. “That was a time when people were not very forgiving about bands going from an indie to a major label. For us, it was an interesting experiment. It wasn't a contradiction or hypocritical to try something and then decide what you like best.”

Moving into a more commercial setting wasn’t the only leap that the band was taking though. This Island found the trio using the money from their last tour to create and produce over the internet for the first time, setting up individual home studios with Pro Tools. All pretty progressive at the turn of the millennium, as they boast in stalwart indie club number Nanny Nanny Boo Boo: 'You’ll never get it / I guess this shit is too new'.

The step up was particularly noticeable for Samson. “It was actually the first time I had a computer. I didn’t even have WiFi!” The process began remixing each other’s early explorations of songwriting; one member started a beat or refrain. Then, they would send it over the internet for another to add a vocal line or melody part. “It gave us all a sense of collaborative energy over every song and made us feel really connected to the songs and the work on there,” adds Samson.

For Hanna, fresh from exploring the early one-woman-iteration of her solo project, The Julie Ruin, after Bikini Kill’s dissolution (for a far more extensive debrief of this brilliant story, dig out a copy of Sini Anderson’s documentary, The Punk Singer), it felt essential to lean on like-minded souls. “We wanted each of us to have the same technical abilities so that we could each have ownership and contribute when we wanted to. Having that combination of each of us having our own time to work on the record by ourselves, where no one's looking at you, no one's listening to you sing the bad part that you decide to erase, meant we were able to get so much further.” 

This pioneering patchwork model wasn’t just propelling their own careers forward though. While, the now infamous, audio workstation Pro Tools was actually launched in the early 80s, its integration with Windows and 24 mix in the early aughts (i.e. the ability to have 24 tracks of unique audio incorporated into your mix) coincided with the band’s own explorations into the platform. Their tentative approach to virtually stitching a track together in this ethereal, online space proved to be hugely influential and continues to inspire a legion of fellow bedroom beatmakers worldwide. Gen Z has embraced the band’s stand-outs like Deceptacon and Phanta, sending them viral on TikTok. Those colourful outfits (both in look and in language) now look timeless thanks to the latest wave of nostalgic fashion thinking, indie sleaze. 

From beadbadoobee to Billie Eilish, bedroom beatmakers have made a huge name for themselves in the last decade alone. They've become a genre – bedroom pop – in their own right. Eilish herself even highlighted the rise in her recent Grammy’s acceptance speech gushing: "This is for all the kids who are making music in their bedroom today. You're going to get one of these!" How does this new generation of artists expressing themselves with online tools like GarageBand and social media sit with some of its original creators then? “Well, I teach at the Recorded Music department in NYU so it’s kind of my life!” jokes Samson, as she gestures to the office space surrounding her in the Zoom frame. “For the most part [the students] all come in knowing how to use a digital audio workstation. It's punk in a lot of ways. They're learning stuff on their own and then they're learning how to put it into context. The internet really has done a lot for DIY culture.”

Hanna nods but is quick to express the commonalities with Le Tigre’s longstanding efforts to do the same, not just in writing and recording but also in their live shows. “Nowadays, you get your phone out and sing or play something into it. Then [you] transfer that into Pro Tools and start messing with it. We've always done that.” In the last two decades, the internet has enabled DIY culture into even bigger, virtual communities. But nothing beats sidling up alongside your favourites in the throng of a festival pit to really find those fellow free spirits. So, when Le Tigre announced they would be reuniting on stage for the first time in 18 years at last summer’s This Ain’t No Picnic festival in Oak Canyon Ranch in California, there was more than a little fanfare. 

For many tastemaker acts, the decision to regroup could fire up fractious debates. Hanna, Fateman and Samson rolled right into it. “I live like a mile away. How could I say no?’” laughs Hanna. The feat wasn’t just a short drive down the hill in the end though, as she acknowledges. “That's part of the reason we're going to come over to you [in the UK] because we did all this work. Jo and JD really revamped a bunch of the music. We have new videos. We have new costumes and all for one show. It seemed totally ridiculous to not take it to other places.” Samson agrees: “We all got off the stage at the This Ain’t No Picnic show and were like, ‘Wait, that's it? That's the end?’”

Rather than a finale, their This Ain’t No Picnic performance brought Le Tigre further towards their origin story. Nearly 20 years had passed since their last performance but their outspoken singalongs and danceable revolution have never felt more relevant, as Fateman attests. “When we originally said yes, it was right before the 2020 election here [in the US]. We had all this nervous energy [but] felt like it could be the cathartic thing to rock the vote. But more so to be there, to be together, and have that as a morale booster.”

Depressingly or not, Le Tigre’s legacy to be that boost has stood the test of time. Their music continues to bring a community together, creating a welcome world without war and violence. And, with so many of those subjects rife right now, their electro-pop sermons are the perfect antidote for ailing indie heads everywhere. Sure, they might not be able to shake up our world leaders but they’ve got the perfect ammunition to set about future change, as Fateman concludes: “What will people like in 300 years? Obviously, they'll still like Deceptacon!”

---

Le Tigre play Barrowlands, Glasgow, 6 Jun