After being hugely instrumental in driving the intersection of feminism with punk rock as part of Bikini Kill, around the turn of the millennium Kathleen Hanna put that band on the back burner to focus on a new venture, the electronically-influenced and proto-post-punk act Le Tigre. With Bikini Kill having made a return to touring earlier in 2023, Le Tigre has followed suit, and the trio of Hanna, Johanna Fateman, and JD Samson assembled a lengthy set of beloved tracks for their first performances since 2005. Leveraging a huge screen behind the bandmates and panels affixed to the ceiling, and complete with full lyrical captions woven into the visuals, it’s a sensory suite befitting such a long-anticipated event – so anticipated in fact that a second date was added at the Royale in Boston after all the tickets for the first evaporated with haste.
Given the tour’s intricate presentation, there are always opportunities for technical hitches, and something brings the band to a halt after the first few seconds of ‘My Art’, just after the band take the stage to massive cheers. In the unscheduled pause, Hanna recounts a memory jogged by their need to restart the show, involving a bizarre place called the “Starting-Over House” that practiced therapeutic techniques that were not so much discredited as they were never accredited at all. But with the issue resolved the song can begin in earnest, and while Fateman’s guitars carry a noisy charge and the drum machines and synths drive the song ahead, it’s every bit as volatile as anything Bikini Kill ever did, facing head-on a creative environment that often seems unwilling to recognize women as artists unless they succumb to tragedy.
The earliest portion of the night is home to a pair of songs named in acronyms, first T.K.O. and then F.Y.R., the latter short for “fifty years of ridicule”. Samson speaks before the song begins, saying that unfortunately a lot of these lyrics remain relevant today. It’s a lament for how, even as progress is made, it’s hard to outweigh the forces clawing things back toward some status quo: “one step forward, five steps back,” as the line goes. Towards the conclusion Samson leaps up and kicks the air, epitomizing the fury of the music. But while the band’s most politically-charged material remains pointedly essential, there are some things that have changed with time – Fateman takes lead vocals on the more interpersonally-minded ‘Mediocrity Rules’, which she says, by contrast to F.Y.R., is something she wouldn’t still write today. As with the recent Bikini Kill shows, listening to the members speak, having lived and breathed and grown alongside the movements and fiery ideologies they helped stoke, is just as gratifying as seeing them perform their work.
“You guys are on fire tonight,” Hanna says to the eager crowd, who are certainly making it feel like something other than a Monday. On a lighter note, she reminisces a bit on the antics of her bands’ past tours, how the drink of choice used to be a bottle of vodka but now a Diet Dr. Pepper is more akin to excess, and on ‘Les and Ray’, the closer from the band’s self-titled debut, she reaches back almost as far as memory can go. The song recounts how she first came to find comfort in music: during a fearful childhood, she moved her bed nearer the window where the neighboring couple could be heard playing piano, a fitting predictor of everything she and her bands would go on to do, finding resistance in music themselves and becoming – by way of cassette, CD, radio, and vinyl – Les and Ray to untold others.
After a furious conclusion to the first portion of the evening that culminates in Samson standing on one leg and full-on punching her drum pad, instruments are re-tuned and mic stands reset to their marks while ‘Get Off the Internet’ plays as an interlude, its title quite prescient way back in 2001. The trio return soon in matching black-and-white suits, Fateman in the center of the stage to start, and the second half of their set focuses heavily on choreography between the three. At the close of ‘On Guard’ Samson sings a refrain of, “Are you a boy or a girl?”, a question that has long plagued gender-nonconforming people, parroted by a group of people inexplicably desperate to crunch the whole of human experience into one of two boxes for their convenience.
Equally as accurate in its foreshadowing as ‘Get Off the Internet’ is ‘My My MetroCard’, which calls out then-NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani long before he became America’s Meltiest Grifter. Its sonics call back to the pioneers of previous decades, such as Gang of Four, with a vocal pattern that echoes ‘Natural’s Not in It’ – but it’s hardly imitation, rather evolution. To the crowd, Samson next invites everybody in attendance to, “Be yourself, take up space, jump up and down, and scream “Visibility!” with us.” In an environment that has fought women, the gender non-conforming, and basically anyone else they could pin the antithesis of “the norm” on – it’s always a genuine blessing to witness this kind of community at a show. Le Tigre – like Bikini Kill, like Hanna’s Julie Ruin – is the real deal, and it’s abundantly clear what they’ve meant to people as part of this generations-long, gradual, unending effort to push spaces of uncompromising acceptance to the fore. Samson goes quiet for just a moment when the dancing’s done, and admits: “I just did that whole thing with my fly down”, to which Hanna eagerly quips: “Visibility!”
The final pair of songs in the night are two that helped make the band’s debut so loved – ‘Phanta’ spins a sci-fi parable based on a doomsday scare from the late Sixties, set to a synth line quibbed from a measure of John Williams’ ‘Imperial March’, though sterilized by the removal of its syncopation. Fateman wields a cymbal in each hand, crashing through occasionally, and the song fades til only a subtle beat remains. Hanna and the band circle the center of the stage, bouncing around as the pattern speeds up slowly but surely, until the telltale hook comes through and ‘Deceptacon’ begins. It’s the song that has been synonymous with the band’s essence since the beginning, the kind of composition you feel like you could show to anyone and have it be fully self-explanatory why it’s so invigorating. Every light in the place is on, from stage to ceiling, as bright as the midday sun, and the mood is as well. The floor vibrates all the way to the back of the room with everyone jumping up and down to an all-time great combination of rhythm and vitriol. Hanna leaps over a jump rope as the song comes to its end, ushered there by a final set of robotic pleasantries: “See you later!” The band waves to the crowd, capping a joyous night that for some has been nearly twenty years in the making.
Photos and Review by Collin Heroux
