What does it mean to be joyful when it feels like the world is falling apart? Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna posed this question to the crowd at Roadrunner on September 22, and her performance that night just might have been the answer.
It was a Tuesday night, but nothing about the energy of the crowd suggested it. Roadrunner was packed wall to wall with fans of every age decked out in combat boots and patch-covered jackets. Kids who couldn’t have been older than ten stood alongside old-school punks who had been following the band since its Olympia days, as well as a handful of grandparents who looked just as thrilled to be there.
Bikini Kill took the stage to thunderous cheers, with fans jumping up and down as the band launched into “New Radio.” Hanna wasted no time setting the tone, telling the room from the outset that the concert was a space to experience joy.
From there, the band worked through songs from Pussy Whipped and The Singles, swapping instruments every few tracks. Drummer Tobi Vail took the microphone on “For Only" and the B-side “I Hate Danger,” while bassist Kathi Wilcox moved behind the drums and Hanna stepped up to bass.
All night, the band treated the crowd less like an audience and more like a group of friends they genuinely wanted to talk to. Hanna bantered between songs, cracked jokes, and somehow made the 3500-person-room feel as intimate as a basement show. At one point, she stopped the show to lead the crowd in “Happy Birthday” for a kid in the audience attending their first punk concert. The entire room sang along, turning the moment into a celebration of community.
Community was one of the concert’s central themes, and Hanna returned to it in a rousing speech toward the end of the night.
“We are living under white supremacist government,” she said, “and we have to create our own communities where we say it’s not okay. We have to look out for our friends and our people, and we have to imagine the future that we want.”
For a band whose music has always been deeply tied to resistance and collective action, the message of community felt especially fitting. But Bikini Kill did not present this communal joy as a means of escape from the realities outside the venue. Instead, it became a reminder that even in frightening times, people can come together, take care of one another, and create something magical.
By the end of the night, Roadrunner was still full of people jumping, shouting, and singing along as the band closed out their set with "Rebel Girl." Bikini Kill offered no easy answer to the question of joy Hanna posed at the beginning of the show. But in some sense, their concert offered something better: a space where people could come together and imagine the kind of future they wanted to live in, and have a good time doing it.
Clea Gaïtas Sur '27 is a staff writer.