round 1

(14) bikini kill, ”rebel girl”
controlled
(3) rage against the machine, “killing in the name”
348-248
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 8.

“Not Exactly What We Had in Mind”: ron hogan on “killing in the name”

When we were picking our songs for this year’s tournament months ago, I had no way of knowing “Killing in the Name” would be quite so relevant to our immediate circumstances.
I mean, it’s always relevant to our immediate circumstances, in that some of those who work forces are still burning crosses—the FBI has known this since at least 2006, when the Bureau’s counterterrorism department issued a (then-classified) warning that, in addition to white supremacists trying to infiltrate their ranks, law enforcement agencies increasingly had to contend with “self-initiated efforts by individuals, particularly among those already within law enforcement ranks, to volunteer their professional resources to white supremacist causes with which they sympathize.”
Plain English: Cops were reaching out to hate groups and offering up the tools of the police state to strike out against minorities.
And, because the Republican Party responded to just about any revelations about this threat, or any threat of right-wing domestic terrorism, in the latter half of the 2000s with accusations of conservative bias, precious little was done about it—which means the links between law enforcement agencies and white supremacists have only gotten stronger and more extensive—to the point where off-duty cops from across the United States showed up at the Trump rally on January 6 that proved to be the initial stage of an insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol, the members of Congress, and the Vice President.
So, yes, the song is as thematically relevant today as it was when it was written in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of the police officers who assaulted Rodney King.
But here’s the thing: Donald Trump’s supporters are so caught up in their fantasy of being a revolutionary force, their delusions of overthrowing rather than reinforcing the status quo, that in early November, while we were still anxiously awaiting an official outcome to the presidential election, these clowns were dancing in the streets of Philadelphia to “Killing in the Name.” They actually thought the song spoke to their condition.
It was, as Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello tweeted, “not exactly what we had in mind.”

I mean, theoretically, I could imagine how a white supremacist with no sense of irony, and absolutely no awareness of Rage Against the Machine’s history, could hear a lyric like “You justify those who died / By wearing the badge” and somehow think it was an enthusiastic celebration of racially motivated police shootings. I can even, just barely, wrap my head around the notion that this white supremacist has somehow convinced himself (or herself) that “Fuck you / I won’t do what you tell me” is a rejection of the politically correct cancel culture of the left or whatever it is right-wing nutters call their bogeyman these days.
So is this what happens when a song of rebellion has been around long enough that it becomes a punchline for funny cat videos?

When one of the most overtly anti-institutional songs of the 1990s is now a cool riff for a band of college students who were at best infants when it came out?

(And that was nearly a decade ago; now, most college students are younger than The Battle of Los Angeles.)
This is where I confess that I first became familiar with “Killing in the Name” through the marching band version, then the cat video. For various reasons, even though I had moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 1992, my various music fandoms never quite overlapped with Rage Against the Machine, and it took more than two decades for me to catch up. When I did, however, my response was much like the gleeful screams of YouTube sensation U.U.U when he first played the band’s debut album while driving in his car.

You can see the moment U.U.U gets it: his head stops bobbing along with the music, and he goes “Whaaaaa?” as he concentrates on the first “some of those who work forces” section. “Ohhhhh, okay,” he says as the lyrics sink in. “Where you going with that, though?” Pretty soon he’s engaged in dialogue with the band (“Now you do what they told ya...” “Say it again!”) and effortlessly shifts singing along. By the end of the next section, the message is impossible to ignore. “Is he saying fuck the police?” U.U.U asks his audience. “He ain’t saying it, but is that what he’s saying?”
And then we get to the “fuck you / I won’t do what you tell me” passage, and U.U.U practically squeals with delight that, yes, “Killing in the Name” is, as he had just described it a few seconds earlier, “some Public Enemy ‘Fight the Power’-type movement shit.”
And, perhaps I’m projecting a little here, but some portion of the delight of discovery might stem from realizing that these guys knew the deal, and laid it out for everyone, nearly thirty years ago. It's like reading Austin Channing Brown's I'm Still Here or Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist: finally, somebody shows you the words to articulate this thing you’ve noticed about the way the world of white privilege works—has confirmed that it exists, explained how it came into being, and recognized its perniciousness, in one tight package.

It’s that intensity which makes the song a perfect throughline for Killing in Thy Name, a new short film by the Ummah Chroma that introduces itself as “a fire escape from the fiction known as whiteness and a spring for discovery.” Where Rage Against the Machine confronted listeners with the existence of systemic white privilege, antiracism activist Tim Wise guides a group of teenagers toward a recognition of the roots of that privilege—the effort by property-owning light-skinned people, beginning in the late seventeenth century, to subvert whatever class solidarity might come into being between poor people of all skin colors by reassuring the light-skinned poor that, really, they were all on the same team.
(And think, Wise continues, how much you aren’t taught growing up about the light-skinned Americans who refused to validate that concept of white supremacy.)
At one point, the film quotes an interview with RATM’s lead singer, Zack de la Rocha, from a ‘90s appearance on MTV, in which he baldly lays out the band’s opposition to the “genocidal” American project:

Any society or any government or any system that is set up solely to profit a wealthy class while the majority of the people toil and suffer and sell their labor power, so long as that system’s only true motive is profit interest and not the maintenance and the betterment of the population, to meeting human needs, then that society should not stand. It should be challenged and questioned and overthrown.

My mind goes back to those Trump supporters in the Philly streets, trying to rewrite a decisive defeat as an indisputable victory, and I wonder, “How the hell did you ever think this song was for you? That this band was for you?” The battle lines could not be drawn more clearly, right?
Then I remember that, after spending years insisting “blue lives matter,” Trump’s supporters engaged in open conflict with the police at the Capitol, leaving roughly a dozen dozen officers injured, one of them fatally. The ideological descendants of the racists who nearly derailed Ice-T’s career when he released “Cop Killer” in 1992 (right around the time RATM were recording “Killing in the Name”) have themselves become cop killers, and few if any of them show any signs of remorse.
The right engages in willful blindness—notice how the majority of the Republicans in Congress wants to simply move on from the recent unpleasantness in which their own leader steered a bloodthirsty mob directly into their path—and insists the rest of the nation blind itself as well. Rage Against the Machine and the Ummah Chroma remind us we do not have the luxury of self-inflicted ignorance. We must, as the students in Killing in Thy Name are told, “stay strong in a society that preys upon our weakness.”
The moral arc of America’s universe has, in some important ways, been bent back in recent years, but many of us do our best to keep it ascending toward justice. And though a 1776 Commission comes forward to challenge every 1619 Project, we do stay strong, whether we’re sustained by Rage Against the Machine, or the prophetic writings of James Cone, or the poems and essays of Audre Lorde, or whatever the source of our strength may be. And we continue to challenge, and to question, and, let’s hope, slowly but surely, bit by bit, to overthrow.

Ron Hogan helped create the literary Internet by launching Beatrice.com in 1995. These days, he publishes a newsletter about developing your writing practice, "Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives," at ronhogan.substack.com, and his next book, Our Endless and Proper Work, is coming from Belt Publishing later this year. He’s @ronhogan on Twitter and @theronhogan on Instagram.

When She Talks I Hear the Revolution: Emily Mills on “rebel girl”

That girl thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood
She's got the hottest trike in town
That girl, she holds her head up so high
I think I wanna be her best friend, yeah

By the time I first heard “Rebel Girl,” Bikini Kill had just broken up. It was 1997 and I was a 15-year-old awkward tomboy who wore Snoopy shirts and played drums in a happy punk band and was terrified to sing in front of anyone. I was also nearly oblivious to riot grrrl or women in punk music generally. I at least partly lay the blame on being surrounded almost exclusively by white, suburban punk and goth boys.
Things began to change when I met Mari. She was a year older but seemed miles ahead. We met over the summer between my freshmen and sophomore years of high school LARPing Vampire: The Masquerade. Hosted by a mix of alterna-kids from three adjacent cities in the far western suburbs of Chicago, we bonded over our mutual love of Ani DiFranco and outsmarting boys, and so we teamed up to take down the most powerful characters in the game.
Up until then, I hadn’t given much conscious thought to the ways in which I was different from most of my friends. I had frankly fought for and then accepted my place as the weird one, the tomboy, without realizing that I’d let myself get locked into a one-dimensional box from which I wasn’t sure how to escape.
Then I met Mari, and, well, a whole lot changed.

Rebel girl, rebel girl
Rebel girl you are the queen of my world
Rebel girl, rebel girl
I think I wanna take you home
I wanna try on your clothes, uh

Mari was smart and confident and weird. She shaved all her hair off and had her nose pierced. She talked openly about being bisexual, maybe, and read feminist authors and listened to women singer-songwriters and techno and forged her parents’ signatures so she could get out of our shitty public school to go to some fancy all-girls boarding school out east.
People called her a lesbian and she didn’t care. She didn’t care! I had been ducking and dodging similar accusations for years by then, bound-and-determined to prove that no, I like boys (too)! Because surely if I admitted just how much I liked girls, that would be it, labeled for life, the same lack of nuance or fluidity I’d been confined to for so long, just with the switch flipped the other way and even more harassment and abuse.
I had feelings for Mari that were unlike anything I’d felt about anyone before. Not even my friend and punk bandmate, Dave, on whom I’d had a massive, unrequited crush for so many years. He’d introduced me to Minor Threat and Black Flag and The Specials. He once referred to The Mighty Mighty Bosstones as his “secret band” and was legitimately crestfallen when “The Impression That I Get” hit the big time. He was an amazing guitar player and we wrote stupid, catchy songs and built tree forts together. I wrote a lot of tortured diary entries about him. Still, nothing prepared me for Mari. I was rocked.
Compared to everyone I’d ever known Mari was a whole-ass revelation. The only problem was, I couldn’t tell if I wanted to make out with her or just be her. Or both.
In interviews, Kathleen Hanna has said that’s precisely the feeling “Rebel Girl” is meant to capture. “I always liked the older, kind of bitchy girls in my neighborhood, who used to leave me out of things,” she told NPR in 2019. “I wanted to be them, or be like them, or make out with them—I didn't really know. [With "Rebel Girl"] I was kind of like, ‘All of the above.’"
I’d never heard music that expressed so clearly the inexplicable feelings I was feeling, and with such raw, unrestrained punk energy. They didn’t care what the boys at the punk shows thought about it, they were going to sing about whatever they damn well pleased, and make sure the girls in the room were at the front of the audience, too.
A skinny white kid with an Elmer’s glue mohawk at a punk show once sneered that female-fronted punk acts were just “period rock.” We were in a bunker-like building in a small town in southern Oklahoma, where a handful of local bands were playing a show for all the weird kids starved for culture deep in the Bible Belt. Between acts, a few dudes were taking turns showing off their best beats on the shared, battered old drum kit missing its hi-hat clutch. When I took my turn, I heard him say it behind my back, shout-whispering to another guy, whose snigger I cut off midway by launching into my fanciest, most blistering drum work. I knew I was better than everyone there that day, but I was also 16 and needed to prove it. Loudly.

When she talks I hear the revolution
In her hips, there’s revolution
When she walks, the revolution’s coming
In her kiss, I taste the revolution

The gay girl coming-of-age movie All Over Me was released in 1997. I remember furtively renting a copy from Blockbuster, no doubt sandwiched between two totally straight/innocuous titles and thrilling at its realistic and painful portrayal of queer girlhood. I also fell in love with its riot grrrl and indie rock soundtrack. It was my first exposure to Sleater-Kinney, to Babes in Toyland, Helium, even Patti Smith. I was almost mad that I’d never heard these bands before. I was determined to dig further, to transform my dude-heavy record collection into a deep well of queer and female angst and ideas. My mission led me, inexorably, to Bikini Kill.
It wasn’t easy. The internet was not yet an accessible wonderland of musical exploration. My local, mall-based record shop didn’t carry much punk at all, let alone riot grrrl. I guess it’s no surprise that those bands didn’t make it onto my radar until the riot grrrl and grunge scenes had, arguably, already crested and waned.
None of that mattered to me, though. The right music seems to find you at the right time: Just as I began more seriously grappling with my identity and who I wanted to be, was uprooted from one part of the country to another, watched my mother get sick and die, became suddenly an only child with a mostly absent, grief-stricken father. I needed an outlet for the boiling cauldron of fucking feelings that I’d become and in walked the most perfect anthem of all that and more. In “Rebel Girl,” I found everything I was feeling about Mari—about my girl friendships and my relationship with my own evolving, confusing, thrilling, maddening young life—all wrapped up in two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of groin-deep scream-singing and catchy, grimy guitar riffs.

That girl thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood
I got news for you, she is!
They say she's a dyke, but I know
She is my best friend yeah

Arguably Bikini Kill’s most classic and well-known song, “Rebel Girl” was recorded three separate times between 1992 and 1993, but the version most people hear and know is the last one. That’s when rock icon Joan Jett stepped in to produce, giving what had been a slower, sludgy, ode to the neighborhood cool girl a faster tempo and a bubblegum veneer. That was enough to propel it to a kind of hit single status, though thanks to lead singer Kathleen Hanna’s unashamed declaration of sapphic potential, the song didn’t get radio play outside of college stations and safe harbor hours.
While still not widely known, the song has gone on to gain steam as a feminist anthem, showing up in everything from political candidate fan videos to Rock Band 2 and introducing it to successive new generations. As much as the angry, protective punk youth that still lurks in my heart might rankle at the idea of her beloved song showing up in mainstream media, the softer bits of me are always glad when the music finds someone at the right time, just when they need it, transcending time.
Overall, the world has become a vastly different and better place for the weird and queer kids. The amount of representation in media, the laws, the access to other strange and queer kids through the internet and school clubs, would have blown my teen self away. But there will always be teen (and adult) angst. There will, for the foreseeable future, be the need to scream about confounding crushes and identity crises, about damning the man and smashing the patriarchy. Especially now, nearly a year into a pandemic that’s largely torn live music from our lives, I feel the loss of the needed, visceral experience of the live show. The bass frequencies that fill up your chest and push blood through your veins. The shivering joy of screaming or singing along to lyrics alongside dozens or hundreds of other people.

I never got to see Bikini Kill live. I did get to play in a tribute band where I took on Kathleen Hanna’s lead singer role. Over the years, with the help of awesome friends and distant icons like Hanna, I’ve finally overcome my fear of singing in public. Technique is an ongoing learning process, however.
I absolutely trashed my voice in the process. But I remember standing in the middle of a small, packed barroom—the audience literally inches away from me and the band—as my drummer started the rhythmic, chugging snare-and-bass-drum intro to “Rebel Girl.” We’d saved it for last and everyone seemed to lose their minds at the same time. We became one, collective organism, shout-singing the lyrics together in a chorus of sweaty, slam-dancing queers and weirdos and even a few normies. When we got to the end of the song, I collapsed gratefully into the embrace of the audience. As one, they lifted me overhead to crowdsurf as I rasped out the final, rambling lines:

Love you like a sister always
Soul sister, rebel girl
Come and be my best friend
Will you, rebel girl?
I really like you
I really wanna be your best friend
Be my rebel girl

“You don't have to only have a song be about desire, or only be about politics, or only be about a certain kind of love,” Hanna said. “It can be about a friendship love that also has a sexy element to it. Or if you want to read it a different way, like I'm singing to my girlfriend, fine. I just really like to write songs [with] the idea that you can be a lot of different things at once.”
Mari and I never did make out. We became the kind of friends I’d never known you could have; people who love you fiercely for your whole, messy, evolving self. People you love back with the same complexity, sometimes platonically, sometimes romantically, sometimes a raspberry swirl of both. I learned, over time, that I wasn’t only a tomboy, only a girl drummer, only into one gender, or only any one thing at all. We are all, like the song, open to interpretation.
In a world that tries to wedge everything into binary boxes, that kind of wide-open approach to life feels like the most rebellious thing of all.

Emily Mills is a professional queer, writer, and musician--formerly the editor of Our Lives, Wisconsin's LGBTQ magazine, currently the comms and media manager for a conservation non-profit. Her freelance work has appeared in various national and local outlets, if you care to search. She is one-half of the queer feminist punk band Damsel Trash and writes a bi-weekly newsletter called Grist From the Mills because she's a cheesy binch. Emily lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her partners and two teeny dogs. Find Emily on Twitter @millbot and Instagram @millb0t.