Le Tigre performing at Union Transfer in Philadelphia, PA, May 27, 2023. Photo: Monica Simoes.
AS THE HOUSE LIGHTS suddenly dropped and the jarring first eight bars of “The The Empty” rang out last Saturday at Brooklyn Steel, Johanna Fateman, Kathleen Hanna, and JD Samson of the agitprop dance-punk band Le Tigre jogged onstage and into the final, sold-out night of their first tour since 2005. The choice of opening number, as with everything the band does, was calculated for maximum frisson with minimal means. Its insistently up-tempo dance beat and repeated refrain of “I went to your concert and I didn’t feel anything” takes musical mediocrity to task while setting stakes for Le Tigre’s twenty-first-century political art: These women want you to feel something, ideally while moving your body.
Back in the year 2000, Le Tigre debuted their live outfit at DUMBA, an anarcho-queer living and performance space in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood, notorious for its gender-bending sex and dance parties (a video of this first performance can be found on YouTube). At the time, Hanna was three years out from quitting her pioneering riot-grrrl band Bikini Kill and one year into a new life as a New Yorker. Fateman was creating the theory-laden underground zines that would kick off a career in art criticism, with regular bylines in the New Yorker and this magazine. Samson was graduating from Sarah Lawrence with a film degree, soon to join Le Tigre as their projectionist and later to sub in for founding member and fellow filmmaker Sadie T. Benning. Each Tigre was “On the Verge,” as they would sing in 2004, of a breakthrough.
At Saturday’s concert, the band luxuriated in the Tigre-isms that defined their original three-album run. As in the aughts, each song was illustrated with a backing video of karaoke-style lyrics set over colorful, cheeky scenes and geometric animations. Halfway through the set, the women changed from gaudy, bright-hued garments into black-and-white harlequin-esque ensembles which indulged the band’s tendency to wear costumes made of the same fabric in different cuts, usually dresses for Fateman and Hanna and pants for Sampson. There was the “herm choreography” described by Rachel Greene in the February 2003 issue of Artforum, most notably executed in their final number, a thrilling rendition of their breakthrough hit, the electroclash dance-a-long “Deceptacon.” Given the very public health struggles which Hanna has faced in recent years, I found the purity of her deeply embodied, yelping vocals more plangent than ever.
From left to right: Le Tigre’s JD Samson, Kathleen Hanna, and Johanna Fateman. Photo: Quinn Tucker.
The mood was less nostalgic for the Giuliani-era New York that birthed the band than it was celebratory of the endurance and accomplishments of the city’s queer and feminist art and music scenes, and the mood was jubilant both onstage and on the floor. While introducing their classic singalong syllabus, “Hot Topic,” Hanna encouraged the audience to add her bandmates’ names to the list of feminist (s)heroes—Gayatri Spivak, Faith Ringgold, and Carolee Schneemann among them—that make up the song’s lyrics. She prefaced “Keep on Livin’” with a dedication to the crowd’s resilience, asking us to sing the verse in the past tense—“We kept on, kept on livin’.”
I first heard Le Tigre in July of 2005. My mother had just gone to see them open for Beck at San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, where she purchased a CD of Feminist Sweepstakes (2001) to share with her music-obsessed, semi-outcast ten-year-old daughter. Le Tigre quickly became the soundtrack of my aughts adolescence. I wrote my first high-school research paper on the Riot Grrrl movement’s cooption into “Girl Power” and read Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2004). I never thought I would get to see this band which shaped me musically and intellectually, let alone bear witness on the digital page. Le Tigre’s triumphant return is proof that the feminist underground sustains itself.
While women and queers have in many ways won the cultural battle, political backlash is accelerating at an increasingly terrifying pace. Fateman, Hanna, and Sampson won’t let us forget the sad reality of “one step forward, five steps back” bemoaned on “FYR” (that’s “Fifty Years of Ridicule”), their jittery Shulamith Firestone–citing protest track. While there may not have been a genderqueer Sex and the City character when Le Tigre released their final album, This Island, in 2004, we took for granted that abortion was still legal in all fifty states. When the culture industry offers pseudofeminist platitudes in the face of mounting reaction, I return to the thesis of Ellen Willis’s 1984 essay “Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism”: “Cultural feminism is essentially a moral, countercultural movement aimed at redeeming its participants, while radical feminism began as a political movement to end male supremacy in all areas of social and economic life.” With Le Tigre, both then and now, Fateman, Hanna, and Sampson succeed in radicalizing the cultural.
— Canada Choate