Life Changing Albums: Jennifer Toms talks up debut Bikini Kill EP

Jennifer Toms is perhaps best known as the bassist and vocalist for Scary Women, a recently defunct Lansing-based punk outfit. Now, Toms fronts A Rueful Noise, a new local outfit. In this week’s “Life Changing Albums” edition of Turn it Down, she tells how a six-song EP shaped her musical path. Here’s what she had to say:

In 2018, I wrote a song of which I was immensely proud: It was angry, it was loud, it was feminist. When I played it in the band Scary Women, it went over well live and it made it onto our album.

It was also “Double Dare Ya,” by Bikini Kill. Like, note for note, just at a different tempo.

I realized this a year after the album came out and was appropriately mortified. I was certain I would be exposed as a punk rock fraud desperate to emulate her hero, Kathleen Hanna, Bikini Kill’s singer, to whom I owe much of my musical inspiration for the last decade. 

Now that I’ve put this shameful episode in print and hopefully behind me, I can explain why Bikini Kill’s 1992 EP is the album that most changed my life. 

It began where so many feminist punk narratives do, at Michigan State University’s Department of English. I was unabashedly enamored of one of my professors: She was cool and hip and wickedly smart. She was what young(ish) Jenny wanted to be when she grew up. A friend at the time casually mentioned that she was in a band once. “They were kinda like Bikini Kill.” I immediately filed this away this “Bikini” whatever under “must research.”

Then, in my mid-30s, it happened. I don’t know when, I don’t know how, but I discovered the Riot Grrrl triumvirate: Heavens to Betsy with Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker, Bratmobile and the indominable Bikini Kill for whom I fell hard. I won’t ever forget finding Bratmobile’s “Potty Mouth” on gleaming pink vinyl and feeling that I had arrived at something very personal and important and impactful.

For I was angry. I was an impassioned feminist with nowhere to scream my displeasure. Until, that is, I got in the car and belted in my most ragged voice “Hey girlfriend! I got a proposition goes something like this:/ Dare you to what you want. / Dare you to be who you will. / Dare you to cry right out loud. / You get so emotional, baby”, the opening lines to Bikini Kill’s EP. I would yell with abandon, and at a stoplight one day I realized it was time I learned how to scream. And that I needed a band. 

It’s Kathleen Hanna’s voice that was so shocking when I first played their record. It was ugly and powerful and she could throw it a dozen ways to impersonate the characters of her songs. And, she took ownership over vocal styles that were usually the territory of male artists: the grunting, the screaming, the growling. But she did it in such a fashion that it mocked the apparent misogyny of her punk scene. 

By the time I hit the third track, I was positively manic. The title “Suck My Left One” might provoke a giggle at first, but not after you watch Hanna grab at her breast while dismantling the notion of a woman’s body as anything other than her own. Bikini Kill’s politics are so evident in that their songs helped form the foundations of Riot Grrrl, a feminist movement of the early 1990s that began in Olympia, Washington, and soon spread nationwide. They blasted their rallying cry, “Girls to the Front!”, through zines, performances and music. 

The call for a feminist space was in response to a largely male punk scene that had literally and figuratively pushed women to the margins. Hanna, in response to attempts to shunt women off stage, sang “Suck My Left One” in a bra with “SLUT” written across her belly. I was mesmerized as I watched the video, and wholly and completely inspired.

In years following, I got ahold of every Bikini Kill album I could find. I kept them in a record case with roses on it separate from the other vinyl in the house, lest they be sullied by something uncool. I was unmistakably under the influence of Bikini Kill when writing songs and lyrics. I listened to them every spare moment. And I learned how to scream. 

Bikini Kill’s first EP changed the course of my life not just musically, but personally. With their inspiration, I found a way to translate my feminism from something I studied in graduate school into activism as a musician. This album made me a more confident woman. 

Several years ago, Scary Women were playing a house show in Kalamazoo. We were covering Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl” at the time. We were received very warmly by the young people crowding the basement, so we busted into it for the encore. Suddenly, I hear “Girls to the Front!” and there is a young woman beaming at me from the front of the stage. I nearly cried.

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