
LE TIGRE (Kathleen Hanna, JD Samson, and Johanna Fateman) will kick off their FIRST tour in 18 years next month, bringing their joyous, experimental post-riot grrrl antics and conceptual multimedia performance to stages across the globe. Today, the band has announced a formidable lineup of support acts: Shamir, Morgan and the Organ Donors, Claud, Big Joanie, MAN ON MAN, Chicks on Speed, Pom Pom Squad, Dream Wife, Problem Patterns, Who is She?, Erin Markey, cumgirl8, Morgan Bassichis. The beloved trio will kick off their North American leg at the John Waters-hosted Mosswood Meltdown Festival followed by appearances in Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, NYC, Chicago, Boston and more.
Forming in New York City in 1999—when Rudy Giuliani was mayor and regressive hipster irony ruled— the band abandoned traditional punk instrumentation, pairing drum-machine beats and looped 8-bit samples with the simplest, serrated guitar riffs and call-and-response vocals. Though rage had its place in Le Tigre, the band, with celebratory songs such as “Hot Topic”—a shout-out to queer and feminist artistic inspirations (from David Wojnarowicz and Lorraine O’Grady to Catherine Opie and Vaginal Davis)—was a departure for Kathleen; she was best known as the singer of Bikini Kill, whose fans found feminist catharsis in her scorching vocals. “Deceptacon,” the lead track of Le Tigre’s debut, was perhaps an aesthetic bridge between that seductive register of rage and her new band’s dancefloor ambitions. It was later conceived of as music “for the party after the protest.”
The members of Le Tigre shared a vision for multimedia performance, touring with a slide projector in their early days with video later becoming a key component of their live show which fans can still look forward to on the upcoming tour. The band’s final show—until their reunion performance for the This Ain’t No Picnic festival at the Rose Bowl in August 2022—was on September 24, 2005, at the Operation Ceasefire concert at Washington Monument in Washington DC, where they joined a coalition of artists calling for an end to the U.S. war in Iraq.
Recently, Kathleen has been touring with Bikini Kill, running Tees 4 Togo (which sells artist-designed T-shirts to fund the non-profit organization Peace Sisters), and writing a book. JD has a full-time teaching position (as Assistant Arts Professor and Area Head of Performance at The Clive Davis Institute at NYU/Tisch), performs with CRICKETS, and tours with the original live score for the film 32 Sounds, directed by Sam Green. Johanna is an author and art critic who writes regularly for the “Goings on About Town” section of the New Yorker and for 4Columns; she is a contributing editor of Artforum.
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