Collapse Board's Bianca Valentino has a great interview with Kathleen Hanna. It covers how she got her start in music*, and what she's up to both musically (the Julie Ruin) and in general, and fairly extensively discusses her politics and the state of being a woman in rock today. If you need something important to ruminate on this Friday morning (I did), this is a great place to start. Here's an excerpt:

I recently did an interview with Kate Nash, she does an After School Rock N’ Roll for Girls program kind of like Rock N’ Roll Camp for Girls in the US. She told me she had interviewed the girls in the program at the beginning of it and it broke her heart that a lot of them said they were reluctant to pursue music because they thought you had to be pretty and they felt they weren’t pretty enough.

KH: Wow! I mean it’s a whole different world now. We have American Idol and that new ‘the whole package’ idea where it’s like you have to be a model first and a singer second. I think there’s a whole other way to keep women from playing music, it’s to say that you have to look a certain way. The thing is there is always some kind of thing!

Getting back to the Babes In Toyland show, people were saying that they are “too pretty” and if Kat was someone that people considered by traditional standards to be unattractive people would have been saying they’re “too ugly”. It doesn’t matter what you do, if you’re not a straight white male you’re going to get more harshly criticised than other people so you might as well just do whatever the fuck you want. It really is true that they are always going to find fault but yes, it is totally depressing. It’s depressing to be an older lady, who is doing music and is feeling like, is anybody going to want to listen to my music because I’m not a model that has a contract with an agency, who also happens to make music.

Read the whole thing here, and see the Julia Ruin live in December 2010 at Knitting Factory NYC after the cut:

* Confidential to Caroline Dodge—she loved Oliva Newton-John too!