Bikini Kill – Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah [Expanded Reissue] (2014)

For the 20th anniversary of the release of their legendary split LP with U.K. riot grrrls Huggy Bear, Bikini Kill have given their material a remastered reissue, although the new edition of Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah leaves out Huggy Bear’s material in favor of some unreleased Bikini Kill tracks.
Bikini Kill were about a year away from their first full-length album, 1994′s Pussy Whipped, when they cut the original seven tunes for Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah on a four-track machine in their rehearsal space, but the band already sounds ferociously confident, and the lo-fi chaos of their purposefully stripped-down punk rabble-rousing hits the bull’s-eye, especially when an audio clip of an appallingly clueless young man segues into the venomous “White Boy,” and when Kathleen Hanna declares “That girl acts like she’s the queen of the neighborhood/I’ve got news for you — SHE IS!” on the über-anthemic “Rebel Girl.” Bikini Kill also showed they had some pop smarts on the original side closer, “Outta Me,” and if this set isn’t the best music in Bikini Kill’s catalog, it typifies what made them iconic as well as anything they ever released. Bikini Kill previously reissued the YYYY songs on the collection The First Two Records, but this time, the material has been remastered, upping the fidelity slightly, and they’ve added seven tracks from the vaults. The bonus material material certainly fits the time and place in which this music was created, but “George Bush Is a Pig” has dated more than a bit, as has “Fuck Twin Peaks” (especially since it’s difficult to tell what Hanna is ranting about in the latter, beyond a presumed dislike of David Lynch’s television series), and “I Busted in Your Chevy Window” sounds like it belongs at a poetry slam more than a show. As a document of a crucial moment in Bikini Kill’s history, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah is invaluable to anyone studying the nexus of punk rock and feminism (or any sort of radical activism, ultimately), but the archival tracks are musically less compelling than the Huggy Bear tunes they replace.