Johanna Fateman | |
|---|---|
 Fateman performing with Le Tigre in August 2008 | |
| Background information | |
| Also known as | Jo |
| Born | May 16, 1974 |
| Genres | Indie |
| Occupation(s) | Writer, songwriter, musician, record producer |
| Years active | 1998–present |
Johanna Rachel Fateman (born May 16, 1974) is an American writer, songwriter, musician, and record producer. She is a member of the post-punk rock band Le Tigre and founded the band MEN with Le Tigre bandmate JD Samson.
Fateman grew up in Berkeley, California, where her father, computer scientist Richard Fateman is a professor at UC Berkeley. On the official Le Tigre website, Fateman refers to filmmaker Miranda July as being her "best friend from high school"; July is also from Berkeley. At the age of seventeen, Fateman moved to Portland, Oregon, to attend Reed College, which she later left for art school in New York City.
Fateman began her writing career producing zines including My Need To Speak on the Subject of Jackson Pollock ; ArtaudMania!!! The Diary of a Fan; The Opposite, Part I; and SNARLA, which she co-wrote with Miranda July. It was through her zines that Fateman first met bandmate Kathleen Hanna. At a performance of Hanna's band Bikini Kill, Fateman gave Hanna a copy of one of her zines. As Hanna has related in interviews, she was impressed and inspired by Fateman's writing, and the two kept in touch.
She donated her early zines and correspondence to New York University, where they are kept in the Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales Library. [1]
Beginning in 2016, Fateman became a columnist for The New Yorker , regularly contributing to the magazine's "Goings On About Town" section. [2] Fateman has also written critically about art and pop culture for Bookforum , Artforum , and 4Columns .
When Bikini Kill was on hiatus, Kathleen Hanna moved to Portland, where she and Fateman lived with several other women in an off-campus Reed College house known as "The Curse". Radio Sloan, who also lived at The Curse, taught Fateman how to play her first songs on a $60 bass guitar. Around this time, Hanna and Fateman formed their first band together, the Troublemakers, named after the film of the same name by G.B. Jones. The band played at house parties in Portland but broke up when Fateman moved to New York.
Hanna soon followed her to the East Coast, and the two women joined forces with filmmaker Sadie Benning to form Le Tigre. After their first album, Benning left the band to return to filmmaking. JD Samson joined the line-up for Feminist Sweepstakes , their next release. The band's most recent album is This Island [3] and in January 2007, they went on hiatus. [4]
In June 2011, a documentary film about Le Tigre's final year of touring was released by Oscilloscope Laboratories. Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour, directed by Kerthy Fix, documents the band's live show and features interview footage of the band members reflecting on their experiences.
While working with Le Tigre, Fateman started her own solo project called "Swim with the Dolphins", named after a self-help book by the same title with the subtitle "How Women Can Succeed in Corporate America on Their Own Terms". She made a five-song cassette entitled "the struggle for the full exercise of woman's equality" during the winter of 1999, which she describes as "sample-based, dj/dance-floor inspired music for the feminist rave in my head". [5]
After Le Tigre went on indefinite hiatus, Fateman and Samson worked together as DJs. They took on the name MEN, eventually adding members and turning into a full musical troupe. Although Fateman left early after becoming pregnant,[ when? ] MEN carried on, making electro-influenced dance music with a political slant. [6]
Fateman has continued to remix, write and produce music for other artists, often with JD Samson. Fateman, Hanna, and Samson wrote and produced the Christina Aguilera song "My Girls" featuring Peaches for Aguilera's album Bionic . Fateman wrote about the experience on the Le Tigre blog: "Together we tailored themes and specific references to her personality and image but found a ton of common ground in our aim to make upbeat danceable tracks celebrating female friendship, strength, and of course, PARTYING. And while the giant sound of her stacked vocals and the pop sheen she lends to the tracks might seem at odds with Le Tigre's aesthetic roots, it really works. The songs have a lot of elements we're known for, like a garage guitar sound, schoolyard chants, new wave-y synths, electro beats, and somehow it all sounds crazily right with Christina's unbelievable voice." [7]
Fateman was the sound designer for experimental filmmaker Cecilia Dougherty's Gone. [8] She also served as the music director and composer for artist Laura Parnes' 2011 episodic video work County Down. Fateman and Samson are credited as co-writers on the 2011 Cobra Starship song "Shwick".
Since 2006, Fateman has been part-owner of a West Village hair salon called Seagull. Established in the 1970s and named after the novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull , the salon was the city's first unisex barber shop. [2] Fateman runs the business side while her partner, Shaun Surething, handles the styling crew. [2] Surething (a regular collaborator with performance artist K8 Hardy) and Fateman were featured in a short documentary on Current TV. [9]
Bikini Kill is an American punk rock band formed in Olympia, Washington, in October 1990. The group originally consisted of singer and songwriter Kathleen Hanna, guitarist Billy Karren, bassist Kathi Wilcox, and drummer Tobi Vail. The band pioneered the riot grrrl movement, with feminist lyrics and fiery performances. Their music is characteristically abrasive and hardcore-influenced. After two full-length albums, several EPs and two compilations, they disbanded in 1997. The band reunited for tours in 2019 and 2022, with Erica Dawn Lyle on guitar in place of Karren.
Kathleen Hanna is an American singer, musician and pioneer of the feminist punk riot grrrl movement, and punk zine writer. In the early-to-mid-1990s she was the lead singer of feminist punk band Bikini Kill, and then fronted Le Tigre in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since 2010, she has recorded as the Julie Ruin.
Tobi Celeste Vail is an American independent musician, music critic and feminist activist from Olympia, Washington. She was a central figure in the riot grrl scene—she coined the spelling of "grrl"—and she started the zine Jigsaw. A drummer, guitarist and singer, she was a founding member of the band Bikini Kill. Vail has collaborated in several other bands figuring in the Olympia music scene. Vail writes for eMusic.
Le Tigre is an American electronic rock band formed by Kathleen Hanna, Johanna Fateman and Sadie Benning in 1998 in New York City. Benning left in 2000 and was replaced by JD Samson. They mixed punk's directness and politics with playful samples, eclectic pop, and lo-fi electronics. The group also added multimedia and performance art elements to their live shows, which often featured support from like-minded acts such as the Need.
Julie Ruin is the debut solo album by Kathleen Hanna, released on September 29, 1998, through Kill Rock Stars. She recorded the album in 1997 whilst taking a break from Bikini Kill. Hanna recalled:
[It] was made as Bikini Kill was in breaking up, a guy who worked across the street from my apartment building was stalking me and I was being treated, in my own community, like a historical oddity. The solo record helped me remember that I was just a fucking person who liked being creative.
Tammy Rae Carland, is a photographer, video artist, zine editor, current provost at California College of the Arts (CCA), and former co-owner of the independent lesbian music label Mr. Lady Records and Videos. Her work has been published, screened, and exhibited around the world in galleries and museums in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berlin, and Sydney.
Jocelyn Samson, known professionally as JD Samson, is an American musician, producer, songwriter and DJ best known as a member of the bands Le Tigre and MEN.
Feminist Sweepstakes is the second studio album by American dance-punk band Le Tigre. It was released on October 16, 2001 by record label Mr. Lady.
Le Tigre is the debut studio album of American music trio Le Tigre. It was released October 25, 1999 on Mr. Lady Records. The album combined pop music with the band's feminist political lyrics. It received positive reviews from music critics.
This Island is the third and most recent album by American dance-punk band Le Tigre. It was released by Universal Records on October 19, 2004. The album was the band's only one for a major label and reached number 130 on the Billboard 200. As of 2008, the album had sold 90,000 copies.
Kathi Lynn Wilcox is an American musician. She is the bass player in Bikini Kill and guitar player in the Casual Dots. She was also a member of the Julie Ruin and the Frumpies.
JD Samson & MEN, originally named simply MEN, was a Brooklyn-based band and art/performance collective that focuses on the energy of live performance and the radical potential of dance music. MEN spoke to issues such as trans awareness, wartime economies, sexual compromise, and demanding civil liberties. The collective disbanded in late 2014.
The discography of Le Tigre, an American electro–punk band, consists of three studio albums, seven extended plays, four singles, one video album and seven music videos. Le Tigre was formed in 1998 by Kathleen Hanna, Johanna Fateman and Sadie Benning. The band is known for its left-wing sociopolitical lyrics, dealing with issues of feminism and the LGBT community.
Sini Anderson is an American film director, producer, performance artist, choreographer, dancer and poet, from Chicago, Illinois. Anderson is widely known for directing The Punk Singer (2013), a documentary about riot grrrl musician Kathleen Hanna's legacy and experience with late-stage Lyme disease.
Riot grrrl is an underground feminist punk movement that began during the early 1990s within the United States in Olympia, Washington and the greater Pacific Northwest and has expanded to at least 26 other countries. A subcultural movement that combines feminism, punk music, and politics, it is often associated with third-wave feminism, which is sometimes seen as having grown out of the riot grrrl movement and has recently been seen in fourth-wave feminist punk music that rose in the 2010s. The genre has also been described as coming out of indie rock, with the punk scene serving as an inspiration for a movement in which women could express anger, rage, and frustration, emotions considered socially acceptable for male songwriters but less commonly for women.
Becca Albee is an American musician and visual artist who was a founding member of the band Excuse 17, which was an early pioneer in the riot grrrl and third-wave feminism movements. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.
The Punk Singer is a 2013 documentary film about feminist singer Kathleen Hanna who fronted the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, and who was a central figure in the riot grrrl movement. Directed by filmmaker Sini Anderson and produced by Anderson and Tamra Davis, the film's title is taken from the Julie Ruin song "The Punk Singer", from Hanna's 1998 solo effort.
Sara Marcus is a writer and musician best known for her 2010 book Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. She began her writing career as a participant in the riot grrrl movement, writing zines as a teenager in Washington, DC. She subsequently worked as a journalist, writing about music and politics. In 2018, she earned a PhD in English at Princeton University and is an assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
"I'm with Her" is a song by American electroclash trio Le Tigre, released on October 19, 2016. It is the band's first single in eleven years following "After Dark" in 2005. The song was released as a one-off single in support of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and her unsuccessful 2016 Presidential campaign. The song also takes swipes at the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who would be elected President of the United States two weeks after the song's release. The song's title was a campaign slogan for Clinton.
Ramdasha Bikceem is an American writer, singer, and musician. She published the pioneering riot grrrl zine GUNK in the early 1990s, which explored intersections of race and gender in punk and skateboarding.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
