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Kathleen Hanna first met Beastie Boys‘ Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz on a 1995 Australian festival called Summersault where her band, Bikini Kill, and the Beasties shared a bill. As soon as she saw him, she decided he was “the sexiest boy in the world,” as she wrote in her upcoming memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk. She flirted with him on the tour but kept a respectful distance, knowing that he was married at the time. But she stayed in touch with him after the tour, speaking with him on the phone and via a true signpost of the Nineties: fax.
In an exclusive Rebel Girl excerpt ahead of the book’s May 14 release date, Hanna writes about the love she felt for him — “the kind of love that starts driving the car of your body” — as they spoke to each other on the phone while he lived in Los Angeles and she in an Olympia, Washington, apartment complex called the Angelus. The only Beasties record she owned at the time was a 12-inch of the Ill Communication single, “Root Down” (also the chapter title), until he sent her a mixtape. But she was still infatuated.
She recalls the early days of their thoroughly modern courtship in the same conversational manner as the rest of the book, which chronicles her youth, the histories of her bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, and the Julie Ruin, and stories of people she’s known throughout her life like Kurt Cobain, Joan Jett, and Kim Gordon. She’ll be expounding on all the stories within the memoir on a book tour, which kicks off in Brooklyn on May 14. And she’ll be on the road with Bikini Kill this summer.
For now, though, here’s her account of how she fell in love with Ad-Rock, and the pangs of heartache she felt about the tension surrounding one of the first times they met up. The Beastie Boy divorced his first wife in 1999 and married Hanna in 2006.
I lay on my bed talking to Adam on the phone for hours on end. He was calling me from his house in LA and I was in my apartment in the Angelus. I knew we were more than friends, but I wasn’t sure what was happening. I just loved the sound of his voice. Every second I got to be a part of his world was worth it.
I had one Beastie Boys record at the time. It was a twelve-inch of their song “Root Down.” I listened to it over and over and almost came in my pants when Adam’s voice came on. I was in the kind of love that starts driving the car of your body. Everything else was colored by its presence and yet paled in comparison to the tornado inside my stomach.
When I told my mom “I’m in love with someone,” she asked who it was. I said, “I can’t tell you because he’s famous and he’s married,” so she started guessing: “Bryan Adams? Tom Petty? Bruce Springsteen? The singer from Hootie and the Blowfish?” When I accidentally said “Adam” in one of our conversations, my mom screamed, “I know who it is, I know who it is! It’s Adam Ant! You used to have posters of him all over your room!”
Since we didn’t have the internet back then, I couldn’t look at pictures of Adam Horovitz every day like I wanted to. Sure, I could walk down to the new magazine store, Bulldog News, and look at magazines he was in, but I lived in a small town.
The opening of Bulldog News was not great news to me. Once it opened, people started seeing Bikini Kill in magazines, and everyone thought we were super famous. Which also meant people thought we were rich and impervious to pain. In truth, I was broke and couldn’t afford to buy most of the magazines we were in. To know what was being said about us, I had to go to Bulldog News and read the magazines there. It was embarrassing to feel people watching me as I read about my own band. It was like the analog version of someone watching you google yourself. I could only imagine the gossip if someone saw me staring too long at a picture of the Beastie Boys when there were already rumors that I was dating one of them. It’s not that I cared about gossip, I just wanted something of my own.
So I went to Sam Goody at the mall. No one I knew went to Sam Goody at the mall. I looked at Beastie Boys album covers for like an hour. Then I saw the poster rack and found what I was looking for: a Beastie Boys poster. There he was, standing in the middle, the sexiest boy in the world. I bought it. I kept the poster rolled up in my apartment closet and would take it out several times a day to see my one and only true love. Sometimes I would cover Mike and Yauch’s faces so I could just see him. And yeah, I kissed him all over his gorgeous pouty mouth. I hoped that someday I would get to kiss him on his actual lips.
My twin bed turned into the 1990s version of a fainting couch. I was constantly throwing myself on it while I drooled over Adam in my head. Everything was large: my longing, my lust. My desire filled every room. And when I wasn’t listening to “Root Down” for the hundredth time, I was listening to the cassette mix Adam had sent me.
Finally, he called and said, “I want to come visit you.” I know I should’ve been worried about people seeing us together since he was on a major label, super famous, and technically still married, but I didn’t care.
I only had a single bed in my apartment and didn’t want to assume he’d sleep in it with me, so I spent nearly every penny I had on a second mattress. With the money I had left I bought bread, peanut butter, jelly, coffee, and a watermelon.
As I was shopping, I kept worrying that I’d end up broke, staring at the empty mattress. Then I thought, Fuck it. Planning for this is the most pleasurable thing I’ve done in years. I’m gonna enjoy it. I’m gonna carry that watermelon to my car while thinking about his beautiful brown eyes.
Friday, he called me from the airport and said he’d missed his plane. I knew he was lying. Maybe he’d decided to get back together with his wife.
“I want to come,” he said. “I just can’t.”
“Fuck you,” I said, and hung up. I drove to Capitol Lake and fast-walked around it, trying not to cry.
When I got back to my apartment, I stuffed the new mattress in the closet with the poster and drank a lot of water but did not eat. I just sat at my table by the window smoking cigarettes, drinking glass after glass of water, and staring at the sky. Sometimes the phone would ring, but I didn’t answer it. It was like one of those movies where a person just stays in the same place while the sun rises and sets behind them.
After a few days I needed to eat, so I put the watermelon on a cutting board in the middle of the floor. I cut off a piece with a big knife. I decided I would eat nothing but watermelon, and when it was gone, I would stop brooding over Adam and move on.
I didn’t shower. I drank coffee and ate watermelon. I felt like I was dangling from a cliff in a car that was about to explode. Then I answered the phone.
“I’m coming to see you,” Adam said. “I’m ready now.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” I said.
The next thing I knew he was helping me pull the mattress out of the closet.
From Rebel Girl by Kathleen Hanna. Copyright © 2024 by Kathleen Hanna. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
