For more than 65 years, Lincoln Center has hosted virtuoso concert musicians, opera singers and ballet stars.
But a noise queen with ripped tights and a screeching guitar?
Enter Kathleen Hanna and Tamar-kali, musicians with big bootprints in the punk scene, and curators of the latest iteration of Lincoln Center’s venerable American Songbook series. Their version honors “singer outsiders,” which includes a series of concerts and tributes to acts like the Slits, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex and more, this month and next. It’s the first time Lincoln Center has celebrated the raw, propulsive D.I.Y. genre of punk, let alone the women who kicked their way through.
The idea was to introduce an uptown audience to “our canon,” as Hanna, the Bikini Kill and Le Tigre frontwoman, and riot grrrl originator, put it. They booked contemporary artists to showcase punk’s elasticity, and to highlight styles that have historically been overlooked.
“As a songwriter, there’s a lot of delegitimizing of aggressive music,” Tamar-kali said. But curating for Lincoln Center offered validation: “It just feels like I’m real musician now,” Hanna said, and they both laughed.
Tamar-kali, a Brooklyn singer and composer (born Tamar-kali Brown), helped found the New York collective Sista Grrrl Riot, an outlet for feminist Afropunk, in the late ’90s; she and Hanna met in the early aughts and have been seeking ways to work together since.
Their curation, Tamar-kali said, was about providing cultural context for anybody who’s considered themselves alone on the margins. She wanted to show that you can “trace your existence from the transgressors, the rule-breakers, the rebels,” she said. “These voices have always existed in our society.”
The focus on women in punk was central to the vision of Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, who was hired in 2021 to shake up the programming. “I interviewed with this concept,” she said in a recent conversation alongside Hanna and Tamar-kali. Then it was just a matter of finding the right moment. The 50th anniversary of hip-hop, in 2023, came with a lot of fanfare — including at Lincoln Center. “Punk has been around for 50 years as well,” Thake noted.
Music that nourishes revolution may be well-timed now, the women felt. “I remember being like, I can’t change a law, but I can write a song and I can perform that song,” Hanna said. “And then the energy that comes in this room maybe can go outside of this room and become something else.” (They also wanted “to make something really fun and joyous — and angry,” Hanna said.)
Tamar-kali thought about “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!,” the seminal 1977 X-Ray Spex anthem. Its singer, Styrene, who died in 2011, was a biracial teenage Londoner with braces, and she announced herself with a sweetly voiced, then shouted intro: “Some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard. But I think, oh bondage, up yours!”
“What that did for women in punk globally — it’s important that we not only give flowers, but frame these flash points that create the opportunity for myself as an American artist to exist,” Tamar-kali said. (The 2022 documentary “Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché,” which explores her life and was co-directed by her daughter, screens on Wednesday.)
Princess Nokia, the New York hip-hop artist, is one of 10 vocalists performing at the tribute to Styrene on Friday. In an emotional phone interview, she called the gig “kind of a culmination of my entire life’s work.” Growing up on the Lower East Side, she was introduced to punk at grungy venues like ABC No Rio and treasured a black-and-white 1980 image of Styrene, Viv Albertine of the Slits, Debbie Harry, Siouxsie Sioux and other punk icons. “I had that picture in my Tumblr for 13 years,” she said. “This is exactly what I was raised on,” she added. “These are our music mothers.”
A banger of a lineup on April 6 is devoted to the rock group Fanny, the first all-female act to release an album on a major label. Founded in the late ’60s by two sisters, June and Jean Millington, Fanny became a taut foursome that, starting around 1970, delivered sharp, harmonizing guitar- and keys-driven rock. Though its admirers included David Bowie, Fanny was a largely underheralded progenitor for bands like the Go-Go’s. Social media, and a 2022 documentary, “Fanny: The Right to Rock” (also screening at Lincoln Center) helped unpack its legacy.
“I get comments all the time — ‘I was alive then. Why didn’t I know about you?’” June Millington, the guitarist and vocalist, said of fans’ newfound interest.
The music industry was often openly hostile to women rockers back then, said Alice de Buhr, the band’s drummer. But “the bottom line is, I think we were just 10 years too early.”
At Lincoln Center, Fanny will get tributes from Gossip, the dance punk trio, and ESG, itself an early female-led act, whose minimalist funk track “UFO” is among the most sampled in hip-hop history. Lincoln Center is also presenting Fanny, which released five albums and had two Top 40 hits, with the inaugural American Songbook Award.
Listening to the music now, “we’re amazed at how good we sounded,” Jean (Millington) Adamian of Fanny said in a video interview with her bandmates. “Back in the day, we were so focused,” rehearsing daily.
Her sister added: “I think that’s the part that a lot of people miss, is how hard we worked. You don’t become Fanny just by smoking a blunt and going, ‘Oh, isn’t this groovy.’ We were real professionals.”
The bandmates were tickled that the sold-out Lincoln Center show is at David Geffen Hall. They knew Geffen, the music mogul and producer, when he was just barely out of the mailroom. “He would just be bopping into the office, hanging out with our manager, to get tips on how to become a manager,” Millington recalled.
It’s been nearly 50 years since Fanny’s original lineup disbanded, but for decades, its members “have been trying to keep the band name alive long enough for people to remember that we were there,” de Buhr said. To be acknowledged by Lincoln Center, “it’s like, yeah, what we did mattered. And it’s nice to have that recognition.”
For the Bronx crew ESG, another group formed by sisters — Renee Scruggins and her younger siblings Valerie, Deborah and Marie, along with a friend, Tito Libran — Lincoln Center was the far-off home of the New York Philharmonic, watched on PBS. Renee Scruggins, ESG’s frontwoman, said the show next month will be the first time she has set foot in the space. (ESG has performed at Carnegie Hall, and in arenas like Barclays Center, opening for Robyn, one of the many acts that followed in its sonic footprints.)
ESG — it stands for emerald, silver and gold — was born as a way for the Scruggins girls to stay out of trouble, and its unique sound blended all the genres they were surrounded by in the Boogie Down borough, circa the late ’70s and early ’80s: punk, funk, hip-hop and Latin grooves. “We like to play music that makes people dance,” Scruggins, 65, said, in a phone interview from her home in Georgia. Crafting the Lincoln Center set list for the group, which now includes her children, she had one mantra: “You should not be sitting in your seat.”
Their joyful vibe was not always easy to come by. Her sister Valerie was once derided by a sound tech for drumming “like a girl,” Scruggins recalled. At another gig, “she beat that drum so hard that the stage started to come apart,” Scruggins said. “Those two stories go hand-in-hand in my mind.”
And even as its music became part of countless hits for others, ESG did not earn royalties, given the contracts the bandmates signed early in their career. (In 1992, they released an EP called “Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills.”) They fought for recognition, too. Once, when they were performing the wordless, spooky “UFO,” “I heard a kid say, ‘They are doing Doug E. Fresh!’” Scruggins recalled. “I said, excuse me, young man, Doug E. Fresh was doing ESG. Get it straight!”
Still, ESG remained true to their own path. “The whole course of our career, we stayed on independent labels, if not putting it out ourselves,” Scruggins said. “We wanted to do it our way.”
That ethos animates this Songbook series, its creators said. (It concludes with a performance by Ana Tijoux, the French-Chilean rapper, returning after a decadelong break.)
And though Tamar-kali confessed the idea that the curators missed something “keeps me up at night,” they also viewed the programming not as completist, but as an opinionated snapshot, meant to inspire and be built upon. It would be “an honor,” Hanna said, if “people could go, ‘Oh, they did this. I think I could do it better.’”
Tamar-kali said, “That’s what punk rock teaches you: If you don’t see it, be it. Make it.”
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