Hump Day Treat: Inaugural Double Header!!!

Here at Rock and the Single Girl, we find that Wednesday can often be the hardest day of the long school-slash-work week. You're not as tired as you are at the end of the week, but you're getting there, and at this point, you still have the energy to wish for the week to be over already and feel bad about yourself, but you're not close enough to the weekend to start relaxing.

Well, here at Rock and the Single Girl, we also say, to hell with all that! Sometimes a little music is all we need to turn our day or even our whole week around. So from now on, you can come on down to R&tSG and get a little Hump Day Treat -- a video with an upbeat, empowering song, sometimes old, sometimes new -- to help brighten your day!



I often feel like this performance is the one decent thing Carson Daly ever did on his stupid show. The quality is not so great, but that's okay because you can still see how much Le Tigre is having here. And serious points for the jump rope at the end!



Brought to us by the fine folks at Punktravesty, here we have a live performance of "TKO", Le Tigre's first single off their their major label debut, This Island. It's unfortunate that the official video is not available for embedding purposes, because that video is a lot of fun, but a live video might be better -- watching people get up onstage and play a song for an audience is always inspiring to me, anyways.

Were you one of those people who was utterly devastated when Bikini Kill broke up? I can't lie, I wasn't. It took me years to realize BK's deceptively simple genius. When Kathleen Hanna announced new projects Julie Ruin and Le Tigre in the late '90s, making old school fans and riot grrrl salivate at the thought, I was too busy having my face melted by early Sleater-Kinney and Team Dresch and trying to get through my first year of high school.

But even though I didn't like Bikini Kill when I first heard them, I was always, always, always intrigued by their lead singer. I still am, because Kathleen Hanna is more than a frontwoman, and more than a musician. Hanna is an ideologue. I'd go so far as to call her a successful feminist ideologue. She's a talented and charismatic artist, and she's used these skills to make feminism and feminist thought relevant to a new generation of women and music fans. Perhaps more shockingly, she and her bandmates JD Samson and Johanna Fateman have made feminism both relevant and danceable.

So listen to Le Tigre on this fine Hump Day -- listen, dance, and be proud to be a feminist!

This Hump Day Treat Double Header is dedicated to my dear friend Leigh Phillips, who is suffering an unbearable winter in upstate NY. Shake that groove thang baby, just like we did at The Shondes last June!!!

p.s. Got any good ideas for a future Hump Day treat? E-mail me and let me know: soundoftheatlantic@gmail.com