Riot grrrl's in the middle of a cultural victory lap. In the past year alone, the early-'90s punk feminist movement has seen some noteworthy milestones: Sara Marcus published Girls to the Front, a terrific and meticulously documented history of the movement; NYU's Fales library opened the first comprehensive archive of riot grrrl zines; and Kathleen Hanna was honored with a star-studded (Tavi Gevinson! Kim Gordon! Kim Gordon's kid!) Knitting Factory tribute show filmed for an upcoming documentary on her career. Even before it was announced last week that her one-time solo project Julie Ruin is heading back into the studio, Hanna's name seemed to be hovering in the air. Even The New York Times could not resist waxing nostalgic.

Into this fortuitous moment comes the DVD release of Who Took the Bomp?—Kerthy Fix's documentary chronicling Hanna's feminist electro-punk band's final tour in 2004. The recently launched D.C. queer web zine Where the Girls Go screened the film on Saturday night to a sold-out crowd crammed into the imaginatively decorated (life-size, zine-style cut-outs of the band greeted attendees in the doorway), and woefully un-air-conditioned Gold Leaf Studios. The event brought together fans young and old, united by a passion for feminist punk, radical politics, and also that really gross and universally leveling feeling of sweat pooling in the small of your back.

Coupling sequin-laden performance montages with fly-on-the-wall tour footage and interviews with band members, Who Took the Bomp? explores the personal politics that animated Le Tigre over its eight-year run. Worn out from riot-grrrl infighting and the media's misrepresentation of the movement, Hanna—along with beatmaker Johanna Fateman and future queer heartthrob JD Samson—started the band in 1998 as a way to infuse messages of feminist empowerment into the traditionally dudely world of electro music.

Like any good rock doc, Who Took the Bomp? indulges in requisite moments of backstage goofiness. And if this is Le Tigre’s Don’t Look Back, the role of Donovan is played dutifully here by Slipknot, with whom the ladies shared the bill at New Zealand’s Big Day Out Festival and plot, with sarcastic glee, a backstage meeting. (Fateman pretends to have a younger brother who’s a fan, and poses for a picture with one band member whose look can only be described as Hellraiser chic. “Timmy will be so excited!” Hanna squeals.)

But the film's at its best when it digs a little deeper, interrogating the difficulties of bringing queer positivity to a wide audience (the band decides to pull an ad from Jane magazine when the publication shrinks from using the word lesbian) and Hanna’s notoriously prickly relationship with mainstream media. Hanna was always uncomfortable when the media portrayed her as the figurehead of riot grrrl, and here she voices her frustration at journalists who continue to define her legacy through the famous men she’s often associated with. Riffing on another trusty rock doc trope (foreign journalists say the darnedest things!), Fix focuses on an encounter between Hanna and a radio host in New Zealand who won’t stop asking her questions about one of these men in particular. “I understand you once wrote some graffiti on Kurt Cobain’s wall,” he says. “I wrote, ‘Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” Hanna answers, in the polite but wearied tone of somebody who’s had to answer that question incessantly over the past 20 years.

Hanna’s not the only focal point, though. Fix’s film provides well-rounded portraits of the other band members, including Samson, the proudly mustachioed lesbian who’s gone onto become the frontwoman of the band MEN and music’s most visible poster girl for female masculinity. Being a queer icon, the film shows, can be trying. While in New Zealand, she goes on what she thinks to be a date with a woman, but when the woman goes on a homophobic rant about how “nasty” lesbians are, Samson realizes there’s been a misunderstanding: This woman thinks Samson is a gay man. She leaves without correcting her and relays the incident to her bandmates with humor, but it’s maybe the most poignant moment in the film.

Fix, who co-directed last year’s Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, doesn’t quite plumb the depths of how provocative a moment this was in Le Tigre’s history (er, herstory?): Having just released its unexpectedly glossy major-label debut This Island, the band was courting a new audience and risking alienating fans who’d originally identified with its DIY ethos. But even if this dynamic is only implicit in the film, it still adds up to an engaging portrait of a band navigating the conflicts of making music with a message.

"I always fear erasure," Hanna says toward the end of the film, expressing requisite worries about her band’s legacy. But Who Took the Bomp? should serve as a lasting document of Le Tigre’s message—and the packed house sweating it out on Saturday night proof that there’s are still plenty of people still willing to listen.

With her bright blonde bob and bangs, Sia resembles a young girl, and she seems to have the joy of one. Appearances can be deceiving: the Australian singer's soulful, heartfelt voice seems like it doesn't fit her body or colorful personality. She effortlessly hits notes that sound so simultaneously haunting and wrought with emotion that even hard-asses like David Letterman melt in her presence.

Sia got her start as one of the lead singers for the band Zero 7 before finally releasing a record of her own. Now dabbling in everything from dramatic ballads to electro-infused pop, she's currently on the "We Meaning You" tour promoting her fifth album, We Are Born, set to hit stores June 8th.

WCP: I'm actually obsessed with your music videos, they're so creative – where do you get ideas for [concepts] like that, for "Buttons," or especially the new one, "Clap Your Hands"?
Sia: I think ["Clap Your Hands" is] my weirdest. Well, the weird ones are the ones I make with Chris [inaudible], and I think that those are definitely my weirdest work because we're weirdos and we enhance each other's weirdness, and he knows that I'll go there, and I will take it all the way. And then some of the more beautiful ones, like "Soon We'll Be Found," are with [director] Claire Carre. I had the treatment for that, which was sign language, and her realizing of the treatment was the most interesting. I'm so glad I chose her because I do love that video so much. I love signing that song, and I do it live as well. Signing is like a beautiful dance language to me.

WCP: I know you love crafts, like you're doing Crafts for A Cause for Haiti. Do you like to combine crafts with music or do you think they're separate hobbies?
Sia: Well, here's the thing. I don't really listen to music, so certainly for me, I'm not crafting while listening to music unless my girlfriend [JD Samson of Le Tigre] is home, and then she puts the records on. And that's nice because I actually do like music when it's on, but I never initiate it. I don't know why, I'm just not that kind of person. Like, I'll put the television on in the background instead and I'll make, like, a thousand pom poms. So yeah, I guess I would consider them separate. Although an old family friend came to see me the other day, and then I was telling him about how I'll [eventually] probably just make records, but I won't really promote or tour them. I want to just be a songwriter and work with the Humane Society or something. I've realized the fame aspect of this job is just not for me. And he was like, "Yeah, but you're an artist, so you'll keep making art whatever it is, whether it's music, or art, or painting, or writing or whatever, but you're an artist." And I was like, "Oh yeah, I guess so," because I do like things that are arty I guess, and now I've started painting on glass with nail polish.

WCP: Were you surprised by the success of "Breathe Me"?
Sia: Actually no, originally I was surprised that the song wasn't successful. That was the one song I thought was gonna sell the album. I knew that the rest of the album was very hard to [sell], but I really thought "Breathe Me" was a hit. I knew it was too slow for radio at the time, but I really thought that it would be good for a movie and used in like, an emotional scene, and it wasn't. For like, over a year, no one touched it until the Six Feet Under people asked for it. Originally, they asked for it to be used in the season four trailer so, at the time, because I was very unsuccessful, we didn't have really any power. So we signed [a contract], so what that meant was that they could use it in any episode as many times as they wanted and they didn't have to keep paying me or asking for permission. So we didn't actually know that it was gonna be in the final episode, and then it happened and I got these emails from my friends in America—because I was in England at the time, and we were still only on season four, I think—and they were like, 'Oh my God, motherfucking amazing. You're gonna make television history. Like, fuck, and they used your song!' And I was like really excited because Universal had dropped me two weeks beforehand because I never made them any money. [Laughs.] So I hotfooted it over to America and Astralwerks picked up the album. All of Universal's companies in the U.S. passed on Colour the Small One, so Astralwerks picked it up and, yeah, it was like the day after the Six Feet Under episode I think Astralwerks picked up the record. Yeah, I'm really grateful for that because that's really my income, that song.

WCP: Do you have a preference for ballads or fast songs or just kind of whatever you're feeling at the time?
Sia: I think what happens is that I always co-write, so really, actually, the music informs me of what the song's gonna be about and really depends on my mood. So if I'm with my friend, I'll be like, "Let's write an uptempo one, I feel like writing an uptempo one," or, "Let's write a really sad one, I'm feeling sad, let's write a sad one." So he will start like a chord progression and a tempo and he'll keep going around different things until I say, "That that that, keep going around that." So then he'll go around the three chords that inspired me or excited me, and then that will inform the melody, and suddenly the melody will just come. And then vowel sounds come and words form and usually in like 20 minutes we'll have a verse and a chorus, and that's kind of how it happens. I will usually initiate whether it's gonna be a more uptempo song or a ballad, but really it's the music that informs the theme and the feeling.

WCP: I know you've released six of the songs [off the new album We Are Born] so the audience knows some of them, but is playing the unheard, new songs scary or do you enjoy playing them for a new audience?
Sia: It is scary—yeah, I feel bad, it's weird. For the first week [of the tour], I felt bad, like, this isn't fun for them. And then Sam [Dixon], my bass player, said to me, 'No, they're excited to hear new stuff, the fans are excited to get a sneak peek at the new stuff.' And I was like, 'Really? Because they responded so much more positively to the old songs that they knew.' So yeah, it makes me uncomfortable because I feel bad about it, because originally we scheduled this tour for after the record had been released, but then Sony needed an extra few months. When someone is spending the amount of money on you that they are, you say, "Whatever you say, Sony." But I do feel uncomfortable that I'm touring before the record is out and that I'm performing songs that people haven't heard yet.

Sia will be performing at 7 p.m. at the 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. $25.

Partyline (2005-present): Fascination with the riot grrrl movement burned brightly and briefly, but the members of Bratmobile—which formed in 1991—kept making music, on and off, until 2002. Sort-of based in D.C., Partyline isn't the first other project for singer Allison Wolfe, but it's had the most staying power. The band's name sort of reminds me of that chirpy Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie where they share a phone line, but Partyline's music—snotty, high-adrenaline, feminist—quickly corrects that association. The trio plays at the Velvet Lounge tomorrow night at 9 p.m. with Edie Sedgwick and Noisy Pig. Tickets are $8.

More riot grrrl second acts after the jump: flowcharts, riots in MTV studios, and Christina Aguilera!

Julie Ruin (1998): When Bikini Kill split up in 1998, singer Kathleen Hanna recorded a one-off album under the sobriquet Julie Ruin. Sonically, it's a bridge between Bikini Kill and Hanna's later electroclash outfit Le Tigre. The lyrics, too, are of the same smart, anarcho-feminist mold, but they also irreverently take measure of riot grrrl itself. Take "Aerobicide," whose spoofy video plays with the cop-show aesthetic of Beastie Boys's "Sabotage" promo, and contains mustachioed suits strategizing how to sell riot grrrl. Best shot? A flowchart in which all arrows point to "dance party."

Sleater-Kinney (1994-2006): This jagged Olympia, Wash.-based band emerged from Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17, and took the riot grrrl ethos to its largest audience yet. The best testament to the trio's success? None of the Sleater-Kinney fans I know have the same favorite album. Also, member Carrie Brownstein's Moniter Mix blog is one of the Web's best blends of hard thinking and excellent taste.

Comet Gain (1993-present): The members of the U.K. band Huggy Bear all joined other groups, none better than Comet Gain. This jangly outfit featuring bassist Jon Slade—one of the few males to play in a riot grrrl band—formed around the time Huggy Bear started a minor riot in an MTV studio, thus earning canonization by British rockists. Production assistants have rested easy since: Comet Gain's vibe is decidedly calmer.

Le Tigre: (1998-present): Kathleen Hanna's second second act. Originally conceived as the back-up band for Julie Ruin, Le Tigre pumped out three loud, rude, and synthy releases beginning in 1999, and is still making music in 2009—with Christina Aguilera. Don't get snooty: A decade after the fact, Le Tigre's "Deceptacon" remains the best part of any dance party where people have the chutzpah to play it.