"Who here loves Bikini Kill?" asked the feminist organizer Sonya Passi on-stage at Olivia Rodrigo's Daisy Chain Fields festival in Irvine, Calif., on Saturday. Under a merciless, 94-degree sun, the crowd roared.
Passi had just identified herself as the founder of FreeFrom, a non-profit working to end gender-based violence by providing survivors with material support. It's one of 10 organizations benefitting from the $20 million raised by the inaugural edition of Rodrigo's one-day, women-led concert, which brought together the likes of Chappell Roan, The Breeders, Stevie Nicks and Doechii for an intergenerational audience of about 45,000. "Bikini Kill helped teach an entire generation that you don't wait for permission to be loud about what matters," Passi said of the '90s feminist punk icons, who now faced thousands of girls for whom the band's galvanic anthems, like "Double Dare Ya" and "Rebel Girl," were designed.
Frontwoman Kathleen Hanna didn't waste a second cutting through to them. "A lot of us feel like this government f****** hates us and wants us dead," she said before Bikini Kill played a note. "They don't give a s*** about anybody's healthcare. They don't care if we die in parking lots of curable illnesses. They don't care if our rights are taken away. They're ripping people off the streets. It makes it hard for me in my body sometimes to have a good time 'cause it's hard to turn it off. And I was thinking on the way here, what a gift to be able to play for you. What a gift Olivia has given all of us to do this festival." Then Bikini Kill instigated its intervention of Revolution Girl Style Now! as young women in T-shirts proclaiming "Girls to the Front" and "F*** AI" screamed.
With proceeds going to organizations like Center for Reproductive Rights and National Women's Law Center, the first Daisy Chain was an extension of Rodrigo's consistent outspokenness about both abortion access and her musical heroes, who've influenced the pop star's emotional clarity and ripping sound. For the artist's Guts tour in 2024, Rodrigo donated ticket proceeds to abortion funds and advocacy groups passed out emergency contraceptive pills to concertgoers. On the Daisy Chain grounds, branches of a Yoko Ono "Wish Tree" were tagged by attendees with hopes for universal healthcare and a free Palestine; one tag simply read "Girlhood is healing." A concrete walkway was painted with quotes from Angela Davis, Audre Lorde and Maya Angelou, a literal path paved by the achievements of historic women.
Two stages — the rock-oriented "Marigold," where flower crowns, crochet and at least one mohawk swirled in gentle circle pits; and the bigger "Dandelion," which leaned pop — were both visually framed by giant buttons evoking the aesthetic of 1970s women's liberation, bearing slogans like "Bans Off Our Bodies" and "Reproductive Rights Are Human Rights." Tattooed mothers with pink-haired daughters sprawled on blankets. A shockingly long line formed for a sparkly Rodrigo-branded Taco Bell pop-up thing ("You Look Pretty Pink for a Baja Blast"). T-shirts abounded honoring the late Dolly Parton, patron saint Fiona Apple and the campaign for Dykes Against Deportation, not to mention Lilith Fair, the hugely successful, all-women touring fest of the late-'90s that served as an explicit inspiration to Daisy Chain. Over on Dandelion in the early afternoon, Santigold played her spiky 2008 classic "L.E.S. Artistes," then beamed: "I can't believe she pulled this s*** off!"
By mid-afternoon the $250-a-ticket festival began to feel perilously overcrowded, with unmanageable lines for food and a concerning lack of shade in extreme heat — that the collective electric mood seemed to prevail anyway was a testament to the sure-mindedness of this women-and-girl-dominated setting. I wondered too going into Daisy Chain whether its stated political mission would feel sidelined or effectually woven into the day, and I was moved to see the latter in action. Attendees could brave yet another long line to enter the expo of booths for the fest's benefiting nonprofits, earning free merch if they visited every table. Organizers took the stages between most sets. "Where a woman lives should never determine if she lives," stated a rep from women's health nonprofit Jhpiego before introducing pop-rock singer-songwriter Rachel Chinouriri. The executive director of Black Mamas Matter Alliance explained the org's mission to end maternal mortality before declaring, "everybody deserves healthcare and it is our human right," then joyfully proclaimed: "Now give it up for Doechii!" Daisy Chain's mission clearly incited artists to speak out onstage, too — the young, heavy rock band Die Spitz (its drummer in corpse paint) succinctly punctuated its set, growling, "Free Palestine, f*** ICE, thank you Olivia!"
During Bikini Kill's blazing set, Kathleen Hanna directly addressed the young people at Daisy Chain and told them to keep teaching the older people in their lives — "We have so much that we can learn from one another," she insisted — and to keep their diaries, which constitute their art, and which will create the world. A participatory spirit was stoked, too, by an exhibition, "Grrrl Germs: Punk feminism goes viral 1991-2026," curated by the artist Astria Suparak, presenting artifacts of DIY feminist punk with blown-up flyers, manifestos, zines, and listening stations (it also functioned as a desperately needed defacto cooling center). I spoke with two young women who were learning about riot grrrl's history for the first time and pointed out its relevance in an age of social media self-commodification and Ozempic. "Younger girls need to be exposed to this," said Claire Hendrick, 24. "You can read about empowerment, but it's so different when you're with people in community, actually doing it and being it."
When Lilith Fair founder Sarah McLachlan guested during Rodrigo's headlining set, it felt like a kind of act of historical justice, too — like a continuum strengthened. "Without Lilith Fair there would be no Daisy Chain," said Rodrigo, who was filmed for a 2025 Lilith documentary about a year before she began plotting to revive it in her own image. Rodrigo and McLachlan harmonized radiantly on "Building a Mystery" and "Angel," the latter of which McLachlan dedicated to Parton, who she called "the biggest philanthropist in the history of country music." Rodrigo reminded the crowd that McLachlan created Lilith during an era when the music industry insisted that two women could not co-headline a show or be played back-to-back on the radio; the tour's overwhelming success upended those bigoted notions.
Lilith was a festival that Sinead O'Connor called "very healing," that Emmylou Harris called "heaven," that Erykah Badu likened to a shared frequency changed. But after its run from 1997 to 1999, the misogynist backlash was instantaneous. Like Parton, Lilith Fair endured years in which its legacy was diminished to a punchline by some in the media (and maybe I would have written Lilith off as too mainstream in its day, too, when certain intellectual DIY bands would never have shared space at a festival with Starbucks-backed singer-songwriters). I personally came of age among a patriarchal, 2000s music industry that seemed hellbent on siphoning women's power. In hindsight, measuring the scale of the blowback to '90s cultural feminism feels like a reminder, in a sense, that equity for women at any level of our world, when not rigorously defended, risks disappearing.
Exiting the festival, I noticed the enormous number of girls carrying copies of the pink, stapled Daisy Chain Fields Zine. It was available at the merch stands for a suggested donation, filled with interviews, essays, and archival ephemera — a scan from Breeders bassist Josephine Wiggs' 1992 journal; a treatise from writer Rayne Fisher-Quann about female friendship that critiques pop-feminism and quotes Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci — plus instructions on how to create your own pocket-sized pamphlet. An intro letter from Rodrigo credits Hanna with inspiring the zine and thanks her for contributing all of the questions posed to the artists, like "What is your favorite protest song or song about women's power?" (Mitski wrote a whole list, including Malvina Reynolds' brilliant "It Isn't Nice") or, "What is something you like about yourself?" I liked imagining young people posing these questions back onto themselves, leaving with something tangible, with the manifold futures of this imperfect gateway and with power in their own hands.
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