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First, there was Kathleen Hanna's band Bikini Kill and "Riot Grrl" -- the buzzword created to describe powerful female voices in punk rock in the mid-'90s, which was said to have inspired a generation of girls to pick up guitars. Bikini Kill's live show was a Molotov coctail of confessional intimacy and confrontational fury. And Hanna -- a former stripper and unabashed feminist -- had an over-the-top stage persona always directly in the eye of the storm.

"It was mostly media hype," says Hanna, on the phone from New York City, having just wrapped up an MTV appearance on "Last Call with Carson Daly."

"But it was a real movement in the sense that it created a loose network all over the country -- female booking agents, writers, musicians -- and the world. You can call it whatever you want, but it was women doing important cultural work. It didn't change any laws -- it was more of a social and cultural movement than a political one."

It's no surprise that she's held on to her mission of female empowerment, but it's a little surprising that she seems to be at the vanguard of yet another music revolution. Her current band, Le Tigre -- together with Johanna Fateman and video artist Sadie Benning -- combines rock 'n' roll and dance music in ways that would have scandalized the self-conscious ghettos of punk rock and dance music just a few short years ago.

Le Tigre sounds a little bit like every cool, confident girl you've ever heard on the radio -- Joan Jett, PJ Harvey, Missy Elliot -- boiled down into a tight, white-hot minimalist groove. The catchy, shout-along lyrics aren't afraid to provoke thought, but, considering the sheer angst of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre is surprisingly upbeat, clever and fun.

The transformation began when Hanna taught herself how to use a sampler. "I just thought of it as a songwriting tool," she says. "Typically, in Bikini Kill, I wouldn't play that much. Mostly, I'd just sing. I'd have to wait for (other band members) to write something. If I sampled stuff and started playing keyboards and got a drum machine, I can make up songs by myself."

The sampler also makes it easy to mess with conventional rock and dance music cliches. "I've been interested in taking typically male rock songs, sampling them, and singing different messages over top of it all," Hanna says, "as a way to take stuff that annoyed me and kind of drove me crazy about rock music and change it into something I understood and I liked. Now it's become a tool to make awesome beats and get people dancing!"

"I wanted stuff to groove, and wanted people to physically enjoy the music," she says. "We did some danceable songs in Bikini Kill, and those were always my favorite. So it seemed a natural thing to get into dance music."

So instead of mosh pits, Le Tigre shows have video projection synch'ed up with the beats, crazy costumes -- and even a little choreography.

Reaching out to new audiences comes with the territory. Appearing on "Last Call with Carson Daly" is part of that.

"I don't think we will single-handedly change all the stereotypes. You're supposed to be really thin and beautiful and wear the right clothes," Hanna says. "We don't have to watch our weight -- we can do whatever we want. If I was 13 and flipping through the channels, and saw all these amazing girls."

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