For about a decade my iTunes library could compete with some of the most eclectic music collections out there. You want one off singles from long forgotten noughties electroclash kids? I’ve got it. Maybe a rare radio session of a 90s alt rock star downloaded from a little read blog in the middle of the night? I’m your girl. How about a compilation of South African Mbaqanga girl groups? You’re covered. I had everything, but I was also lazy and once streaming services became normalised, I transferred my vast library to an external hard drive to free up space on my laptop and let it collect pixelated dust. My iTunes library’s residence on my external hard drive means I have to remember to plug it in and then reload whatever song or album I want to listen to on my Apple Music app. I rarely go about this time-consuming process, but on one recent perusal I rediscovered an old favourite, the album released in 1998 under the moniker Julie Ruin by riot grrrl veteran and Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna.
If you’ve never heard it before, Julie Ruin is a masterpiece that defines Hanna as a creative visionary. Written and released as the sun went down on the iconic feminist punk riot grrrl era of the early 90s, Julie Ruin is Hanna’s first and only solo album, recorded entirely in her Olympia, WA, bedroom. The album was far removed from her political punk background in Bikini Kill and saw Hanna experiment with lo-fi electronic bedroom pop, a glitchy $40 drum machine, looped vocal samples, and hyper distorted renditions of soothing poetic verses. Julie Ruin sounded like the past and the future all at the same time; a lo-fi art pop creation that documented female expression in the late 90s and solidified Hanna’s legacy as a pivotal feminist artist.My love for this album is one of the many reasons I can never fully get on board with trusting my entire music library to streaming. Despite its importance to many fully grown elder riot grrrls and punks out there, Julie Ruin is out of print and unavailable on any streaming services or music download sites. Beyond a few kindly YouTube users who uploaded the whole album a few years ago, the record mostly exists on the old hard drives and in the imaginations of elder punks like me, and risks being forgotten.
With no physical copy to hold in my hands, on some days I question whether Julie Ruin ever existed. Occasionally a snippet of the cut and paste, DIY electro pop songs would interrupt my thoughts in the middle of the day. Did I imagine those words? Is this the soundtrack to a life I didn’t know I lived? Then it came back to me; these are Hanna’s words. Words that she conjured as a way of writing a new future for herself. To understand why this record is so important to the punk landscape and also within Hanna’s discography we need to understand where Hanna was in her life at that moment and why she needed to write the album in the first place.
When Hanna started working on the Julie Ruin project in 1997, her life was at a crossroads. Her band Bikini Kill had released their final album Reject All American the year prior and, although there had been no announcements, the band were struggling to communicate and would eventually break up in 1998. Hanna was living in Olympia, a hotbed of riot grrrl activity at the time.
As the frontwoman for one of the scene’s most prominent bands, Hanna was seen as a leader, but she began to back away from the role, unsure how to deal with the movement’s race problems and the bad faith actors who used riot grrrl to work through their own personal issues. What’s more, her small amount of fame left her feeling disconnected. She was subject of constant critique and attention from both the riot grrrl scene (some members of which saw her as a bad feminist) and the mainstream media (who accused her of not being a real musician).
Hanna was at a place in her life where she was struggling to define both who she was and who she wanted to be. No longer a riot grrrl, not rich enough to isolate herself from the pressures of fame, and at risk of losing the role of Bikini Kill frontwoman that previously defined her, Hanna needed a new outlet to find herself. Here stepped in Julie Ruin, the persona.
In many ways Julie Ruin was a shield to keep the negative criticism at bay. As she told We Owe You Nothing zine in the late 90s, “Some people think that anybody who is ever in the public eye becomes an object that they can banter about like you’re not a person. That’s why my new stage name is Julie Ruin – when people would say fucked up things like ‘Kathleen Hanna is this’ or ‘Kathleen Hanna is that’ it was really disturbing. But when they say that about Julie Ruin, what the fuck do I care? She’s just a character I created.”
The project gave Hanna an excuse to explore different techniques beyond straightforward rock music, like manipulating her vocals, singing through unconventional items like guitar pedals, or layering on multiple overdubs. They were techniques that she was unable to incorporate into previous bands and allowed Hanna to re-create what feminist pop music could look like, while making a sly nod to the critics who had previously accused her of being a ‘fake’ musician. If they thought she was fake while in a group with the traditional guitar, bass, drums set up, what would they think now she was making unconventional electronic music with no real band?
What Julie Ruin ultimately gave Hanna was a sense of freedom and possibility through working alone and learning to trust her gut. “No one was listening to me, there was no producer in the room who I felt self-conscious around,” Hanna told Index magazine in 2000, “so I realized I could learn all these different styles of singing. I wanted to find out what was in my head that wasn’t censored.”
The uncensored Hanna as heard on Julie Ruin was just that – raw and unfiltered. Although the album opens with a sample of a woman uttering the words “is the lady of the house at home?” on the stuttering and stripped down punk opener ‘Radical Or Pro-Parental’ I don’t believe this line is here to convince us that the album is a step into Hanna’s world and hers alone. Rather, the opening indicates an appeal from Hanna to view the album as an entrance into the thoughts and minds of women and girls around the world.
In The Punk Singer, a 2013 documentary of Hanna’s life, she likened the record to a girl’s bedroom, which can act as spaces for secret creativity, but girls rarely share that creativity beyond the boundaries of their four walls. The record was a chance to connect these isolated female worlds, adding, “I wanted the Julie Ruin record to sound like a girl in her bedroom made this record, but didn’t just throw it away. It wasn’t just in her diary, but she took it out and shared it with people.”
Across the album, the depictions of womanhood were varied. Anger is a recurring theme, directed at the forces that upheld misogyny, for example the capitalist businessmen on the electro punk fury of ‘Aerobicide’ or the denouncement of police brutality in the spoken word influenced melancholy of ‘I Wanna Know What Love Is’.
There are moments where Hanna directs her ire at what became of riot grrrl and the “fake feminist police force” that she speaks to in a monotone affectation on ‘A Place Called Won’t Be There’. The issue seems to have preoccupied Hanna, as references to the failures of riot grrrl can be heard across the album. It is a sign that Hanna, like many former riot grrrls, recognised the problems within the movement that no longer resembled the hopeful vision of girl love and unity from its early years.
Although the album tackles a variety of weighty themes there is an element of playfulness that overwhelms even the most distressing moments. Even ‘Apt #5’, with its muffled drum loop and piercing guitar riff, has a semblance of hope imbued in its makeup despite its dark themes of sexual assault. Rising up alongside the song’s razor-sharp guitar lead, Hanna takes back her power from her perpetrator, telling them, “If you’re gonna talk about how I deserved what you did, you can look now cause I’m gone”.
‘Valley Girl Intelligentsia (VGI)’ is the record’s most upbeat anthem, which Hanna describes in her 2024 memoir Rebel Girl as a “braggadocious song about how awesome I was” in which she claims she’s able to grant “girls wishes from [her] stonecold bikini”. ‘On Language’ humorously pokes fun at its own garbled, barely audible vocals and themes of creating womyn’s language, by sampling the sound of a typewriter, like a secretary is desperately trying to transcribe the lyrics in the background but unable to keep up.
Adding to the playful theme was the xeroxed album sleeve design, influenced by feminist activist artists like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, feminist zine culture, and Hanna’s take on the idea of women’s work as art, such as quilting and needlework. Aided by a fancy new machine that had recently come to town, the colour copier, the Julie Ruin cover consists of an image of Hanna dressed as a feminist secretary taped onto the back cover of an AC/DC album. Complete with hand written text and drawings, the record presents as an extension of her girls’ bedroom theme. Hanna had been making this in her bedroom too, and the album sleeve conjured the idea that she was presenting the result as a handmade gift just for the listener.
Julie Ruin has inspired my work as a musician and artist. I once tried to cover the Julie Ruin song ‘Stay Monkey’, a deliriously sweet love song written about Hanna’s then boyfriend Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys. My version was a failure. Lopsided and too on the nose, it did not manage to replicate the coy depictions of simmering lust that were present in the original.
What the attempted cover and constant relistens to the album did teach me as an artist was to always err on the side of the peculiar. ‘Stay Monkey’ was built around a warped synthesiser loop that sounded like the theme tune to a haunted fairground ride and Hanna’s monotone call of “don’t go”. On paper it did not read as a typical love song. Despite its incoherence on first listen, it is these unusual elements, together with Hanna’s increasingly emotive vocal, that soundtracks their love story (“It’s a movie that never gets filmed, it’s a story that we won’t tell”), as two people who are battling against larger forces but will forever end up finding each other.
The reach of Julie Ruin extended beyond a limited press run and a few interviews in the late 90s as many artists also tried to replicate and find themselves within the rough grooves of the record. As the millennium rang in and riot grrrl dissolved, Julie Ruin became a framework on which the next era of electroclash and indie dance punk would be built on. In Julie Ruin I hear the confident female power of Peaches, the rebellious DIY ethos of London punks Trash Kit, and also in Hanna’s next evolution through her feminist art punk band Le Tigre.
Over the years Hanna has dropped in and out of the spotlight, battling severe health problems due to struggle with Lyme disease, but she has always strived to tell her own story. In 2010, Hanna returned to the public arena after some time away and formed a new band, The Julie Ruin. There was some hope that since the band bore the moniker of her old solo outfit, the discontinued album would be rereleased again. When I caught The Julie Ruin band live in London on one of their first UK tours, Hanna spoke about how she knew her fans wanted a new copy of Julie Ruin, but clearing the old samples she used on the record was proving harder than she thought.
A decade later, it feels like we’ll never get a physical copy of that record, plus the existence of the new The Julie Ruin band has practically wiped the 1998 album from the internet’s memory, making the album harder to search for. Although efforts may have stalled in bringing back the record in the past, the renewed popularity of riot grrrl with a younger generation, along with the reformation of Hanna’s bands Le Tigre and Bikini Kill, and her new memoir, will surely inspire someone somewhere to want to bring this piece of punk history back from the archives. Until then, I’ll be listening back through my old hard drive for as long as it keeps going, one file at a time.
