The Low Culture Essay: Stephanie Phillips on the 1998 Kathleen Hanna solo album Julie Ruin

In this month’s essay, Stephanie Phillips reflects on the 1998 lo-fi, art pop album Julie Ruin, in which riot grrrl veteran Kathleen Hanna reaffirms her position in feminist art, while creating the building blocks for a dance punk future

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?  I’ve got you 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 feminist 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.