Happy 30th Anniversary to Juliana Hatfield’s debut solo album Hey Babe, originally released March 17, 1992.
1992 was a landmark year for women in music. PJ Harvey and Tori Amos had debut albums. Bikini Kill’s eponymous EP had been freshly pressed on Kill Rock Stars. And L7 was making noise with Bricks Are Heavy. Meanwhile, Hole’s debut Pretty On The Inside and Liz Phair’s introductory Girly-Sound tapes were making magic in the underground after releases the year prior.
In April of 1992, women marched on Washington in the hundreds of thousands in an historic abortion rights rally. In tandem, Riot Grrrl began to emerge as punk rock-fueled feminism. And Rolling Stone, and its younger, hipper sibling SPIN, couldn’t stop talking about “Women In Rock.”
A few years later, Juliana Hatfield, who had also had a 1992 debut solo album, Hey Babe, stepped into an elevator in Los Angeles with a journalist from BOMB magazine. “I’ve been warned not to ask you about ‘women in rock,’ he said. “Why is that?”
“I don’t want to be involved in that discussion because it’s so belittling,” she said. “I’m insulted when I’m lumped in any category. I resent that I’m talked about in this group of women. Why can’t I be talked about in the group of all music, like all musicians in the history of music?”
This was a reason why I really liked Juliana Hatfield—she was never a joiner. In fact, she was an outlier, a young artist who spoke to girls like me who cherished their alone time and amused themselves with their own sardonic humor. I first discovered Hatfield by way of the Lemonheads, as many fans probably did. “Didn’t you have a crush on those guys?” my mom asks whenever that band comes up. That’s because when I was 16, my mom was cool enough to drive my friends Nikki, Shana and me a couple of hours across the grey, rainy countryside to a small, dingy nightclub in god-knows-where Germany to see the Lemonheads perform with Superchunk.
I had spent my life in Germany as an American army brat and had recently been running wild and going to nightclubs long before my stateside peers (the drinking age in Germany was 16). No doubt the entire car ride to that show—god bless my mother and her patience—was filled with chatter about how cute Evan Dando was, because we all had raging crushes on him. Mine wasn’t raging enough, though, to not like Juliana Hatfield, who sang and played bass on It’s A Shame About Ray (1992), and who Dando was rumored to maybe-sort-of be dating. Her voice was riveting, and sublimely strange in the sense that while singing about something like scoring drugs (“Drug Buddy”), she could sound incredibly sweet and innocent.
There were other favorite moments: On her band the Blake Babies’ first album Nicely, Nicely (1987), there’s a song where Hatfield repeats over and over, “I don’t want to be a cocaine slut, I don’t want to be a cocaine slut, I don’t want to be a coke sluuuuut.” It never failed to crack me up, and it was so quirky and endearing that I put it on pretty much every mixed tape I ever made.
Later, on her second solo album Become What You Are (1993), I was smitten with how “My Sister” hit you over the head with that killer first line “I hate my sister, she’s such a bitch.” Sung in that sweet voice.
Obviously, I liked Hatfield because she was wry. But on Hey Babe, her debut solo album sandwiched between the Blake Babies and her fame-fanning Become What You Are, she was vulnerable, too. Radically so. In 1992, she appeared on MTV’s 120 Minutes to promote the video for “Everybody Loves Me But You,” Hey Babe’s first single. I’m not sure if I saw it back then. Every summer, my family would fly to the states to visit my grandparents in Minnesota, and my brother and I would lounge around the basement rec room, bingeing on MTV for hours.
After playing the black-and-white video for “Everybody Loves Me But You,” a catchy pop tune about unrequited love and/or an unhealthy desire to be universally liked, the male MTV interviewer asked Hatfield about the “women in rock” thing. “I don’t think it’s really a big deal for me,” she said. “But people are really open to seeing women playing music right now, so it’s a good time for me to be playing music.”
Then, she played a live acoustic version of “Feed Me,” a song she had written only a few days prior that would serve as a B-side to the Hey Babe single “I See You.” She put on dark sunglasses for the performance and sat cross-legged on the floor while strumming her guitar and singing in a near-whisper: “Oh baby, if only you knew / I'm down to a hundred-and-two / Oh baby, if only you knew / Oh baby / I had a hole in my heart / So I threw away my plate / ’Cause nothing would fill me up / Whatever I ate.”
The theme fit with another song on Hey Babe titled “Ugly,” which, despite it never having been a single, The Guardian refers to as the “centerpiece” of the album. It’s easy to understand why: “Ugly” packs a very hard emotional punch. It’s also a fan favorite. “There are always people in every audience who want to hear ‘Ugly,’” Hatfield writes in When I Grow Up, her 2008 memoir.
A SPIN cover story written in the ’90s whined melodramatically, “How long can she keep this up? How long can she make a perfectly healthy audience believe in—and sing along with—a chorus hook as ridiculous as ‘I’m ugly / With a capital U’’?” It was quite likely an attempt at a compliment—Juliana Hatfield is absolutely in no way ugly—but it was missing the point.
That summer of ’92, I wasn’t making the usual trips back and forth between the big fridge my grandmother filled with sodas—“pops” as they called them in the Midwest—and creamsicles and other special treats for the grandkids. Instead, I was eating rice cakes and carrot sticks, and every day I was running on the treadmill my grandparents had installed in the basement after my grandpa’s heart attack. I was planning to try out for the dance team when school started, and I wanted to be in the best shape possible. So, I added pushups, and sit-ups, too, and over the course of that summer I became even more restrictive with my food. Little did I know that it would be the beginning of an eating disorder that would wax and wane and morph in expression throughout my teenage years, before eventually getting really bad in college.
It was something that I kept secret, even from myself, and for a long time I was able to look healthy—good even. Over a period of a year or so between my sophomore and junior years, I was spending a lot of time at my friend Shana’s house, and she and her mom nicknamed me “Barbie.” It was mostly good-natured, but there was also always a little bit of an edge to the compliment—as though being “Barbie” was something that just came naturally to me, as though I had it really easy—and it always made me feel even worse.
“I had had, since high school, a tendency to want to eat too much—way too much—when I was anxious, or sad, or angry, or lonely, or confused, which was much of the time,” Hatfield writes in her memoir. “Stuffing myself with food numbed me and dulled my feelings, temporarily, like heroin numbs the heroin addict and alcohol numbs the alcoholic. Then I would compensate by starving myself after every gluttonous episode. … I kept it hidden, never mentioned it, tried not to act weird around food when there were other people present. I didn’t want anyone to think that I had a problem with food, of all things.”
The more I restricted, the more the cycle Hatfield describes became a pattern in my life, and no doubt in many other young women’s lives, which might explain the popularity of a song like “Ugly.” At that time in 1992, no one else was making music about it, much less talking about it. At a time when “heroin chic” and 90-lb. supermodels would soon become the “ideal.” So even if it’s not considered “Riot Grrrl,” or stereotypical ’90s “girl power,” Juliana Hatfield’s Hey Babe is feminist as fuck.
Hey Babe is not entirely about eating disorders or body shame. Much of the album is about the normal awkwardness in relationships between young people, and about trying to discover yourself and develop an authentic identity. “I See You” is a fun, angular guitar-driven pop song that quirkily compares the narrator’s crush to a bug crawling up the wall, or across a book—never far from the narrator’s mind, but always a little out of reach. “Everybody Loves Me But You,” the lead single, is both melodic and somewhat braggadocious about how much everyone loves the protagonist, and how much attention she gets from everyone else—everyone but you. Meanwhile, “No Outlet” is both a rollicking rocker and a pretty pop ballad about a relationship that never really gets off the ground, but, actually, hey, it’s not that big of a deal.
My favorite song, “Nirvana,” has an appropriately grunge-y, slow-driving, punk-meets-heavy metal vibe. The song was originally written when Hatfield was still in the Blake Babies—it appeared on their Rosy Jack World EP not long before they broke up in 1991. Hatfield had recently heard Nirvana’s Bleach (1989) for the first time, and was blown away, particularly by “Negative Creep.” “Now here comes the song I love so much / Makes me want to go fuck shit up / Now, I got Nirvana in my head / I’m so glad I’m not dead.” Kurt Cobain sent Hatfield a handwritten note, telling her how much he liked the song: Juliana, your song “Nirvana” was totally flattering when I first heard it. I really like your new album, especially “My Sister.” The video’s great as well. He signed the note, Love, Kurt, adding a little smiley face.
Much of Hatfield’s memoir When I Grow Up reflects a temperament not totally unlike Cobain’s. She admits to a tendency towards deep depression, and to an acute emotional sensitivity shared by many artists. Throughout the book she also seemed to be wrestling with food and body image issues—it’s something that never fully goes away—while not really acknowledging it. Therefore, I was relieved to discover that she sought ED-related treatment only a couple months after the book was published, when a friend lovingly told her, “Juliana, you are anorexic.” Despite her struggles, there’s something very strong and dogged about Hatfield, which is evident in the blog post she wrote while in eating-disorder treatment:
“A heart that hurts is a heart that works. I will shout it from the rooftop (as I contemplate jumping but then ultimately don't, and walk back indoors). I am not dead inside. I still care about right and wrong. I refuse to succumb, to accept that I can't fix this. I want desperately to be a better, happier, healthier, saner person and companion. My will to endure is, so far, unkillable.”
Now, more than 10 years later—and in the case of Hey Babe, exactly 30 years later—Juliana Hatfield continues to rock on.
LISTEN: