HOLE | LIVE THROUGH THIS
Courtney Love built a career out of drama and messiness, and with Live Through This she crashed the grunge rock party and made girl-pain pretty.
The album remains famous for being released one week after her husband Kurt Cobain’s death, which prompted immediate questions about how accurately the album title anticipated the young widow’s tragedy. For all those who admired and worshiped Cobain and Nirvana’s music, Live Through This offered an inside look at the mindset of the fallen rock star’s companion.
Love’s manic beauty is manifest in her 70’s pageant queen junkie-flare. In 1994 female bitterness and angst deserved its time in the limelight with the boys and Hole offered an edgy feminine take on the pain Pearl Jam and Soundgarden couldn’t quite distill from their robustness and male privilege. When woman have the creative ability to tap into their inner demons it trumps anything men can tap into. Love proudly shows these bruises while striking a confident pose, one foot always on the monitor in a baby doll dress.
“Miss World” is an anthem of angst pop perfection while “Violet” barks tantrums to the ceiling. We get a glimpse into what it’s like to be fucked around by men, childhood, motherhood, fatherhood, friends, and life itself. You can almost picture the objects she’s throwing at her ex-lover while she sings “Go on take everything, take everything I want you to.” Though she’s never shy about casting stones, Love can easily soften into her late afternoon self-reflection tea-time when it’s time to calm down. “Doll Parts” showcases her souring take on a relationship with the scathing lyrics “I love him so much it just turns to hate. I fake it so real, I am beyond fake.”
Hole plays around with themes of sex, misogyny, self-pity, and sarcasm without losing their fun. The band members are loose and fiery, keeping their performances free from studio session perfectionism. Love’s obsession with milk spills across her diary; “your milk’s in my mouth, it makes me sick…your milk is so sour…” There are many interpretations to be had (breast feeding and semen come to mind) but the imagery lends itself potently to the decaying and disgust we sometimes have with our traumas. “Softer, Softest” throws nod to physical abuse with the line “Pee-girl gets the belt,” evoking never-forgotten feelings of parental disapproval.
While it was rumoured Kurt Cobain and Billy Corgan wrote much of the album its hard to bother worrying about the particulars. Love is genuinely and unapologetically herself in everything she does. “Plump” is power-chord riff for the post-Cobain generation to play along to, while “She Walks On Me” is pure Riot-grrrl action on the scuffed heels of Bikini Kill. On “Gutless” Courtney sings “All my friends are embryonic, all my friends are dead and gone” in another strangely coincidental reference to her recently deceased husband.
Finally, “Rock Star” playfully opens with a staged false guitar start serving as the perfect bratty pastiche of boredom and disinterest after getting everything she needed off her chest on the previous songs. This is the original “thank u, next” attitude long before Arianna Grande learned to sing.
With Live Through This, Hole paints a portrait of grungy punk agitation through the lens of the divine feminine. The album is loose and tattered, far from pristine in its execution, performance, and mix. Because Love was not a household name at the time, the earnestness inevitably spills through every nuance of the album. Hole’s later efforts would be somewhat less affecting as the band sanded-off the rougher edges that made Live Through This such an exciting experience to live through.
