Hole - Live Through This

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the righteous anger of Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This.

Try to imagine a famous woman who screams for a living today. Not alternative, punk-magazine famous, but American monoculture famous, platinum-selling-album famous, so famous her drug mishaps make headlines in Mexican newspapers, so famous rumors and conspiracies about her celebrity marriage hound her for decades. This woman doesn’t let out sing-screams or tinny emo yelps, but raw, diaphragmatic bellows—or, as David Fricke put it in his Rolling Stone review of Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This, a “corrosive, lunatic wail.”

He was wrong on the second point: There’s no lunacy on Hole’s records. But there is anger, female anger, which, to a man’s ear, historically scans as madness. Lead singer Courtney Love often told reporters that she named her band after a line in Euripides’ Medea. “There’s a hole that pierces right through me,” it supposedly goes, though you won’t find it in any common translation of the ancient play. It’s apocryphal, or misremembered, or Love made it up to complicate the name’s obvious double entendre—either way, it makes a great myth. A band foregrounding female rage takes its name from the angriest woman in the Western canon, a woman so angry at her husband’s betrayal she kills their children just so he will feel her pain in his bones.

Like all female revenge fantasies written by men, Medea carries a grain of neurosis about how women might retaliate for their subjugation. It is easier, still, for men to express these anxieties by way of violent fantasy than it is for women to communicate their anger at all. In a 1996 New York Magazine cover story on women alternative singers entitled “Feminism Rocks,” Kim France, the founding editor of Lucky who also worked as New York’s deputy editor, paraphrased feminist journalist and author Susan Faludi: “While our culture admires the angry young man, who is perceived as heroic and sexy, it can’t find anything but scorn for the angry young woman, who is seen as emasculating and bitter.” This was true for Love, who watched grunge break through to the mainstream only to find that the freedom and rebellion it promised was reserved for her male counterparts. In grunge, men could be scruffy and rude and defy gender norms—they could be rawer than the men modeled in synth-pop music videos or hair metal concerts a few years prior. Women, for all the space afforded them in the subculture’s spotlight moment, might as well have been Lilith.

Hole’s second album, Live Through This, famously came out four days after Love’s husband Kurt Cobain was found dead at their home in Seattle. The sudden tragedy threatened to swallow the music, to say nothing of the genre and social movement in which it was encased. Here was a dead rock god, and here was the woman who survived him. Even the album’s title alluded to Love’s endurance through a ground-shaking trauma, though of course she had written the title about surviving her fame, surviving her fraught association with the most beloved man in rock, surviving her pregnancy with their child, surviving the tabloid rumors that would—and still do—swarm her as a result.

”I sometimes feel that no one’s taken the time to write about certain things in rock, that there’s a certain female point of view that’s never been given space,” Love told Sidelines in 1991, the same year Hole released their first album Pretty on the Inside. While there were plenty of rock songs written by men about hounding and abusing women, there were few about being hounded and abused. The rock canon, like all the others, fiercely guarded its male subjectivity, and Love wanted to break through its ranks.

She did so with violent contradictions. Love projected a high femme presence, all red lipstick and messy blonde hair like a bedraggled Marilyn Monroe, while commandeering her post at the microphone with masculine bravado. She wore baby-doll dresses and screamed at the coarse bottom-edge of her range. She was the first to admit the look was a compromise, a Trojan horse for her rage. “When women get angry, they are regarded as shrill or hysterical...One way around that, for me, is bleaching my hair and looking good,” she told the New York Times in 1992. “It’s bad that I have to do that to get my anger accepted. But then I’m part of an evolutionary process. I’m not the fully evolved end.”

If Pretty on the Inside delivered fury on the backs of abject impressionism, then Live Through This crystallized the same impulse into pop songs you could holler along to. Its lyrics juxtaposed visceral imagery—milk and piss and blood—with catchy, vituperative sloganeering. Hole walked the same high wire Nirvana did on Nevermind and In Utero, between bone-deep rage and syrupy hooks, only Hole’s job was harder: The band had to sell that unstable boundary through a female lens.

They had to sell Love, too, who had already committed a host of cardinal sins in the public eye. She was a woman without a filter married to a pop idol, and she had carried his child without giving up her celebrity or her art, without retreating into the shadows to become an incubator. An infamous 1992 Vanity Fair profile probed the question of Love’s irreconcilable role of expectant mother and rock star. Such a simultaneity does not exist in the popular imagination. She was impossible, she could not be, and according to sources quoted in the story, she was using drugs while pregnant. The story prompted an investigation from the Department of Children and Family Services, and Love’s newborn daughter Frances Bean was temporarily taken from her parents.

”I want my baby/Who took my baby?” Love howls on “I Think That I Would Die,” and this time it’s not a metaphor; listeners could map that anguish onto events they’d seen unfold in real time. No one could accuse Love of lying, which didn’t stop rumors from bubbling up that her husband had written all the songs on Live Through This. Love carved an impossible space for herself in pop culture and was pilloried for it, and when she sang about the fallout, Nirvana fans cast her as a puppet for her husband’s genius just because the songs were good. It’s not like he could have written them, either; when Cobain wrote about rape, he wrote sardonically, and from the point of view of the rapist. The irony in his songs was apparently lost on some of his listeners. In that Vanity Fair profile, Love relayed a chilling anecdote she had heard about a girl who had been raped in Reno, whose rapists had been singing Nirvana’s song “Polly” while assaulting her. “These are the people who listen to him,” she said.

Love wrote about sexual violence with a snarl, too, but a heavier, more knowing one. “Was she asking for it?/Was she asking nice?” she poses on the seething “Asking for It.” “If she was asking for it/Did she ask you twice?” The song, she’s said, was inspired by a stage dive that took a wrong turn. She leapt into the audience to crowd-surf during a show, and found the crowd ready to devour her. “Suddenly, it was like my dress was being torn off me, my underwear was being torn off me, people were putting their fingers inside of me and grabbing my breasts really hard, screaming things in my ears like ‘pussy-whore-cunt,’” she said. Whatever covenant binds fan and artist, whatever gives the latter power over the former, didn’t apply to Hole—not in totality, at least; not to the extent that it would keep a singer who was also a woman from being molested by her audience in public.

Live Through This refers to autobiographical traumas, but it is not a confessional record. “The whole cliché of women being cathartic really pisses me off,” Love said in a 1994 SPIN cover story. “You know, ‘Oh, this is therapy for me. I’d die if I didn’t write this.’ Eddie Vedder says shit like that. Fuck you.” Her lyrics don’t hit like spleen-venting. They’re analytical, no matter how viscerally she howls them, and their insight transcends their origins. Throughout the record, Love speaks to the atomization of the female form that takes place in the eye of the misogynist. To the ogler, a woman is never whole. She’s shards: lips, hair, tits, ass, whatever can be grabbed without consequence, whatever can be bought and sold. Love would know, having stripped for a living before the band broke big, having made a career of, among other things, being looked at. She sings of “pieces of Jennifer’s body.” On “Doll Parts,” against halting guitar chords, she sings about how she’s “doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs.” Her multiplicity is underscored by backing harmonies from Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff and guest vocalist Dana Kletter, who chime in with the indelible line: “I want to be the girl with the most cake.”

As much as it concerns trauma and misogyny, Live Through This, like all great rock records, quakes with desire. Love deciphers what it means to be an object of desire, but she also plays a woman who wants ravenously. Her wanting, at the time, was a terror; she inspired so much vitriol in part because she refused to be passive, refused to accommodate a man’s hunger without indulging her own. She would not be a vessel or a muse. Her husband did not cast her in the drama of his life. She wanted him and chased him down, and then she wanted their child, and she believed that her desire mattered, that it had substance. “I went through all the shit and pain and inconvenience of being pregnant for nine whole fucking months because I wanted some of his beautiful genes in there, in that child,” Love told Melody Maker, in a profile that called her “a one-woman spite factory” in its tagline, in February of 1994. “I wanted his babies. I saw something I wanted, and I got it. What’s wrong with that?”

On “I Think That I Would Die,” Love calls after her baby in the melodically barren verse, and then the song inverts itself into the album’s greatest hook. Hole pull this trick often, switching gears between repulsion and attraction at a moment’s notice, bombarding the listener with noise and then sweetly luring them back in. There is violence and there is desire and the line between the two is never clear. The album’s pummeling opener “Violet” baits the ear with a jangling guitar tone cut from the same cloth as R.E.M., and then drummer Patty Schemel churns the song into a fury. “Go on, take everything/Take everything/I want you to,” howls Love, her bitterness oxidized into defiance.

In a second profile of Love, published in 1995, Vanity Fair conducted the first-ever interview with the singer’s mother, the therapist Linda Carroll. “Her fame is not about being beautiful and brilliant, which she is,” Carroll said. “It’s about speaking in the voice of the anguish of the world.” That the anguish of the world would have a female voice was an idea new to the music industry. It’s still new. Love makes a bid for universality on Live Through This in that it’s hard not to get swept up in her energy, but she also acknowledges that female pain is marked, that it is compartmentalized and dismissed because it is felt by women, not people. Though Hole screamed open a space for angry, pained women artists like Alanis Morissette to thrive in the mainstream, that space is still bounded by the dismissal of men who will not deign to empathize with them. I think of the letter Larry Nassar wrote when early this year he pled guilty to assaulting hundreds of women and girls, how it looped in a popular misquote from a 17th-century play: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

”Doll Parts” ends with a chilling, enigmatic hex: “Someday you will ache like I ache,” Love glowers, and maybe it’s a threat but it could also be an oracle. It could be the promise that no matter how much you hate her, no matter how much spite you send her way, the venom will find its way back to you. That those severed parts will one day congeal into a furious living whole.