‘Doll Parts’: Courtney Love’s most vulnerable lyric
There has always been a strange sense of mythology over everything that Courtney Love has ever done since the 1990s. Although she was one of the greatest female voices out at the time of albums like Live Through This, there are bound to be people who only see her as the Yoko Ono of her generation, who pulled Kurt Cobain away from the other members of Nirvana. However, Ono was never the core source of the problem in The Beatles, and unlike the publicly reserved Ono, Love wasn’t afraid to talk about her softer side whenever she got behind the microphone.
No one would have had that first impression if they had only listened to tunes like ‘Violet’ when she first started breaking big. Hole has always been a bit more feral than most bands coming out of the grunge movement, but considering their breakthrough album was called Live Through This and was released only a few weeks after Cobain’s tragic end, it didn’t take long for bullshit artists to start spinning a narrative that Love was profiting off of her husband’s death.
But if anyone bothered to listen to what she was saying, ‘Doll Parts’ is one of the most earnest songs she ever wrote during her glory years. There’s no question that she loved Cobain outside of being one of the biggest stars in the world, but this song is where she truly started to realise what more was at stake with her beyond being one of the biggest first ladies of alternative rock at the time.
Despite everyone fawning over Cobain’s work, it was almost like Love wasn’t allowed to express herself however she wanted to. Anyone would want to let the world know about their love for their significant other, but since Cobain’s star power became much bigger than anyone could have imagined, it was as if the world was treating him as their property, and Love only got to see a piece of him.
So when she sings a line like “They really want you, but I do too”, it’s actually fairly heartbreaking. There’s a lot of attitude in the way she talks about being the girl with the most cake, but a lot of that anger is more about not being able to talk to the person she considers to be the most important to her because the world decided that she didn’t have a choice in who he was with.
But the real kicker then comes from the line that became the most hauntingly prophetic: “Someday you will ache like I ache.” There are bound to be nutjobs to this day that take this as an admission that Love had something to do with Cobain’s death, but that line seems to be more about what could happen if someone takes that sense of infatuation too far.
No matter if someone falls in love with a celebrity like Love did or not, there’s always going to be people who stand in the way of romance, and they’re probably never going to know what she went through until they face their own romantic relationships being ripped apart.
So, really, Love’s lyrics on here may as well be the inverse of what Cobain was going through on ‘Serve the Servants’ from In Utero. Love had been talking about all of the headaches that came from simply trying to love her husband, and yet Cobain was lecturing his audience about how he wasn’t some grand sage of music and how he felt guilty for having the spotlight on him nonstop.
Even for an album that can be as relentless as Live Through This is, ‘Doll Parts’ is the perfect title for one of Love’s most honest tunes. After all, some doll parts are made of plastic and will last forever, but it’s easy to bend them out of shape until they are on the verge of breaking as well.
