Hole – ‘Live Through This’
As Hole established themselves as one of grunge’s leading bands, Courtney Love was continually caught in the crossfires of controversy, with the media heavily publicising – and criticising – her relationship with Kurt Cobain. Love was widely attacked by the tabloids for her use of heroin, her role as a mother, and her generally outspoken nature. With Live Through This, Hole’s second album, the musician hit back – subsequently creating the band’s greatest record.
There’s no doubt that Love is a complicated figure, but her tumultuous life experiences have provided her with the ability to write effortlessly compelling lyrics. She contrasts the feminine with the vulgar; Live Through This is visceral, and both Love’s lyrics and vocal delivery invoke a powerful rawness and shamelessness. The musician’s unabashed approach feels like a sonic middle finger to the people shaming her for her personality, her dress sense, and her romantic relationships.
Themes such as consent, inadequacy, media shaming, motherhood and the trials and tribulations of being a woman come to define the record, which, several decades later, remains one of grunge’s most stunning albums. Love and her band members brought a well-needed feminine perspective to grunge, but with that came plenty of subversion and shock. Love sings about being a mother in a way that is so rare to hear, alluding to the poet Anne Sexton in ‘Plump’, who similarly expressed a complex view of motherhood in her work. The song features lyrics such as “I’m eating you/ I’m overfed/ Your milk’s in my mouth/ It makes me sick” – any form of taboo is allowed to disintegrate into the guitar riffs.
On ‘I Think That I Would Die’, Love also addresses the custody battle that she and Cobain faced after they had their daughter, Frances Bean, “I want my baby/ Where is the baby?”. The track utilises simple lyricism, conveying her desperation, which culminates in a chant of “there is no milk!”. The chorus is abrasive, with Love allowing her voice to morph into an almost-growl while the guitars become heavier, mirroring her anguish. The hard/soft dichotomy serves to represent the two sides of Love – the angry, disillusioned side aggravated by the media and the softer, more vulnerable side who just wants to be with her daughter.
There is further reference to milk in ‘Softer, Softest’, which is brutally honest at times, like when Love references her own childhood with lines like “Pee girl gets the belt.” Her desire for a return to innocence before she found herself easily swayed by self-destruction (“I‘ve got a blister from/ Touching everything I see”) is especially prevalent. She wishes for a time of total bliss, singing in the pummelling ‘Gutless’, “I don’t really miss God/ But I sure miss Santa Claus.”
The album features many references to the inequalities and instances of abuse faced by women, which Love calls out through strained vocal deliveries, fed up and unable to take it anymore. Songs like ‘Asking For It’ and ‘Jennifer’s Body’ are cathartic, their confronting lyrics forcing us to consider female exploitation. On the former, Love sounds as though she can’t believe she has to spell out the fact that women are never asking to be abused, using a sarcastic chorus which directly addresses aggressive men.
Many women have found solace in the album, with Hole giving a voice to issues that aren’t usually discussed in mainstream rock songs. Love wasn’t afraid to write about things considered ugly and unfeminine, yet her approach to lyricism couldn’t be more concerned with the complexity of the female experience if she tried. There’s a blend of tenderness and vulnerability with loudness and intensity, both lyrically and musically, which makes Live Through This so fantastic.
The album has given us some Hole classics, like the anthemic ‘Violet’ and the emotional ‘Doll Parts’, yet there are so many more tracks that are just as good, if not better, which fail to receive as much praise, such as the addictive ‘Plump’ and the Young Marble Giants cover ‘Credit in the Straight World’. There are the occasional moments where the album dips into unnecessary territory, such as ‘She Walks On Me’ and ‘Rock Star’ – two songs that reveal Love’s immaturity – but it’s hard not to find yourself sucked into the beautifully violent world that Hole have created here, which remains a seminal slice of 1990s grunge.
