STILL KICKING
There's a special class of albums so deeply ingrained into people's experience that they withstand the test of time. 26 years later, Hole's Live Through This still holds a permanent residence with young people, guiding them through rage, insecurity, and softness without losing any of its raw, seething power. Tackling motherhood, fame, cheating, riot grrrl, and body image with their signature snarl, Hole doesn't shy away from directing their harsh spotlight on anyone, including themselves.
Live Through This is Hole's sophomore album, following their much more hardcore Pretty On The Inside. It saw the introductions of Patty Schemel and Kristen Pfaff into the band and continued the writing collaboration between Courtney Love, Hole's frontwoman and rhythm guitarist, and Eric Erlandson, their lead guitarist. Love wanted to make an album that would be "shocking to the people who think that we don't have a soft edge, and at the same time, [to know] that we haven't lost our very, very hard edge." (VH1) Finding that intersection turned out to be where Hole excels. The sweet spot of Live Through This comes with songs like "Doll Parts," whose soft verses make its screaming final lines of "Someday you will ache like I ache" hit that much harder.
Live Through This also happened to be released exactly a week after the suicide of Love's husband, Kurt Cobain. Accusations that Cobain had ghostwritten the album came out of the woodwork, despite the entire band's insistence that yes, he sang backup on a couple of tracks, he was in the studio. But no, he had no hand in the writing. As factually wrong and sexist as these remarks were, they also helped raise an important point of acclaim for the album, which is that Live Through This is made up of purely feminine rage. In their 1994 review, Rolling Stone wrote "Love delivers punk not only as insinuating as Nirvana's but as corrosive as the Sex Pistols'. More significantly, Live Through This may be the most potent blast of female insurgency ever committed to tape."
The album's title comes from one of the most gut-wrenching songs on the album, "Asking For It." The song is part rape culture commentary, part personal experience. It's one of the songs that fall into the sweet spot, starting soft on the first verse and ramping up until Love is screaming "Was she asking for it? Was she asking nice?"
The unique brand of feminism explored by Hole on Live Through This continues to enrapture listeners. The albums final track "Rock Star" (actually titled "Olympia" but the band switched out "Rock Star" after the album art had been printed) is a lyrical takedown of the ever- influential riot grrrl movement. Love and Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of Bikini Kill and riot grrrl poster child, had a notoriously difficult relationship despite Hanna's friendship with Kurt Cobain. "Rock Star" offers Love's critiques of the women of riot grrrl saying "We look the same/ We talk the same/We even fuck the same" in an uncharacteristically ditzy voice. Love and Erlandson's writing of specific feminine rage doesn't mean that other feminists are exempt from their critiques.
It's no secret that Live Through This has stayed relevant. It was critically acclaimed upon release, and now, it got a coveted Pitchfork 10 on retrospective and is widely considered an album everyone must hear before they die. The thing that makes Live Through This hold so much meaning today is that I don't think it was written for everyone to enjoy. Love tears at the institution of motherhood and explores rape culture, insecurity, unoriginality, body image, and depression at close distance, sometimes uncomfortably close. Live Through This is not the only album to explore these themes, but, from my listening experience, it's just one of the albums that do it the best.
As I poured through the internet to find testimonials from teens about Hole's power, I came back to something else in the pantheon of great work for young women, Rookie Magazine. Tavi Gevinson's famed website/online zine named their advice and personal essay section "live through this." A Rookie article called "Not Creepy At All" had readers send in photos of shrines they had created in their rooms, quite a few of which had to do with Hole, and two in particular to the Live Through This era. A Tumblr page called Hole Confessions, where people anonymously submit, has a very simple testimonial, reading "Live Through This is keeping me alive and giving me hope."
Live Through This is an album where Hole takes responsibility for every emotion they write about. On the albums' second track, "Miss World," Love lets out her signature growl on the chorus as she sings "I made my bed I'll lie in it/I made my bed I die in it." The album opener, "Violet," hears Love snarl "I told you from the start just how this would end/When I get what I want I never want it again." One of the things that makes Live Through This continually gut- wrenching is that even when they're terrible, sad, angry, in love, desperate, Hole is still claiming to be themselves. Through songs about cheating, custody, and loving someone so much you end up hating them, Love seems to offer strange words of comfort to every listener who comes across the album: Things can be awful. Live through it.
Image Credit: Thumbnail- London Features, Image 1- Hole, Image 2 London Features, Image 3 -NME