The Most Cake: Revisiting Hole’s Live Through This

Just to clear this up: Only one song on Hole’s Live Through This sounds like Kurt Cobain could’ve been involved.

The late-breaking rager “Gutless” shares the same structure and antagonistic relationship with tune as Nirvana’s “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” from the previous year. Except where Kurt’s vocal curls sullenly inward on his chorus, Courtney Love’s makes it clear the title means her insides exploded out of her body cavity. The flat-out offensive, inattentive insistence than her husband masterminded her masterpiece in any way doesn’t take much listening to dispel. The doomed power couple transmuted completely different pains, however Cobain’s gynecological fascinations may have informed “Pennyroyal Tea” or “Heart-Shaped Box” or the brilliantly Succession-appropriated “Rape Me.” It’s a disgraceful to rock and roll that there’s an “authorship allegations” section on the album’s Wikipedia page.

Men are not immaterial to Love’s music; her chief collaborator, Eric Erlandson, may be downright unsung at this point, as a supporter of her vision and a doctor of guitar dissonance who managed to hack Sonic Youth’s formula on 1991’s “Babydoll.” She opted to cast men as her perfect foils in a world where she didn’t have a choice. A former sex worker who stated that her debut album “announced her persona as a cunt” and looped in bassist Kristin Pfaff from a classified asking for a “whore from Hell,” Love’s penchant for fully-realized, blunt-force trauma rock begins with one of the all-time great band names. So it’s fitting that “they get what they want and they never want it again” remains the tersest transactional-sex lament/sneer I’ve ever heard.

Love’s ambition confuses misogynists; just because she’s good at getting what she wants doesn’t mean she killed her husband after forcing him to write her magnum opus at gunpoint. It just means she had the chutzpah to ensnare Kim Gordon and her friend Don Fleming to produce 1991’s Pretty on the Inside with only a persuasive fan letter and the bribe of a Hello Kitty barrette. Before that, Love acted in Sid and Nancy and was an early collaborator of Faith No More and Babes in Toyland’s Kat Bjelland before pursuing her own Fleetwood Mac-inclusive version of riot grrrl. Her many tiring detractors don’t understand agency; they don’t even realize their idea that she slept her way to the top was hers, incepted by her own Trent “more like three-inch nails” Reznor jokes. And if they really believe Kurt’s death is what boosted her to accolades, why didn’t Nirvana’s suddenly posthumous Unplugged beat Live Through This to Pazz & Jop-winning glory in 1994, or even R.E.M.’s Monster? How did Pretty on the Inside make SPIN’s top 20 albums of 1991 before they even dated?

If this is all a defensive entrée to one of the best albums of the ‘90s, well, combat is Love’s thing. Live Through This sounds like a declaration of war. The pooling reverb of its clean guitar tones and the revelation of her husky Stevie Nicks purr on the sensitive moments dared Grunge Nation to cry sellout. The panoply of bodily fluids spotting “Plump” challenged In Utero fans to deal with grotesque testimony from the front lines of pregnancy. The abrupt switch from “Violet” to searing red is a scream to every POS who molested Love in the pit at an unfortunate Glasgow gig: “Go on, take everything / Take everything, I want you to.” It’s “Rape Me” in practice, not in theory at a distance.

 

VIDEO: Hole “Violet”

Cobain did remarkable things with his short-lived celebrity privilege to center the plight of women as a major rock subject. But it was his wife who expelled those feelings and experiences directly from her guts. Love embodied her abused protagonists on “Asking for It” and “Jennifer’s Body” because she was them; she wrote about exploitation because she knew it.

Love also understood and wrote about the Faustian bargain of success in a patriarchy; “I’m Miss World, somebody kill me” goes one typical pairing, another is her mournfully sighing, on the album’s most famous tune, that she wants to be the girl with the most cake. When that turns into “I fake it so real I am beyond fake,” women knew what she was talking about, and her voice was loud enough that plenty of men did, too. Poetically her one cover is entitled “Credit in the Straight World,” by Young Marble Giants, whose author Stuart Moxham, she relayed with glee, reportedly hated it, for turning his song into “pornographic Led Zeppelin.” Real or apocryphal? Doesn’t matter, she fakes it so real it’s beyond the point.

 

VIDEO: Hole “Miss World”

Ultimately, Love is an entertainer, a Hollywood survivor who understood punk was just as much about pleasure as rage, and her hooks cut as deep as her feminist analysis. “Plump” sports a riff as guttingly dumb as “Breed,” and “She Walks on Me” zigzags sweet-and-sour power chords under a rapid-fire delivery that resembles mutual friend Michael Stipe on “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” more than anything Nirvana ever did. “Doll Parts” and “Violet” forced radio into submission even though the album only went platinum one time. “Rock Star” ends 38 relentless minutes on both a three-chord happy note and another perfect bout of throat-ruining shrieks.

“We even fuck the same” she mumbles towards the end, a perfectly TMI tribute to the man she loved while he was still alive, with whom she’d sometimes get it on to Trout Mask Replica. Not enough is said about how much love there is in Love’s music. That’s where the passion and fury come from; the love of the family she wanted, her sacred Fleetwood Mac, the overwhelming necessity to overcome these obstacles to the good living she was hell-bent on. Her husband didn’t. “Someday you will ache like I ache” instead became a blues of astonishing sympathy and heartbreak. Love howls it into the void like she’s demanding a response.