With the obvious exception of Newt Gingrich, was there anyone more hated in the nineties than Courtney Love? If Yoko Ono broke up The Beatles, Courtney Love broke down Nirvana's door with a can of gas in one hand, a blowtorch in another, a burning cigarette hanging out of her mouth and a dirty syringe hanging haphazardly from her arm.
I'm here to ruin an icon, thanks.
Other nineties grunge bands had a devoted following, but none had done what Nirvana did when they released "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in 1991 and it became a staple on MTV. The song no one could understand but everybody loved changed MTV's playlist almost overnight, and teens and college kids across the county could not have been more enthusiatic.
Not The Beatles enthusiastic, no. It was more of a stoic, this is, like, really cool, laid back enthusiasm. Grunge had effectively arrived and was A Thing. The over-indulgence of '80's hair metal quickly became a joke, and budding guitarists no longer had to become Olympians on the fret board. They just had to know a few chords and feel shit.
And Nirvana, whether they liked it or not, became the face of the whole popular music sea change.
Kurt Cobain killed himself on April 5th, 1994, and it shocked, stunned, and saddened an entire generation and then some. Although they certainly weren't the first band to embrace heavy power chords while shunning the rock star image, they were, inexplicably, the first to become mainstream.
For anyone looking for a reason that Kurt did what he had done, Courtney was an easy target. She was.... well, she was Courtney Love. Easy to criticize and quick to give her critics ammunition.
It didn't help that Live Through This, the band's second studio album, was released only days after Cobain's death. This only fed fuel to the conspiracy fires that were burning at the time: Love clearly killed Kurt in order to advance her career.
It didn't matter that Hole's first studio album, "Pretty on the Inside," was released in 1991 and was a critical success, if not commercial one. Objectively speaking, that record was a really cool alternative album but was never destined to be a commercial hit. I loved it, but far more people hated it. Is was incredibly raw, loud, and angry, with very few (or zero) production tricks to make it easy to swallow.
Consider two of my favorite songs from the album: Good Sister, Bad Sister and Garbage Man.
(I'm intentionally NOT including YouTube videos of the songs in order to save bandwidth, but you can indeed find the videos online.)
Good Sister, Bad Sister:
Good sister bad sister
Better burn that dress, sister
Scar tissue, blood blister
Suck upon the dregs sister - whoa
.......but I can't and I want to so bad and
I try but I can't and I want to so bad and
I try but I can't and I want to so bad and
I try but I can't and I want to so bad and
Good sister, bad sister
You're different from the rest, sister
Choke, strangle, rip, twist her
Sell me down the river sister - whoa!
.......but I can't and I want to so bad and
I try but I can't and I want to so bad and
I try but I can't and I want to so bad and
I try.. I try... I try...
C'mere and sit talk about it just for a sec',
Boy you sit back down
You're choking on big, black, bloody mouthfulls of it
Left me lying in your dog descent
And choking on your candy flesh
I'll be the biggest scar in your back
Run down it jagged and naked and black
I'll be the biggest dick that you ever had
Hey want it back hey want it back you want it
Good sister, bad sister
Tell me what you want, sister
Better watch your back, sister
Even you cannot resist her - whoa
....but I can't and I want to so bad and
I try but I can't and I want to so bad and
I try but I can't and I want to so bad and
I try but I can't and I try..I try
Sugarstar comes down to talk to me
She comes to crucify - off with her dress
I am not your ruby to grease
And sugar comes from her arteries
I'll be the biggest... scar
Run down and jagged and naked.. and black
I'll be the biggest star in your sky
You want it back you want it back
You want it back
She's in she is incredulous
? drips off her dress
She wants you in her descent
Choking on her candy flesh
I'll be the biggest scar in your back
Run down and jagged and make it back
I'll be the biggest dick that you ever had
Hey you want it back you want it back
You want it...
This song starts with the dual assault of hyper-distorted guitars slowly strumming power chords and Love's voice apathetically singing "Good Sister, Bad Sister," before screaming (in the way only Love can) "Better burn that dress, sister!"
It is inherently difficult for a wider audience to swallow.
Garbage Man
She tears the hole up even wider
Lets all the darkness up inside her
Holy old yeah
Yeah, you're mine
your everything is mine
With or without a doubt
Hey, where the fuck were you when my lights went out?
Yeah you don't want to look at it
No, ....whoa
Yeah you don't want to look at it
With or without a doubt
C'mon and let me out
Yeah where the fuck were you when my lights went out...
Yeah you don't want to look at it
No, ...whoa whoa
Yeah you don't want to look at me
C'mon let me out
c'mon and let me out
Yeah, tie a soul to you when your life goes down
Time flies when you're falling down
I spread my right all over this town
And everyone of you looks the same
And everyone of you feels the same
For causal listeners of rock music, the whole album sucks. Everything is raw and loud and littered with feedback: again, it's not an easy to swallow album.
But it was awesome. If you don't believe me, listen to the album and pretend it was recorded live (which it essentially was). Imagine it all polished up with production tricks. Those chord changes and the way they emote, and then Love singing/screaming every other line. It's amazing.
Anyway, as I said, it was a critical hit but never meant to be widely consumed.
Live Through This was, though.
There aren't a lot of practical differences between the two albums, but
Live Through This was much cleaner sounding than
Pretty on the Inside. Moving from the obscure Caroline Records to the more well-known Geffen had predictable results. Every single on
Live Through This was quite at home on the radio.
Live Through This also enjoyed critical acclaim. Said Rolling Stone:
Even if you have serious reservations about punk-rock brats living on major-label largesse or believe profanity is the last refuge of the inarticulate, the sheer force of Love's corrosive, lunatic wail — not to mention the guitar-drum wrath unleashed in its wake — is impressive stuff, a scorched-earth blast of righteous indignation as feral and convincing as anything in Johnny Rotten's bark-and-spittle repertoire.
It is also the very thing that made Courtney Love, Hole's founding singer and guitarist, such a wonder grrrl in the first place. Even before she ascended to celebrity spousehood, Love was the scarred beauty queen of underground-rock society, a fearless confessor and feedback addict whose sinister charisma — part ravaged baby doll, part avenging kamikaze angel — suggested the dazed, enraged, illegitimate daughter of Patti Smith. Hole's 1991 debut album, the gloriously assaultive Pretty on the Inside, remains a classic of sex-mad self-laceration, hypershred guitars and full-moon bawling, in particular the spectacular goring of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now" (a k a "Clouds") at the end of the record. You don't really know the solitary despair at the core of that song until you've heard Love's embittered delivery of the last two lines — "It's life's illusions I recall/I really don't know life at all" — over guitarist Eric Erlandson's fading squall.
Live Through This is, in comparison, prettier on the outside, with a greater emphasis on crushed-velvet guitar distortion and liquid poppish strumming. There are tart, hooky guitar maneuvers (the sing-along clatter of "Miss World") and vocal airs and graces (the faux-Gregorian drone prefacing the hepped-up cover of Young Marble Giants' "Credit in the Straight World") that invoke the divine hammering of the Breeders. Even when Love picks at her open wound in "Doll Parts," a song written from the losing end of naked ambition and vicious manipulation, she doesn't overplay the hurt.
Live Through This existed in the shadows of Cobain's suicide, though, and although in was
objectively a great record that critics loved, it was never allowed to stand on its own.
Conspiracy theories swirled around Cobain's suicide, most notably the belief (immortalized in the documentary Kurt & Courtney) that Love herself was behind Cobain's death.
The timing was always suspicious, say proponents of this CT. The irony of that, of course, is that Live Through This could have easily become a greater commercial success had it not been overshadowed by Cobain's death, which was still sinking in for most of my generation at the time of the album's release.
And that wasn't the only conspiracy theory that cast a shadow over the album: others claimed that Cobain wrote the album and Love took credit for it.
At every turn, Live Through This was under attack culturally, and not from angry parents (my mother being the exception; she didn't believe the conspiracy theories but did think Love was a horrific role model) but from the album's own audience.
To be fair, Love's behavior didn't exactly help the situation. She was always a troubled and erratic person, and with the spotlight placed on her in the wake of Cobain's death, it was easy to believe she was absolutely the type of monster who would force Cobain to write an album for her and thank him by having him killed.
Okay, it's actually not easy for me to imagine that, but that's more or less how she was portrayed at the time and, again, her behavior didn't help to dispel those myths.
It's hard to imagine what would have happened to the careers of both Kurt and Courtney had Cobain lived. Kurt was clearly losing interest in stardom and was ready to move on to other things; musical things, but different things. Love was still ready to rock, but Celebrity Skin, the final Hole album released in 1998, was a huge disappointment to fans. It played well on the radio, but it was the same sugar pop rock that any old band could release. (It was also the last straw for me when it came to Billy Corgan, the album's producer and Smashing Pumpkins frontman, but that's probably a whole different diary).
In 2004, Love released her first solo album, the righteously titled America's Sweetheart. It received mixed reviews but ultimately didn't go anywhere. It's an album I listened to for a few weeks then mostly forgot about. Occasionally I'll remember it and give it another listen. It's good, but it doesn't have the raw emotional power that Live Through This and Pretty on the Inside had in spades.
In the end, though, Live Through This did live through the nineties and is widely considered one of the best 100 to 500 (depending on how much space any given publication has to fill) rock albums of all time. When removed from the emotional turmoil it evoked in the nineties, it gets the fair hearing it always deserved.
And almost twenty years later, young and old alike can agree that there's something exhilarating about the song "Violet," and screaming along with Love to "Go on take everything, take everything, take EVERYTHING!!!!" is practically a liberating experience.