The Power of “Live Through This” is Palpable, 25 Years Later
Courtney Love has long been viewed in the way of Yoko Ono. Both married talented, idolized men, only to be blamed for their demise. Even Love saw herself in Ono, so much that she wrote a song about her.
“Riot Grrrls, think you can stop me?” Love challenged. “You’re forever in her debt / I know you haven’t saved me / And you haven’t saved her yet.”
It was 1992 when Love sang “they want to burn the witches inside us,” but even then, she’d yet to be fully engulfed in the flames.
Kurt Cobain, the Lennon to Love’s Ono, died in 1994. That year Love sang about witches again, this time on Live Through This, her band Hole’s magnum opus. But Live Through This, its title a premonition, came out four days after the news of Cobain’s death, and the ensuing mourning and conspiracy theories cemented its place on the list of most overshadowed albums. But Live Through This stood on its own as a perennial document of female rage, and simply as a great rock record. 25 years later, it still does.
“You should learn how to say no,” Love incants on opener “Violet,” and the two-front assault of her guitar and Patty Schemel’s drums cast the hex. “I’m the one with no soul / One above and one below,” Love shouts, with a guttural “ugh.” She’s seething.
While “Violet” is straightforward in matching its themes to its music, its successor splits them up. In “Miss World,” Love introduces herself as the girl who “can’t look you in the eye,” who “lies and lies and lies.” The sparkling, shimmering chord progression that follows that admission sets the tone for the song and the record with a new defining trait for Hole: the juxtaposition of really pretty music with pretty desperate words. After the pure noise of debut LP Pretty On The Inside, Hole intended to prove that they could write a pop song too. And even when the hacksaw guitar returns, with Love singing about dying in the bed she made, it’s still a sing-along chorus.
Love established her lyrics as her calling-card early on — “If I could get that girl to publish her poetry, the world would change,” Cobain told Spin Magazine in 1993 — but the pop structure of the songs on Live Through This increases their impact. The innocuous riff in “Jennifer’s Body,” for example, allows its words to breathe. Abstract and dark, Love talks around the feeling of being eaten away by something invisible, and the self-destruction that follows: “I know it / I can’t see it / But I know it enough to believe it… My bitter half has bitten me … I’m sleeping with my enemy / Myself.” The most devastating imagery is attributed to an unknown man, a placeholder for the patriarchal system Love built a persona to fight: “You’re hungry / But I’m starving / He cuts you down from the tree / He keeps you in a box by the bed / Alive, but just barely.”
It’s hard to pinpoint the inspiration behind “Jennifer’s Body,” but most of the songs on Live Through This can be easily traced to the media storm that swarmed Love and Cobain during their two-year marriage, and well after its demise. In the chugging, sarcastic “Plump,” Love spins several aspects of conventional femininity into sick jokes and returns the rumors against her with infuriated charges of her own.
“Shakes his dead rattle / Spittle on his bib / I don’t do the dishes / I throw them in the crib,” the song begins, and it’s off to the races. Later, Love assures the audience: “They say I’m plump / But I throw up all the time.” The reference to real accusations of bad parenting in the former stanza and the casual allusion to disordered eating in the latter are tied together with the chorus: “Your milk’s in my mouth / It makes me sick.” “Plump” introduces this milk motif that permeates the album, in lines that often address motherhood in disturbing ways. This is track number three, and in the third to last track, “I Think That I Would Die,” the milk has disappeared.
“I Think That I Would Die” is probably the most personal song on Live Through This, or at least the song with the most easily-decipherable lyrics. “I want my baby / Where is the baby? / I want my baby / Who took my baby?” Love asks, in the aftermath of her child, Frances Bean, being taken by Child Protective Services after a Vanity Fair article alleged Love had used heroin while pregnant. The song is punctuated with glistening guitar tones and creeping verses that explode into violent bursts of emotion. This is the “Miss World” trick all over again, pairing appealing sounds with tortured poetry. In the hook, Love cries that “there is no milk,” and then she haunts the instrumental breaks with her singular screams. “It’s… not… yours,” Love coos in the final slowdown, followed by a guttural, throat-tearing “FUUUCK! YOOOU!” If Love hadn’t sold you with her intellectual writing, she dumbs it down for you here. Once you hear it, it seems like all of Live Through This was leading up to this moment.
“Asking For It” was another track developed from Love’s experience, but it’s also one of the most generally applicable. This happened often with Hole; turns out female pain endures. The song addresses the practice of victim-blaming, in which survivors are told that they had asked for their assaults. Love, in many interviews at the time, wondered aloud why male rock stars could dive into the crowd and safely surf the venue, while she’d return to the stage from a dive with her clothes torn off and her body violated.
“Every time that I sell myself to you / I feel a little bit cheaper than I need to,” Love sings, maybe referencing her time as a stripper, maybe referencing fame in general. “Every time that I stare into the sun / Be a model or just look like one,” comes later, summing up the goals of female adolescence in one line. In the chorus, she simply asks, “Was she asking for it?”
The lyrics to “Asking For It” really open you up to Love, or, as David Fricke put it in his Rolling Stone review of Live Through This, “the woman behind the headlines.” In the bridge, the title of the album comes to life. Love begs her husband to push through public scrutiny and promises everything in return: “If you live through this with me, I swear that I would die for you.” That the world only heard this plea after it came up empty is a tragedy in itself.
And of course there’s the enduring “Doll Parts,” whose three chords grow tiresome but whose lyrics never do. “I am / Doll parts / Bad skin / Doll heart,” Love sings, at her most vulnerable. “It stands / For knife / For the rest / Of my life.” In the original lyrics, “it” was “K,” and in live performances, Love cursed “your lives.”
Hole was much more than this sad song, but the indelible lines “I want to be the girl with the most cake” and “someday you will ache like I ache” cut straight to the supposedly-evil woman’s heart.
Because of the timing of the record’s release, many of the lyrics on Live Through This took on a meaning different than what Love intended. The public spectacle of Love’s performances of the songs only helped detractors diminish their musical merit.
It’s easy to write someone off who is living out their pain in public as forgettable, or to see neurosis and controversy over any real contribution. But amidst all the noise, Courtney Love carved hooks out of the void and a crystal-clear message out of the murkiest waters.
Others might last a day — hers is forever.
