The Troubled Story of Hole’s ‘Live Through This’
Hole's second studio album is a testament to having control over your own mythology, even when the rest of the world wants to be the narrator. The songwriting on Live Through This moved through space and place. Frontwoman Courtney Love wrote the stirring hit “Doll Parts” in a friend's bathroom. On the one hand, it's a room with four walls, and on the other, it is a deeply private space for what feels like a remarkably private song. The track subverts femininity, literally pulling it apart and then putting it back together again, something one might feel they need to do behind a locked door. Drummer Patty Schemel and Love wrote “She Walks” in a studio built in a laundry room and “Jennifer's Body” in San Francisco. The band shared a much-loved rehearsal space on Capitol Hill in Seattle, where they built solid tour sturdy relationships with each other while fine-tuning their sound.
The lyrics were propelled by a strong undercurrent of competition and a desire to make it on their terms. They're packed with poetic liberation and uneasy transitions that force you to move from the softness onto something purposefully uncomfortable. “Violet,” inspired by the relationship between Courtney and Billy Corgan (lead singer of the Smashing Pumpkins), starts with a visual of an amethyst sky and ends with a plead, almost sarcastically, to be left with nothing as she sings, “Go on, take everything, take everything, I want you to, Go on, take everything, take everything, I want you to,” while using power chords that carry the listener from subdued and tender verses into a bitter loud chorus. “Miss World” is a lyrical act of disrupting the gaze while referencing the unstable split between what is beautiful and what is repulsive. Love sings, “I am the girl you know, can't look you in the eye, I'm miss world, watch me break and watch me burn,” while threading themes of drug abuse and mental oblivion throughout the track. Hole found their way through abrupt honesty, completely uncooked and straight from the gut.
According to Love, the “rehearsals just flowed” because of an underlying and seemingly unspoken understanding between the band, even with a surface of chaos. This was especially true after Erlandson brought in Pfaff with her inherent musical talent and acute auditory intuition. After that, they could sense something incredible was unfolding. During writing and rehearsal, there was this feeling that they were never finished, even though they were completely satisfied with what they had already written. You can hear the restlessness in the album, always moving and hard to pin down.
Courtney Love performing with Hole in September 1994, photo by Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Live Through This was recorded in late 1993, about a year and a half after Hole signed a seven-record deal with the Geffen subsidiary D.G.C. records. Love stated they crafted the record to be “shocking to the people who think that we don't have a soft edge.” It was produced by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie (Radiohead, Pixies) and mixed by J.Mascis (Dinosaur Jr) and Scott Litt (R.E.M.). According to Erlandson, “it was the first time Hole had worked with real producers.” Schemel got her brilliant drum tech, Carl Plaster, and Pfaff had a musical ability that allowed her to play the bass so perfectly while recording that they didn't have to overdub.
Despite Love's chronic lateness and the band's turbulent emotions, their combined gifts had them covered. It was proof that kicked-up dust uncovers the polish. Cobain came to sing some harmonies over a few tracks and offer advice, but this likely started one of the most grinding and unfair rumors to take hold of Hole's story, that Cobain was a ghostwriter on Live Through This. Although Kolderie and Slade were worried Cobain was going to take the album and have it remixed, eyewitnesses to its creation have consistently disproven the writing rumors. Live Through This dropped on April 12, 1994. Regardless of Hole's attempts at separating themselves from Nirvana, the album was bound to Nirvana's legacy when Cobain committed suicide almost a week before its release, leaving Love with a newborn and new traumas.
Live Through This was created with melody in mind and polished for the public, but it has become one of the most significant albums to come out of the 90s for other inescapable reasons. Love is a frontwoman who was a visual representation of disintegrating binaries. Every theme on this album is blurred: the mother and the whore, the gentle and the abrasive, the joy and the pain, and the pretty with the ugly. The album rattled feminine foundations, questioning all of our sticky notions of reality. It has held up against all our unresolved cultural boundaries, and it will continue to do so as long as those still need to be settled. So far, Live Through This has lived through everything.
Listen to Live Through This:
