Were we asking for it? Were we asking nice?
Well, I didn't ask for Hole's new album, but I got it anyway. And you? What do you want in your ripped black fishnet stocking this Christmas season? While not answering that question, dear reader, also don't answer me this: Why is it that My Body, the Hand Grenade makes me want to sit down and pick up my knitting, when I'd much rather be running for cover? Whereas Live Through This was battered, bruised fingers pounding against a wall of small-minded ladylikeness, this album is last year's shade of Bruise digit dazzle (yes, that's nail polish) adorning the hands of your slightly unbalanced neighborhood Avon lady. Still, when Hole come around peddling their wares, there are three or four good reasons to answer the door.
Which is to say that if you are a true fan, you will buy the thing anyway and be glad and pissed that you did. Glad because, like I said, there are some good songs. Pissed because, like I'm saying now, this album could almost be retitled If You Buy This CD, Courtney Will Have More Money to Purchase Chanel. (While I realize that I'm focusing on Courtney Love and not on Hole as a unit, I am only somewhat repentant. She is, after all, the most compelling character of the four band members.) OK, OK, to be fair, the liner notes do make a somewhat convincing case that this album provides the missing link between Pretty on the Inside and Live Through This, so at the very least, My Body has artifact value.
Enough finely tuned ambivalence -- let's strip it down.
The first Hole recording ever, "Turpentine," opens the album. Although it's not the most inspired song I've heard (in fact, halfway through I got distracted and started thinking, Boy, her throat must hurt), I like the silly internal rhyme of the partially decipherable line "I've ceased to exist on the Christmas list." This song, "Phonebill Song" and "Dicknail" (all singles that are none too easy to get ahold of) were recorded in 1990. Even eight years ago, Love managed to sound simultaneously defeated and ready to do battle. Her fatigued vitriol reminds me of when the end of an argument -- or what you think is the end -- suddenly loops back into the middle and the beginning again. At other times, it sounds as though someone's forcing words through her mouth, which she resents, so she tosses them off, studiously casual or just plain sick of it all. On "Phonebill Song," Love poison-pens, "Well I could really fuck you up, yeah/ I'm the demon buttercup." If there's one thing you can't accuse her of, it's humorlessness.
Or harmlessness. One of the most interesting songs is the acoustic, witchy "Old Age," an outtake from Live Through This. The untitled lead-in to this song is also compelling -- it's a 45-second interlude dominated by either an organ or guitar feedback that sounds like an organ, and which also appeared (untitled) on Live Through This. Whatever this mysterious piece of music is -- let's not get hung up on semantics -- it spooks and comforts. I like that. There's also the MTV "Unplugged" version of "Softer, Softest." With lyrics like "I've got a blister from/ Touching everything I see/ The abyss opens up/ It steals everything from me," this is quintessential Hole, thin- skinned and calloused at once, blistered yet still reaching for that lit burner.
The most interesting thing about this album is that it affords the opportunity to track the evolution of the band -- from somewhat hollow-sounding, no-holds-barred defiance to a fuller, more restrained, more coherent and lucid range of expression, from sadness to rage to longing to exhaustion to wicked glee and back. Hole have also, it seems, made the leap from merely reacting against something (pop music, sexism, opportunism, hypocrisy) to actually creating something all their own. In other words, they started out by messing up the bed and throwing the pillows around, then they made the bed, then they decided the bed was never theirs in the first place, so they threw it out and built a new bed. Now they're lying in it.