Spin Magazine
The 90 Greatest Albums of the '90's
#6 - Hole - Live Through This

She sings three different songs, among tht emost wrenching blues of the century, about the mother's milk in her breat - the virtue of her feminitiy - and how it has gone sour, makes her sick, is a dick. Tracks like "Doll Parts," "Miss World," and "Violet" have the opposite effect of koans: Deceptively wispy and strummy, filled with commonplace phrases, they destroy your serenity the more you contemplate them. When she closes the record with a throwaway slam at the riot grrrls of Olympia, it lands with almost as much punch as Dylan's shot at the folkies in "Positively 4th Street."

Courtney, you made a really good album.

But because it was released only days after Kurt Cobain blew his head off, Live Through This has never been heard as just another piece of music. Courtney Love, his wife and mistress, accused hanger-on and contributor to his delinquency, was too controversial for that and wrapped that controversy too tightly into her art. "I was a lot more misanthropic when I wrote Live Through This," she says. "My marriage gave me a bunker mentality. Going back to Seattle recently, I was thinking: Pretty city. Too bad I never saw any of it."

Love's punk credentials and inherent gremlins have never been questioned. Her longtime friend Roddy Bottum of Imperial Teen says, with the right kind of poetry: "When we were younger, Courtney taught me the magic of smelling the dental floss after flossing. It's vile and disgusting, it's the rotten smell of death, and it's fascinating and unavoidable." But then she became a rocks tar, initially more on the basis of marriage than her previous work, and applied the same shambolic engery and paranoiac cynicism to an industry and press corps still grappling with the mainstreaming of grunge.

The results weren't pretty, and they only got worse with time. There was the Vanity Fair article suggesting that Love had used heroin while pregnant with Frances Bean and the battles with musicians from Axl Rose to Kathleen Hanna to Sonic Youth. Nastiest of all, perhaps, were the allegations that Kurt had secretly written Live Through This. Not a shred of evidence has been offered, though The Stranger, a seattle alt-weekly, recently reported that "Old Age" which Love has said she and Cobain did write together, and which appeared credited only to her on a Hole EP, exists full-formed on a tape of Nevermind demos - from before Love and Cobain became involved.

Does anyone really believe that the self-incriminating, girl-germs-infested, quote-worthy lyrics of Live Through This came from a notebook other than Courtney Love's? As for the music, it certainly shares the soft-raw dynamics of the time with Nirvana, but with a rose/thorn quality that suggest Love knew exactly what she wanted, drawing on her own obsessive and idiosyncratic musical canon. A cover of the Young Marble Giants tune "Credit In The Straight World," for instance, gave some recognition to a postpunk pioneer, while the lyric precisely suited her purposes. And besides that scorched-earth yowl, her vocals throughout the record had the dexterity of great acting, finding the poise to make lines like "I fake it so real I am beyond fake" credible and moving.

Love refuses to put Live Through This above her other work, but no album better represents alternative rock in all its compromised glory, trying to reach for a status no one believed it was entitled to. "At Geffen," she recalls, "it was like, 'Oh, this is a shift from Axl to Kurt to Courtney.' There was no sense that the values had changed. Top 40 was getting obsolete, it didn't have any of the force that it has now. You could do what you wanted."

She thinks, then goes on, with a determination that should outlive the doubters: "And you still can."

By Eric Weisbard