And she didn't use the usual cathartic rock and roll tactics to accomplish that goal, either. There was no ecstatic connection, no hysteria, no one weeping in the audience from blatant emotional overload. She just did her songs for us, which is the last thing anyone expected from the infamous and conspicuous Courtney Love. She snuck in the back door, so smoothly I wonder if she even knew exactly what she was doing. Duh. How could she not?

She seemed so cool up there, one foot up on a monitor, alternating between looking at her guitar and staring up, above the crowd, making eye contact impossible. Singing gave her face some expression, but there was nothing really unique there. Her stage manner is just total classic rock and roll star--male rock and roll star, in a lot of ways. It's really cool, reserved and righteous, like Keith Richards, you know.

But then she'd speak between songs. Her speaking voice is not the same as her gritty, bravado-drenched singing voice. When she speaks, even saying something crude or harsh or hateful, she sounds a little like the girl in the picture on the back of Live Through This--tired, but sweet, and young.

Other times, like when she jumps into the crowd, she's completely silent, eyes wide wide open, huge, head cocked a little, a soundless, twisted mannequin. It's freaky, spooky. The whole concept of stage diving is weird anyway, but usually it's such a high, the ultimate connection between audience and artist, springing from emotions so intense that the performer just has to jump into the crowd, can't help but trust the thousand sweaty people who have been singing along all night, people who know all the words.

When it's truly meant, it can be breathtaking, beautiful, like watching a spirit jump out of its poor wretched skin. When Courtney took her stage dive, though, it was completely different--not the opposite of joy, but simply the absence of it, like she felt she had to do it, like taking medicine, or performing some sort of wifely duty.

I was right up front when she dove, and I helped catch her and pass her around. When security nosed in and tried to pull her back onstage, she clasped my arm and hand and fixed that weird, empty look straight on me. I couldn't tell if she wanted me to let go so she could go back or hang on for dear life so she wouldn't have to and I tried to read her face to see but I couldn't do it. I mean I just couldn't tell.

So I held on for a minute. When I finally let go she gave me this wry little smile like the smile I give my friends when I've done something naughty. She's so smooth, so smart, so fast. Either that or she's the most evil poseur alive. Honestly? I think she's both.

If the distance she projects is meant as some kind of defense mechanism on her part, it worked opposite on me. I mean, how do I not love someone who is trying so hard to keep from trying to be loved? But maybe she realizes this. Maybe the distance is a offensive weapon, a postmodern guerilla tactic designed to bypass the media, or at least minimize its importance. Either way, mission accomplished. That tall girl whose hand she grabbed in Pittsburgh will be thinking about her for a long time, thankful that the whole is so much greater than the sum of all those chopped-up parts.

There's also the way that she totally walks that I-hate-you/ I-need-you-to-survive crowd-vibe line, the way she simultaneously invokes and rejects messiahdom. She sings about how she's just doll parts and then throws dolls into the audience like communion: this is my body, eat it up you bastards, "take everything I want you to," hating whoever catches a piece for being so hysterically happy about it, like it's a fly ball or something, but at the same time needing to leave a trail of dolls behind her, wherever she goes, in her wake.

In Pittsburgh, I think she hated us. I've read a few other reviews, and it seems like she has fun other times and places, but for the record, she appeared to have no fun here. She was mostly Courtney Anti-Love, and you're right, who can blame her if she is? But then I wonder, why is she doing it? Really. I mean, why go around the country miserable and so full of loathing that you want to die? Would she do it to punish herself?

Or am I just reading way too much into a stage act? Which leads to the big and ultimately unanswerable question--how much of it is an act? And a part of me really despises myself for asking questions like that, because I feel like it's not fair, that we should just fucking leave her alone already. But then I remember that look. She wants people to see that look. She wants people to wonder and think about her. She needs to have a big impact, even if she's not sure what that impact will be, or what she wants it to be. But she can't help it. That's why she's an artist. And, since she's a woman, a self-proclaimed whore, too. She has to be the first to say it; she has to beat everyone else to the punch.

I understand that need--why she throws doll parts at the audience, why she picks her panties out of her cunt up on stage in front of God and everybody. She's not as hard to read as she seems. But she's also not conventional. She's political and shocking, but at the same time beyond simple politics, beyond simply trying to shock. You have to think to get it. She doesn't fit into any of the slots. She refuses to uncomplicate herself to expedite cultural digestion of her music, her image, her body.

And she keeps it together in the most intensely draining situations. Like, every other MTV News snippet is about how she's coping or who she's banging, but it took thousands of complaints by MTV viewers/Hole fans before the video for "Doll Parts" made it into any kind of steady rotation schedule. Entertainment Weekly ran a cover story about her "life after Kurt" after she refused their request for an interview, and the article rambled endlessly about her past boyfriends and drug problmes. Hole's music was mentioned, but only in passing, and only because it made a good lead.

The world is constantly trying to rip her image off her back while stuffing her voice down her throat, building a mystique and a mythology completely apart from any kind of truth, completely apart from what she herself sings and talks about. This kind of reification kills, but, admirably, she keeps dodging the final bullet. She manages to stay one step ahead.

How? She undermines herself so much, treats herself like such a whore, but unless you're stupid, you realize it's conscious. She means everything she does. She's smart as hell, articulate and funny and far too complex to allow herself to be commodified. At least not in the usual way.

Time will tell how hard she is to kill. If the pressure never subsides, maybe someday she will crack. And if she does it will be the harshest, most brutally accurate indictment of the music industry ever. For now, Hole's records are truly great, and she is the coolest, most fascinating kid on the block, the undisputed queen of the neighborhood. She really is a singular thing, something you can't break down into parts. Plastic dolls do her no justice. And I think that's the point.