My pal Ed edited a compilation zine called I F#cking Love This Album, and he invited me to contribute to it. The zine came out a few weeks ago, so I thought now would be a good time to share my little essay with you here. The zine has a number of funny, interesting essays by other writers, including the highly entertaining Billy da Bunny. Buy yourself a copy, why donthca? Meantime, read mine:
Hole, Live Through This
By the time I started college, Kurt Cobain was already dead. My best friend Laura and I hugged each other in the parking lot at school that Monday, the weekend after we found out. Laura and I used music as a way to distinguish ourselves as different from the other girls at school, and to get close to each other. She’d drive us around the suburbs in her little Corolla, tapes blasting, while we laughed like Beavis and Butthead and worked up the nerve to buy cigarettes. Laura loved Hole and Courtney Love as much as we both loved Kurt and Nirvana, and although I thought Courtney was cool and funny, I didn’t care that much about her music. Where Nirvana’s sound was rare and perfect, Hole sounded messy and unformed, always on the verge of flying apart.
After high school Laura and I stayed best friends but went to different colleges, and at first it was really hard. I was lonely and isolated at a hyper-competitive school, and I had a new boyfriend who I had no idea how to deal with because growing up Catholic had left me sick with sex-shame. During those months, I learned that feeling anguished made Hole sound … different. The music wasn’t just angry, it was urgent, like it was desperately trying to save your life. Courtney Love’s rage and pain were so female, too—the true beginning of my feminist education. “They found pieces of Jennifer’s baaaaah-dee”: I must have sung that awful line ten thousand times.
Live Through This isn’t my favorite album; nowadays, I’ll forget about it completely for years at a time. But MAN was it important to me then. I had it on tape, and played it at top volume on my Walkman over and over in the dark. Lying on the stiff mattress of my lofted bed at night, trying not to cry, getting braver. Whenever I think of the album the first words of the first song unfurl in my mind—“And the sky was made of amethyst,” set to the pulse of a too-quick heartbeat, and I can hear the perfection that was always there.
A few years ago I saw Hole play for the first time. Courtney Love was unbelievably powerful in person, with huge long legs like an Amazon. We got close to the stage, which isn’t hard to do at an old-people rock show, and I looked up at her in amazement as she bucked and heaved and belted out my getting-brave music, right there in front of me. It was 15 years after the album helped me save myself, and I no longer needed it the same way I once did. But I still loved it.
Indicative Mood 