Forget, just for a moment, everything you've heard about Courtney Love for the past three years – the tales, apocryphal and otherwise, of substance misadventure; her, uh, lively marriage to Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and checkered passage into motherhood; the endless Yoko Ono comparisons and dragon-bitch disses. Then go straight to the lusty, vengeful, lung-busting "Fuck y-o-u-u-u-u!" that blows the roof off "I Think That I Would Die" three-quarters of the way through Live Through This. Even if you have serious reservations about punk-rock brats living on major-label largesse or believe profanity is the last refuge of the inarticulate, the sheer force of Love's corrosive,
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lunatic wail – not to mention the guitar-drum wrath unleashed in its wake – is impressive stuff, a scorched-earth blast of righteous indignation as feral and convincing as anything in Johnny Rotten's bark-and-spittle repertoire.
It is also the very thing that made Courtney Love, Hole's founding singer and guitarist, such a wonder grrrl in the first place. Even before she ascended to celebrity spousehood, Love was the scarred beauty queen of underground-rock society, a fearless confessor and feedback addict whose sinister charisma – part ravaged baby doll, part avenging kamikaze angel – suggested the dazed, enraged, illegitimate daughter of Patti Smith. Hole's 1991 debut album, the gloriously assaultive Pretty on the Inside, remains a classic of sex-mad self-laceration, hypershred guitars and full-moon bawling, in particular the spectacular goring of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now" (a k a "Clouds") at the end of the record. You don't really know the solitary despair at the core of that song until you've heard Love's embittered delivery of the last two lines – "It's life's illusions I recall/I really don't know life at all" – over guitarist Eric Erlandson's fading squall.
Live Through This is, in comparison, prettier on the outside, with a greater emphasis on crushed-velvet guitar distortion and liquid poppish strumming. There are tart, hooky guitar maneuvers (the sing-along clatter of "Miss World") and vocal airs and graces (the faux-Gregorian drone prefacing the hepped-up cover of Young Marble Giants' "Credit in the Straight World") that invoke the divine hammering of the Breeders. Even when Love picks at her open wound in "Doll Parts," a song written from the losing end of naked ambition and vicious manipulation, she doesn't overplay the hurt.
When I saw Hole perform the song live in Los Angeles back in the spring of '92, Love flayed the melody with suicidal anguish in front of Erlandson's industrial-strength guitar snort. Here, to the tense whisper of more muted picking, Love simply lets the scar tissue speak for itself: "He only loves those things because he loves to see them break/I fake it so real, I am beyond fake/And someday, you will ache like I ache."
Unlike Love's husband
