Essay · Music & Culture
The Mess That Was Also the Method
Courtney Love arrived in the early 1990s indie scene like something the scene had not known it was missing: a woman who wanted to be enormous, who was not prepared to be grateful for whatever space was made available to her, and who understood that the rage and the ambition and the mess were not obstacles to the work but the very substance of it.
By Bergotte · Los Angeles · Music & Culture
There is a photograph taken at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards that has become, in retrospect, one of the more eloquent documents of the decade. Courtney Love, in a white slip dress, hair a catastrophe of bleached tangles, lipstick applied with the approximate aim of someone who has better things to think about, is crashing Madonna’s interview with Kurt Loder. She is throwing compact powder at Madonna. She is demanding attention in the most literal possible sense — physically inserting herself into the frame, refusing the off-camera position that the evening’s hierarchy has assigned her, making herself impossible to ignore by the simple and radical method of being impossible to ignore. The expression on Madonna’s face is one of mild, practiced amusement. The expression on Love’s face is harder to read: it contains hunger and defiance and theatre and something that might, beneath all of those, be a genuine question about whether this is the only way available to her to be seen. It is one of the defining images of 1990s alternative culture, and it has nothing to do with music, and it has everything to do with music.
Hole’s Live Through This had been released seven months earlier, on April 12, 1994 — four days after Kurt Cobain’s death, in a coincidence of timing so cruel and so cinematically perfect that it seemed, to those not entirely in control of their critical faculties, like something arranged. It was not arranged. It was simply what happened, and what happened produced a situation in which one of the most important rock albums of the decade was received through a fog of grief and suspicion and prurient speculation about its author’s role in her husband’s death that made a fair hearing almost impossible and a fair assessment of the work’s actual qualities rarer still. The album deserved better. It still does.
The Biography That Preceded Everything
Love was born Courtney Michelle Harrison in San Francisco in 1964, to a mother who was a therapist and an heiress and a father who had, by his own later admission, given her LSD at age four and who was gone shortly after. The childhood that followed was unstable in ways that make the instability of Sexton’s or Karina’s childhoods look almost settled by comparison: foster care, reform school in New Zealand, a period in Portland, a period in Eugene, stints in Liverpool and Dublin and Dublin again, Japan, where she worked as a stripper, Los Angeles, where she didn’t. She assembled herself, in the manner of someone who has not been given the raw materials and has to find them wherever they are available, from music and film and literature and sheer force of will, and the person she assembled was — by the time she arrived in the Los Angeles punk scene of the mid-1980s — so fully, even aggressively, a construction that the question of what lay beneath the construction was one that critics and biographers would spend the next thirty years attempting, with limited success, to answer.
She formed Hole in Los Angeles in 1989 with the guitarist Eric Erlandson, and the band went through the standard early permutations of personnel and sound before settling, by the time of their debut album Pretty on the Inside (1991), into a noise-rock ferocity that owed debts to the riot grrrl movement forming simultaneously in the Pacific Northwest, to the Pixies’ loud-quiet-loud architecture, and to the specific fury of a woman who had been treated as peripheral for long enough to have developed a fully articulated position on the subject. The album was produced by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth — a significant endorsement from the most respected woman in American indie rock — and was received with critical enthusiasm that acknowledged its power while keeping it firmly in the category of Important Underground Art rather than Actual Mainstream Success, a category whose function is partly to contain things that threaten to be too large for the available frames.
“I am not a woman. I am a force of nature.”Courtney Love, in interview, 1994
Live Through This: The Album and What It Did
Live Through This is a different order of achievement from Pretty on the Inside, and the difference is not primarily one of production quality or commercial ambition, though both of those changed between 1991 and 1994. The difference is one of songwriting: the album contains melodies, and the melodies are extraordinary — big, aching, hook-laden things that sit inside the noise rather than being buried by it, that make the noise meaningful rather than merely loud, that give Love’s voice somewhere to go other than the upper register of rage. The combination of melody and distortion, of vulnerability and aggression, of the confessional lyric and the wall of guitar, was not entirely new in 1994 — Nirvana had demonstrated its commercial viability, the Pixies had invented much of its grammar — but what was new was the subject matter, and the subject matter was a woman’s body and a woman’s anger and a woman’s refusal to be defined by either her victimhood or her ambition.
“Doll Parts” is the album’s most discussed song and deservedly so: a slow, devastating account of desire and inadequacy and the specific misery of wanting someone who wants someone else, built on a guitar figure of such bare simplicity that the emotion has nowhere to hide. “I am doll parts / doll heart / doll eyes,” Love sings, in a voice that moves between speaking and keening, and the lyric lands because it is doing two things simultaneously: it is expressing genuine feeling and it is examining the cultural construction that produces that feeling, the way the female self is fragmented and objectified and reduced to its component parts by a gaze that cannot see the whole. This is not a simple lyric. It is a lyric that operates on multiple levels at once, and the fact that it operates this way while also being a song you cannot get out of your head for a week is a considerable formal achievement.
“Violet,” the album’s opening track and its most visceral, establishes in its first thirty seconds the terms on which the album will operate: maximum volume, maximum feeling, the voice riding the guitars rather than competing with them, and a lyric that is simultaneously about a relationship and about the experience of being consumed by something larger than yourself and choosing, against all prudent advice, to be consumed anyway. It is one of the great opening tracks of the decade and it announced, to anyone paying attention, that what had arrived was not a minor talent or a peripheral figure but a major one.
Riot Grrrl, the Indie Scene, and the Spaces Between
The relationship between Hole and the riot grrrl movement — Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Bratmobile, the broader feminist punk insurgency centred on Olympia, Washington, and Washington D.C. in the early 1990s — is one of the more interesting fault lines in the history of 1990s alternative music, because Love was simultaneously the movement’s most visible beneficiary and its most problematic figure. The riot grrrl bands had established, through manifestos and zines and performances of deliberate confrontation, that the indie scene’s gender politics were not as progressive as its aesthetic politics liked to suggest — that the spaces available to women in punk and alternative music were still, in practice, circumscribed by the same assumptions that governed the mainstream it claimed to oppose.
Love benefited from this opening without being part of the movement that created it, which created friction. She was too ambitious, too interested in mainstream success, too willing to use the tools of conventional female attractiveness — the baby-doll dresses, the red lipstick, the calculated girlishness that she called “kinderwhore” and that was simultaneously a punk provocation and a commercial strategy — to be entirely comfortable within a scene that was suspicious of all of these. Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Love had a public enmity that was partly personal and partly ideological and partly the inevitable friction between two women who were both trying to occupy a space that the culture had not yet decided was large enough for either of them, let alone both.
“The thing about Courtney is that she wanted to be the biggest rock star in the world. And in 1994 she almost was. The fact that almost no one is willing to say this clearly is itself a kind of answer to the question of what the indie scene actually thought about women who wanted too much.”Ann Powers, music critic, Los Angeles Times
What the riot grrrl movement gave the culture, and what Love both inherited and extended, was the insistence that female anger was a legitimate subject for rock music — not processed anger, not anger that had been mediated into something more palatable, but the raw, specific, sometimes ugly thing itself, directed at the people and structures that had produced it. Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna screamed. Love screamed louder and put it on a major label and charted with it, and the chart position was either a betrayal of the underground ethic or the point of the whole exercise, depending on who you asked and what they thought the underground was for.
The Noise Around the Music
It is impossible, and it would be dishonest, to write about Courtney Love without writing about the noise — the tabloid coverage, the drug use, the erratic public behaviour, the custody battle over her daughter Frances Bean, the conspiracy theories about Cobain’s death that she has lived inside for thirty years like a person inside a house they did not build and cannot leave. The noise is real, and some of it reflects real failures and real damage, and none of it is, finally, the most interesting thing about her.
What the noise did, in the years immediately following Live Through This, was to make a fair assessment of the work almost impossibly difficult. The album had been completed before Cobain’s death, and the suggestion — raised immediately, with the particular eagerness of people who had already decided what they thought — that the songwriting must have been his, that a woman in Love’s circumstances could not have produced work of this quality, was both an insult and a symptom. The insult is obvious. The symptom is this: that the indie scene of the 1990s, for all its political self-consciousness, for all its awareness of the structures it claimed to be dismantling, had not fully prepared itself for a woman who was this good and this difficult simultaneously, and reached, in its discomfort, for the available explanation that required the least revision of its existing assumptions.
The songwriting was hers. This has been established, repeatedly and conclusively, by everyone who was present in the studio, by the demo recordings that predate her relationship with Cobain, by the evidence of the songs themselves, which have a specific and identifiable voice that is not Cobain’s voice and is not anyone else’s voice but Love’s — jagged, melodic, furious, self-lacerating, capable of a tenderness that arrives without warning and is more devastating for the contrast with everything surrounding it.
Celebrity Skin and the Mainstream That Almost Was
Celebrity Skin, released in 1998, is the album on which Love made the most explicit bid for the mainstream she had always wanted, and it is a more interesting record than its detractors — who found its polished production a betrayal of the noise-rock ferocity of Live Through This — have generally acknowledged. Produced by Michael Beinhorn with a radio-ready sheen that was, by indie standards, practically heretical, it is full of enormous melodies and hooks that lodge in the skull and refuse to leave, and it contains, in “Celebrity Skin” and “Malibu” and “Awful,” songs that are among the best she wrote. The critical reception was mixed, the commercial reception was strong, and the sense that she had crossed some line by wanting to be heard on the radio rather than on college stations was pervasive in a way that told you more about the assumptions of indie culture than about the quality of the music.
It was, in retrospect, the last substantial Hole record. The band dissolved, re-formed, dissolved again. Love pursued acting with the same ferocious ambition she had brought to music — her performance in Miloš Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) earned her a Golden Globe nomination and demonstrated that the intelligence and the physicality that made her remarkable on a stage were equally available in front of a camera — and the acting career was itself interrupted and complicated by the noise, as everything in her life has been interrupted and complicated by the noise.
What She Changed and Why It Matters
The question of Courtney Love’s legacy is one that the culture has been reluctant to settle, partly because settling it requires acknowledging the degree to which her treatment — by the press, by the industry, by the indie scene that simultaneously needed her and resented her — was shaped by the same gender politics that her music was explicitly challenging. To say that Live Through This is one of the great rock albums of the 1990s is not a controversial statement among people who have listened to it carefully. To say that it was received less fairly, assessed less generously, and attributed less fully to its actual author than it would have been had its author been a man in similar circumstances: this is also not controversial, among people willing to think about it honestly.
What she changed, in the space between Pretty on the Inside and Celebrity Skin, was the available territory for women in rock — not by being exemplary or by providing a model that other women could safely follow, but by being so fully, so defiantly, so messily herself that the space she occupied could not be argued away or politely reduced. She was too loud to ignore and too talented to dismiss and too complicated to contain, and the combination produced a body of work that has outlasted the noise surrounding it and that continues, thirty years later, to sound like the thing it always was: the most honest account available of what it felt like to be that angry and that ambitious and that alive in a world that had not decided whether to make room for you.
The compact powder thrown at Madonna at the 1995 VMAs. The baby-doll dress and the smeared lipstick and the voice that could go from a whisper to a howl within a single bar. The songs that were unquestionably hers and that the decade spent twenty years trying to give to someone else. These are the documents of a career that the official histories of 1990s indie music have not yet fully absorbed, and whose absorption, when it finally comes, will require some revision of what we thought we knew about who that decade was for and what it permitted and what, in the end, it was willing to celebrate.
This essay draws on Hole’s studio albums Pretty on the Inside (1991), Live Through This (1994), and Celebrity Skin (1998); Melissa Auf der Maur’s published recollections of recording Live Through This; Ann Powers’ criticism in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times; and the broader critical literature on riot grrrl and 1990s alternative music including Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (2010). Courtney Love was born Courtney Michelle Harrison on July 9, 1964, in San Francisco.
My World of Interiors 