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A positive, feminist reading of Hole´s landmark 1994 album and its controversial creator, Courtney Love, which explores womanhood, desire, disgust, self-destruction, survival, and fame.

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Courtney Love has never been less than notorious. Her intelligence, ambition and appetite for confrontation have made her a target in a music industry still dominated by men. As Kurt Cobain´s wife she was derided as an opportunistic groupie; as his widow she is pitied, and scorned, as the madwoman in rock´s attic. Yet Hole´s second album, Live Through This, awoke a feminist consciousness in a generation of young listeners.

Live Through This arrived in 1994, at a tumultuous point in the history of American music. Three years earlier Nirvana´s Nevermind had broken open the punk underground, and the first issue of a zine called Riot Grrrl had been published. Hole were of this context and yet outside of it: too famous for the strict punk ethics of riotgrrrl, too explicitly feminist to be the world´s biggest rock band. Live Through This is an album about girlhood and motherhood; desire and disgust; self-destruction and survival. There have been few rock albums before or since so intimately concerned with female experience. It is an album that changed lives - so why is Courtney Love´s achievement as a songwriter and musician still not taken seriously, two decades on?

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Acknowledgements
1. Violet
2. Miss World
3. Asking for It
4. Credit in the Straight World
5. Softer, Softest
6. I Think That I Would Die
7. Rock Star
Notes
Bibliography

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While many may not admit to it immediately, it´s probably a safe bet that your average rock fan from the ´90s keeps Hole´s Live Through This in their collection. And why not? . The immensely successful 33 1/3 series from Bloomsbury examines the album track-by-track through the eyes of writer Anwen Crawford (The Monthly), giving both a historical frame of mind to the album, as well as deconstructing the themes behind seven tracks . If you haven´t had a chance to experience this album, give it a listen, then give this book a read, and then give the album a second shot . it will definitely give you an appreciation for what Hole was trying to make and the impact they had on grunge. Gavin Sheehan SLUG Magazine

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