Hole - Live Through This

We're stretching the boundaries of the post-Cobain era by including his wife's 2nd album from 93/94. Totally fine, they're guidelines not rules. What actually matters was that i immensely enjoyed this album back when it came out, at one time i could play every single song and more, but i haven't sat down and listened to it in a loooooong time. Not sure why i don't have it anymore (i assume i sold it for $5), but i do wonder if it's still as good as i remember. 

Whatever you think about Courtney Love, just keep in mind that the standard mansplanation is that Curt actually wrote this album. First of all, who cares? Lots of people wrote other peoples' albums, and lots of people never get credit for things. I don't think he wrote any of these songs because she was constantly telling her audience which songs he did write. Second of all, the only possible motivations for saying that are negative and misogynistic, so [toilet flush sound effect]. You know something? Je suis doll parts, let's hear about how homogeneously unenjoyable it was going to school in Olympia, Washington. 

But first, some actual not fun historical context. Curt killed himself a week before its release, and Kristen Pfaff died from a heroin overdose a couple months later. You'd have to be one sick bastard to even consider seriously bringing up 27-club melodrama like heroin addiction is some kind of PR stunt, then off-handedly panning it as "men don't get enough credit for everything women do." R.E.M was in the middle of the monstrosity that was Monster, should you need to go back to that review to refresh your memory. All that to say that my personal cut off at 1995 isn't just an arbitrary thing i made up. 1994 was the breaking point at the end of an era, and lead times have always been 6 months out when you're producing millions of copies of anything. This album is basically a document of the catastrophic climax of its own creation. 

That's not to say you can't find humor or intentional provocation in it, it's just to say that even though we understand that it's a fictionalized retelling, the underlying perspective can't be anything but autobiographical when we listen to it; if Time were a college course, most humans would flunk out. We'll of course read too much into everything, but it is there to be read, so we have to acknowledge that we're doing a whole lot of psychoanalyzing that says more about us than it does Courtney or the band or the scene. This softer, more melodic (for a given value of sheer noise) 2nd album was intentional and recognizably provocative for an already established Hardcore Punk/No Wave Noise band. We experience the world around us, and not everyone agrees that it's sunshine and lollipops, or a great place to raise your gluttonous babies. Morbid humor alert, that's why a lot of people didn't live through this. 

Total tangent, but "free stuff" is nowhere even close to a good enough substitute for being able to afford what you want to do, so shove that garbage idea back in the pocket with a hole in it so it gets lost as quickly as possible. All dogs are good dogs, but all jobs are crap someone wealthy isn't willing or able to do themself. Secretly that's not an actual tangent. Courtney Love's day job (which is to say night job) was exotic dancer/stripper because that paid actual money. Vomit. 

Now for the listening, which i'm doing on my lunch break because thanks youtube. I just wish the royalty schedule was a bit more fair to the creators rather than their corporate handlers.

Oh, wow, i honestly forgot how much i enjoy hearing her straight up yell the choruses. Right off the bat i just plain love it, and i'm gonna stop writing and just enjoy the rest... 

... ok, I'm back now. Yeah, this is a classic album. There's nothing to criticize except maybe the occasional weird panning. I guess if you hate women or Punk or great pop songs about the terrible side of reality then this wouldn't do it for you, but it's fucking great. Seriously, they found pieces of Jennifer's body. Not the whole thing, pieces of her. 

I have a theory that everyone on earth is a drug addict waiting to happen because life is merely vibrating chemistry; emotions are specific levels of harmonic resonance and consciousness obeys the Law of Conservation of Energy. I don't claim it's a good theory, but if Buckminster Fuller is gonna claim Sidis imagineered black holes as the mirror universe of opposite thermodynamics, then i don't feel so crazy entertaining the notion. That might be my most complicated tangent yet, but have fun researching it. At least it's not quite as mentally taxing as contemplating the Romeo and Juliet-esque absurdity of the lyric "live through this with me (and) i swear that i will die for you." 

And on that note, enjoy the rest of your evening.