Loving Hole as an adolescent girl was an exercise in comically misinterpreting lyrics but still identifying with their particularly female anguish. My friends and I listened to the stories on Live Through This as one might listen to a stranger frantically seeking help in a language other than our own. We detected distress but not its source. Hers were stories littered with drugs and shrieking infants and the kind of girls who never stood a chance against ending up in a box by the bed. This was the foreign country of addiction and panicked motherhood and broken hearts. There was an abundance of bodily fluids: talk of milk run dry and girls who piss themselves. It was all germs and embryos. The panicked cries sounded like something that might be waiting to happen to us, or even waiting inside of us already. Those cries broke our hearts—not just for our newly appointed queen but also for our future selves. A world of women’s blood and tears was the one we were on the brink of inheriting and would soon have to live through as well.
In light of its other striking visuals of motherhood, death, and addiction, it is easy to miss that Live Through This is thick with witches. The music videos for the album’s tracks are shot through with the particular sadness of working-class school dances, and Courtney’s commitment to dressing like an overripe figurine during that era links the album to macabre children’s games and girls who bleed too early. But a witch first appears in the third track, “Plump,” when Courtney shrieks, “My baby’s in her arms Crawling up her legs Like a liar at a witch trial / You look good for your age.” On “Softer, Softest,” there are two and a half lines sung with uncharacteristic sweetness, “Burn the witch / The witch is dead / Burn the witch,” followed by just the briefest pause before screaming, “Just bring me back her head.”
Beyond the explicit references to witches, there is a pronounced misanthropy and a notable commitment to the manipulation of others that borders on shape-shifting. Courtney declares, “I’m the one with no soul,” in the opening song “Violet,” while there is madness born of missing babies on “I Think That I Would Die” (a classic witch-making formula if there ever was one). “Miss World” and “Doll Parts” are both odes to the woman morally disfigured by virtue only of her own wretched thoughts, barely human in their wantonness. If these are unconvincing pieces of evidence of witchcraft enthusiasm, it is nothing more to me than confirmation that Love has done an especially thorough job with her sorcery.
Meghan’s cadre of adolescent girls were devoted disciples of the witchy Love, and we were hardly alone in our devotion. Despite the mourning shrouds that covered the landscape of rock criticism in the days and years that followed Kurt’s death, the genius of Live Through This was not entirely obscured by its attendant tragedies. The Rolling Stone review from 1994 is awash in adoring metaphors: “daydream whispers,” “crushed-velvet guitar distortion,” and “a woman who measured the depth of her abyss by taking the plunge” all feature in David Fricke’s praise.1 The NME review concluded, “It wakes rock from its cliché coma, leads it, laughing, to a lake of stinking mud and honey, and there drowns it; quietly, efficiently and with surprising gentleness.”2 Spin and Rolling Stone both identified it as the best album of 1994. The sheer volume of positive criticisms surrounding the release that were written primarily by male critics with no particular allegiances to Love made disparaging the contents of the album a less compelling measure by which to fuel her growing mob of detractors. Because it was not acceptable to call the album a failure, rumors began to circulate that it was a forgery.
Word spread quickly from rock scene whispers and embryonic online forums that it was Kurt who had written the bulk of the album, despite the sworn and repeated word of those who witnessed the album’s entire development and creation. Producer Paul Kolderie was present for the recording of Live Through This and noted, “He [Kurt] was very interested in what was going on, but I could tell that he wasn’t behaving as someone would behave if he had created it himself, or if he knew the songs.”3 Numerous accounts affirm essentially the same story: Kurt seemed impressed by but unfamiliar with the songs. It also notably doesn’t really sound like anything Kurt had written before. But this fact is attributed to Kurt’s otherworldly genius and versatility—rather than Courtney’s.
Courtney broke her silence over the issue in 1998, telling the Observer, “I mean for fuck’s sake, his skills were much better than mine at the time—the songs would have been much better.”4 Her claim was entirely uncontroversial: It was taken for granted that Courtney was the lesser talent in the duo. But in revisiting Hole’s work outside the immediate context of Kurt’s death, critics have emerged to suggest a truth that might have been unseemly to print before this decade. “Live Through This is, in a lot of ways, a melodically sharper and more inviting album than anything Nirvana or Pearl Jam or Soundgarden were doing at the time,” writes Tom Breihan on StereoGum in 2014.5 Alex Galbraith writes on UPROXX in 2015 about how listening to Nirvana through the lens of “the Cult of Nirvana” obscures a very important point: A lot of their songs were self-pitying gibberish. “Hole had their fair share of angsty songs, but they always used that angst to shine a light outward. Both Love and Cobain wrote songs about intensely personal situations, but only the former couched her complaints in universal language,” Galbraith writes.6 But the large-scale public investment in despising Courtney would not let itself be devastated by the fact that she was talented. The audacity to be more brilliant than a fallen hero required punishment, so punish her they did. Courtney was the one who sang “I love him so much it just turns to hate,” but those words could just as easily have been the motto of the hate mob that came for Courtney Love.
In the wild west of the early Internet, conspiracy theorists made the case for Courtney orchestrating Kurt’s murder with often melodramatically named websites like “Justice for Kurt.” Some still exist today on Tripod and Geocities mirror platforms. America Online had to delete a Hole forum on its platform in part due to a death threat sent to Courtney in 1995—a relative rarity at that time. And then there’s the case of Tom Grant, the private investigator hired by Courtney to seek out information on Kurt’s whereabouts when he would disappear amid the decline of their marriage. Grant turned against Courtney in the wake of Kurt’s death after learning of evidence that he saw as indicative of a murder plot.
More than twenty years later, the struggle by some fans to get closer to Kurt via violence toward his family continued as recently as 2015. Frances Bean Cobain, who reported that a stalker had stayed in her home for three days while she was on vacation, said, “This person’s twisted explanation was that he was meant to be with me because my father’s soul had entered my body.”7 Though such unhinged behavior is rare, there are plenty of fans who have deified Kurt to the point of reducing his child to a sacred relic. And while Courtney still makes headlines on a semiregular basis, her daughter, Frances, has become the more sought-after spectacle of the Cobain tragedy.