An album cover can be worth a thousand words, and Hole’s Live Through This certainly is one of those album covers. A manic pageant winner, mascara streaming down her face after a bout of tears, holding up a bouquet of flowers while an almost comically ostentatious tiara adorns her head. It’s a picture that evokes an almost Hitchcockian horror film quality– is she thrilled at her victory, are those tears born of crippling self-doubt, is she doing this truly for herself, or is this an attempt to fill some hole in her psyche by surrendering to the beauty standards that dominate mass media? It’s a cover that is immediately striking in its honest ambiguity.
This sense of unease found on the cover wouldn’t mean a damn thing if the music wasn’t any good, but good music and that feeling of ease is omnipresent throughout the entirety of Live Through This. Lead singer and frontwoman Courtney Love brings a poised fury that belies the brilliant pop songs underneath, channeling the incredibly disorienting personal tumults she was experiencing at the time in a way few 90’s grunge albums were able to do. Love was in the tempest of life at an almost unprecedented scale during the buildup and recording of Live Through This— a custody battle with Child Protective Services over her two-week old infant daughter, a media frenzy over her outspoken nature that led to constant paparazzi harassment, stints at rehab to kick her heroin addiction, and the chronic drug and mental-health induced depression of her husband Kurt Cobain (who died via suicide one week before this album was released).
It was messy as hell in a way the grunge scene in the early 90’s was known for, and ultimately showed us the raw rugged ugly beauty that can be found in a person who was both pushed and pulled herself to the limits of emotional capacity. From the treatise on beauty standards that evokes the cover art (“Miss World”) to the crippling insecurity of being with someone you don’t feel you deserve (“Doll Parts”) to the primal honesty of Love’s experience with motherhood and her experience with CPS (“Plump”), Live Through This is as honest of a peek behind the curtain as you’ll find from such a massive public figure. And live through that experience she did.
Standout Songs: “Violet”, “Asking For It”, “Plump”, “Doll Parts”
