Yo, this is pretty great. In listening to Hole, I'm realizing that I don't know shit about grunge. Sure, I have a surface-level dilettantish appreciation for Nirvana, but man, after being on a Hole high all week, I'm starting to get this crazy notion that maybe Live Through This is better than anything Nirvana ever did. But that's crazy, right?
It's probably not even fair to compare the two bands, even though they are in the same genre. Just because their respective leads dated up until one's death doesn't mean we necessarily have to put them head-to-head. Especially when you consider the fact that everything I know about Courtney Love could fit on the tip of a heroin needle, I am really not qualified to go there.
Okay, but I think I feel comfortable in making at least one assumption here. While I found the music mostly comforting—in that I was afraid it was going to be "too hard" for me, but ended up hitting my sweet spot right on the goddamn bullseye—what I found fascinating about Live Through This is when I finally looked up the timeline. This album was released exactly one week after Kurt Cobain's death.
Now, because of this timeline, it would be tough to claim that Love was in any way influenced by her paramour's death in creating this album, since it completed and ready to go when Cobain pulled the trigger. But the assumption that I'm making is that this particular album, with this particular sound, might have been a comfort to Love, and to her and Cobain's mutual fans. It's angry, and their fans were angry too. But also, it's allegedly somewhat softer than Hole's previous work (it's all relative, baby), so no one had any excuse to get angry in an unhealthy way. I don't know if that makes sense, but I'm treading lightly here. I just get the feeling that many people are like me, in that melodies and hooks—no matter how drenched in distortion they are—are a greater source of comfort than straight-up noise.
Something else that I found fascinating was that there was a conspiracy that Kurt Cobain had ghostwritten all the songs on this album. There has been zero evidence of this, and Occam's razor says that of course Love is going to be influenced by Cobain's music, just as I'm sure Cobain was influenced by Love's music—when you live together, love each other, raise a child together, then certain parts of your lives are going to blend together. So I think we can safely conclude: the bogus theory is false and also sexist.
Finally, out of all the things I am unqualified to speak about in this blog post, I am probably the most qualified to speak about the beef between Love and Olivia Rodrigo. And yet I choose not too. Silly, silly stuff, y'all, and I don't want to take away from the raw power of Live Through This by getting into it. Kick back and listen to some primo grunge shit right here, and leave your conspiracies behind.
P.S. This was another album I took off the RS500 list from last year. It's probably the highest ranking of all the albums that ended up on the Year of Blind Spots list, and—surprise surprise—it's by far the one I've liked the best so far.
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