Live Through This

This article is about the 1994 Hole album. For the television show of the same name, see Live Through This (TV series).

Live Through This
Studio album by Hole
Released	April 12, 1994
Recorded	October 8—30, 1993 at Triclops Sound Studios in Marietta, Georgia
Genre	Alternative rock, grunge
Length	38:14
Label	DGC
Producer	Paul Q. Kolderie, Sean Slade
Hole chronology
Pretty on the Inside (1991) Live Through This (1994) Celebrity Skin (1998)
Singles from Live Through This
"Miss World" Released: March 28, 1994 "Doll Parts" Released: November 1994 "Violet" Released: January 1995 "Softer, Softest" Released: December 1995

Live Through This is the second studio album by American alternative rock band Hole. It was released by Geffen Records on April 12, 1994, just four days after frontwoman Courtney Love's husband, Kurt Cobain, was found dead in their home. It is Hole's last album to feature bassist Kristen Pfaff before her death in June 1994.

Musically and lyrically, the album differed greatly from the band's debut, Pretty on the Inside (1991), which was heavily influenced by punk and noise rock. For Live Through This, Hole sought a more accessible rock sound, focusing more on melody and dynamics and utilizing less of the distortion and experimental touches that dominated their previous record. Lyrically, the album heavily reflected Love's life at the time, her transition into public notoriety, and her role as a wife and mother, as well as articulating a "third-wave feminist consciousness".

The album was extremely well received by music critics, garnering rave reviews and "best album of the year" awards in major periodicals, such as Rolling Stone, Spin, and The New York Times. The album was also a major financial success, selling over two million copies worldwide and going multi-platinum within just a year of its release. It also spawned four singles, including "Doll Parts" and "Violet", with "Doll Parts" reaching number 58 in the Billboard's Hot 100 as well as peaking at number 4 on the Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart.

In recent years, Live Through This has often been considered a contemporary classic of alternative rock, as well as one of the greatest albums of all time. The album's title is derived from a monologue by Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (1939).

History and recording

Sessions for Hole's second album begun initially in Paris in May 1993 with Nirvana producer, Butch Vig. Nothing is reported to have come from the sessions, and a second attempt at recording the album was done at Hanzek Audio in Seattle in August 1993 with producers and engineers, Chris Hanzek, Jack Endino and Craig Montgomery. During this attempt at recording Live Through This the band recorded instrumental versions of a number of songs, including "Jennifer's Body" and the unused Nirvana song "Talk To Me", however the session "wasn't very productive" and eventually, the recordings were left in the studio for years before Eric Erlandson reclaimed them.

The sessions for Live Through This began on October 8, 1993 at Triclops Studios in Marietta, Georgia (near Atlanta), where The Smashing Pumpkins - friends of the band - recorded their second studio album, Siamese Dream. The first week of recording was spent record basic tracks, such as drums, bass, scratch guitars, and scratch vocals. After the first tracks were laid down, Love's husband, Kurt Cobain, joined the band in-studio on October 18 before Nirvana were set to tour to promote their latest album, In Utero. When shown the work in progress, the band invited Cobain to sing on a few unfinished numbers. Cobain refused at first, due to being unfamiliar with the material. When Cobain asked, "how can I sing on it if I haven't heard it?", Courtney answered by encouraging him to "just sing off the top of [his] head."

Due to this and that a year earlier, a b-side for "Beautiful Son", "Old Age" was credited as being written by Hole but the song had been recorded a year before by Cobain's band Nirvana, there have been unsubstantiated rumors regarding Cobain's involvement in this record, from alleged instrumental and songwriting contributions, to claims that he effectively wrote the entire album. What is known is that Cobain sang background vocals for two tracks, according to both Erlandson and Love; he can be heard in the bridge of the released version of "Asking For It", though his vocals are low in the mix and during "Softer, Softest." An alternate mix of "Asking For It" was broadcast on radio in 1994 which more prominently features his singing. Some recent claims state he can be heard at some point in "Doll Parts". Having taken a break for dinner, the session devolved into a formless jam with Cobain on drums, Eric and Courtney on guitars and session co-producer Sean Slade on bass. The band eventually finished on October 31 and finished off their stay in Atlanta with a show at The Masquerade.

The album is dedicated to the memory of Joe Cole, a roadie for Black Flag and the Rollins Band who was shot to death in a 1991 after attending a Hole show at the Whisky A Go Go in West Hollywood. The album was noted for being more accessible and melodic than the band's previous album, Pretty on the Inside. According to BMI's website, most of the songs credited officially to Hole were written just by Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson. "Doll Parts" was officially written only by Love and "I Think That I Would Die" was written by Erlandson, Love and Kat Bjelland. "Credit in the Straight World" is a Young Marble Giants cover.

Bassist Kristen Pfaff had decided to take a break from the band at the time of Cobain's death in April, 1994. In June 1994, she was found dead by boyfriend and bandmate Eric Erlandson from an apparent heroin overdose. Two months after Kristen's death, Hole began an extensive tour, with Melissa Auf der Maur replacing her on bass.

Four singles were released from the album and three promotional videos were shot, for "Miss World" (still with Kristen Pfaff), "Doll Parts" (with L7's bassist Jennifer Finch replacing her) and "Violet" (already with Melissa Auf der Maur). "Softer, Softest" was also released as a single, and Hole's performance of this song at their MTV Unplugged session was used as a promotional video.

Composition

Music and lyrics

In contrast to the band's debut album, Pretty on the Inside, which was lauded for its disturbingly poetic lyrics and abrasive guitar riffs and arrangements, Courtney Love sought a more mellow sound for Live Through This: "I want this record to be shocking to the people who don't think we have a soft edge, and at the same time, [to know] that we haven't lost our very, very hard edge." The resulting music was starkly less aggressive than the band's former work, blending more structured melodies and smoother arrangements with still heavy guitar riffs, described as " a loud, lush rock record of uncompromising strength and unexpected depth."

Lyrically, the album was also less aggressive, very much reflecting Love's life between 1991 and 1994. The opening song, "Violet", described as "one of their strongest songs" was purportedly written about Billy Corgan, though this has been disputed among fans and other musicians. Before a Later... with Jools Holland performance of the song, Love described it as "a song about a jerk— I hexed him and now he's losing his hair." Nonetheless, the song expresses a deep-seated female rage ("Go on, take everything/Take everything, I want you to"). "Miss World", with its upbeat musical structure, makes references to depression and suicide, while "Plump" appears to reference Love's pregnancy and the ensuing custody battle that took place over her infant daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, following an unflattering Lynn Hirschberg article written for Vanity Fair, which painted Love and husband Kurt Cobain as drug addicts and unfit parents. In a 1994 interview, Love said, "If you read Vanity Fair, you probably think I swig Jack Daniel's first thing in the morning, after I smoke my crack, and don't see my daughter for ten days."

"Asking for It" was inspired by an occurrence at a 1991 concert when Hole was touring with Mudhoney, in which Love was assaulted and had her clothes ripped off of her while crowdsurfing, leaving her entirely naked. "Doll Parts", the album's most successful single, seems to reflect love and the need for acceptance. In a 2010 interview, Love stated: "I still don't understand why that one song with just three chords is such a big thing. But it's definitely got some good lyrics. That was a song about Kurt. I wrote it in Boston."

The last half of the album rounds off with a cover of the Young Marble Giants' "Credit in the Straight World", alluding to "the critics who had dismissed [Love] as a starfucking phony" and the rock ballad "Softer, Softest", which makes indelible references to Love's troubled childhood. "I Think That I Would Die" contains the only lyrics on the album not written solely by Love; the song was a collaboration between her and friend/former bandmate Kat Bjelland.

A song entitled "Rock Star" was originally slated to close the album, but a last-minute decision was made to replace the track with "Olympia." Since the artwork had already been printed, however, the title of "Rock Star" remained and was also used for further releases. The purported reason for the song replacement was concern about the lyric "a barrel of laughs to be Nirvana, you'd rather die." To those not aware that Live Through This was completed before Cobain's death, the lyric could be potentially misconstrued as a reference made in poor taste regarding the discovery of Cobain's body (the same could be said of the album title as well, but the title was actually lifted from the lyrics for "Asking for It" which, coincidentally, featured Cobain on guest vocals).

Nonetheless, the actual song that closes the album, "Olympia" (under the title "Rock Star"), criticizes the riot grrl music scene in the Pacific Northwest, which Love was associated but not involved with, and has been described as "a rollicking, good-humored fuck-you to Olympia hipsters." Love had been vocal about her criticism of the riot grrl movement, calling the musicians "imperious", and pointing out their particular form of feminist politics: "The whole riot grrl thing is so... well, for one thing, the Women's Studies department at Evergreen State College, where a lot of these bands come from, is notorious for being one of the worst programs in the country. It's man-hating, and it doesn't produce intelligent people in that field." Alternate mixes of the song included even more satirical lyrics, such as: "When I went to school in Olympia/And everyone's the same/What do you do with a revolution?/You just forget your name/When I went to school in a fascist state/And everyone's the same/We took punk rock, and we got a grade".

Songwriting allegations

Following the album's release in the wake of Kurt Cobain's death, rumors began wildly circulating about the album's lyrical content and songwriting, with many people alleging that Cobain had written the album, not Courtney Love. In response to the allegations, drummer Patty Schemel said: "There is that myth that Kurt wrote a lot of our songs— it's not true. Eric [Erlandson] and Courtney wrote Live Through This." According to a Kurt Cobain biographer, interviews were conducted with everyone associated with the record, and universally, they all contested that Love and Erlandson wrote the songs.

Although these rumors circulated for years to follow, much of the content on Live Through This had been written and performed during Hole's Pretty on the Inside tour. Both "Violet" and "Doll Parts", two of the album's most notable songs, had been performed as early as 1991 at various concerts, and presumably been written in 1990 or '91, when Love and Cobain were acquaintances. The first studio recordings of the songs took place during a BBC Radio broadcast for John Peel in 1991, inbetween US and European tours to promote Pretty on the Inside; these recordings would later appear on the group's 1995 EP Ask for It. Early versions of "Softer, Softest", another one of the singles from Live Through This, were also performed during the tour. "Violet", "Doll Parts", and "Softer, Softest" were all performed in the same set at during a December 1991 concert at the U.L.U. in London, and "Violet" was performed at Exeter several days later at a concert with Daisy Chainsaw and Therapy?. The songs were individually performed at various concerts in Paris, Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, and Germany throughout the 1991 tours along with songs from Pretty on the Inside.

Several magazine publications also mentioned the rumors regarding the writing credits, and in a 2006 Time Magazine piece, it was noted that "[the rumors] started immediately that it was Cobain, not his wife, Courtney Love, who wrote the majority of these churningly catchy songs. Forget that there's no proof, that their marriage was collaborative and that it's a nasty thing to say, Live Through This is clearly a woman's work [and is] far more swaggering than any album any grunge man ever came up with. When Love sings, "I went to school in Olympia / Where everyone's the same," it's obvious she thinks she's not, and that she's right."

Courtney Love made several responses to the rumors, first in 1998: "All this time I have never addressed this. But here I am finally saying for the very first time that Kurt did not [write] Live Through This. I mean for fuck's sake, his skills were much better than mine at the time - the songs would have been much better. That's the first thing." Later on, in 2010, she commented again, saying: "If Kurt had written on it, I would have said something. He didn't. That's all."

Although the band members denied Cobain's involvement in the songwriting, they have openly stated that Cobain was briefly in the studio and performed uncredited backup vocals with Kristen Pfaff on two of the tracks— "Asking for It", and "Softer, Softest". The album's liner notes credit Hole as the sole writers of the album, except for on two songs: "I Think That I Would Die", co-written by Kat Bjelland, as well as the band's cover of "Credit in the Straight World". The liner notes read: "all songs [were] written by Hole except "I Think That I Would Die", written by Hole and K. Bjelland [. . .] "Credit in the Straight World" written by Stuart Moxham." Additionally, an interlude verse lifted verbatim from a Janitor Joe song appears in "Miss World"; bassist Kristen Pfaff had previously been in Janitor Joe.

Packaging and artwork

Back cover of Live Through This.

Model Leilani Bishop is shown on the cover of the album, dressed in beauty pageant attire with a tiara and a bouquet of flowers, with mascara running down her eyes in tears of joy. Courtney Love stated in an interview that she "wanted to capture the look on a woman's face as she's being crowned... this sort of ecstatic, blue eyeliner running, kind of 'I am, I am—I won! I have hemorrhoid cream under my eyes and adhesive tape on my butt, and I had to scratch and claw and fuck my way up, but I won Miss Congeniality!'" The band logo introduced on the front cover of the album is thought to be modeled after the '90s Mattel Barbie logo.

The back cover of the album features a family photo of a young Courtney Love during her childhood in Marcola, Oregon, with the individual track listings appearing to the right, printed on embossing tape.

Release

When released on April 12, 1994, Live Through This debuted on the charts at number 52, never hitting the Top 40 in the U.S. In December 1994, the record went Gold, having sold a total of 500,000 copies, going platinum six months later for having sold one million copies. To date, the album has sold more than 1.6 million copies in the United States and has well over 2 million worldwide. It has also achieved platinum status in Canada and Australia.

The album received unanimous critical acclaim, and was regarded as Hole's greatest album, as well as one of the greatest rock albums of the 1990s. Critics praised it for combining the raw energy of the band's previous album, Pretty on the Inside, with a pop rock sound that would later characterize the band's next album, Celebrity Skin.

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
About.com
Blender
Robert Christgau	(A)
Entertainment Weekly	(B+)
NME	(8/10)
Rolling Stone

Live Through This was praised unanimously by music critics and rock periodicals. Rolling Stone said, "Love delivers punk not only as insinuating as Nirvana's but as corrosive as the Sex Pistols'. More significantly, Live Through This may be the most potent blast of female insurgency ever committed to tape", while Entertainment Weekly gave the album a B+ rating, saying, "What Live Through This makes perfectly clear, though, is that Love is a greater star. She has charisma and attitude to burn, and she knows it. " NME called the album "a personal but secretive thrash-pop opera of urban nihilism and passionate dumbthinks", and Melody Maker called it "the high watermark of the genre that survived the crass label of `foxcore'..."

Musician Magazine said, "[Kurt] Cobain's much-discussed, little heard other half finally gets the chance to escape gossip-column purgatory and succeeds with flying colors... Courtney Love's foul, funny eloquence...cuts through all the bullshit with a mighty flourish." This sentiment was reassessed in a 2008 BBC review of the album, which stated, "In 1994 and the years that followed, tragedy and controversy seemed to overshadow everything Courtney Love touched. Thankfully, with every year that passes, it becomes easier to put the record's emotional baggage to one side and appraise it on the strength of its songs."

Spin perhaps gave the album its greatest praise, awarding it a rare 10/10 rating and naming it the #1 album of the year on their "20 Best Albums of 1994" list, noting, "Love rode her band's gargantuan riffs through a shy loner's air-guitar fantasy: rock stardom as revenge upon the entire human race."

The album's prolificness has been recognized in more recent years as well— it was ranked number 466 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and was included in TIME magazine's All-TIME 100 Albums list, as well as the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Accolades

• Included in Rolling Stone's Essential Recordings of the '90s
• Ranked #6 in Spin's 90 Greatest Albums of the '90s
• Voted Best Album in Rolling Stone's 1995 Critic's Poll
• Included on Jon Pareles' (New York Times) list of the Top 10 Albums of '94
• Ranked #1 in Spin's list of the 20 Best Albums of '94
• Ranked #1 in the Village Voice's 1994 Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll
• Ranked #9 in Spin's Best Albums since 1985
• Ranked #12 in NME's list of the Top 50 Albums of 1994.
• Ranked #20 in Rolling Stone's 50 Essential "Women In Rock" Albums

References in pop culture

• In the Bernardo Bertolucci film Stealing Beauty (1996), Liv Tyler's character dances and sings along to "Rock Star" in her bedroom.
• The album cover is shown inside of Mena Suvari's locker in The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999).
• "Doll Parts" is played by Ellen Page and Jason Bateman in the film Juno (2007).
• The 2009 film Jennifer's Body was named after the song on the album; the film also features "Violet" during its end credits.
• Mariah Carey has stated that she listened to Live Through This often during the recording of her album Daydream (1995).
• Author Debra Gwartney's book, Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, was named after the album, after Gwartney had bought it for her daughters one Christmas.
• Music biographer Everett True named his book after the album— Live Through This: American Rock Music in the Nineties.
• Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi has mentioned that Live Through This is one of his favorite albums from the 1990s.
• "Violet" is played on the radio by Kristen Wiig in a scene from the 2011 blockbuster comedy film Bridesmaids.
• Continuing a trend of naming arcs after popular rock tracks, lines and albums, the first arc of the series Angel and Faith is entitled "Live Through This".

Musicians and personnel

Musicians

• Courtney Love – vocals, rhythm guitar
• Eric Erlandson – lead guitar
• Kristen Pfaff – bass guitar, piano, backing vocals
• Patty Schemel – drums
• Dana Kletter – additional vocals
• Kurt Cobain – backing vocals on "Asking for It" and "Softer, Softest" (uncredited)

Personnel

• Paul Q. Kolderie – producer, engineer
• Sean Slade – producer, engineer
• Scott Litt – mixing (on "Violet", "Miss World", "Asking for It", "Jennifer's Body" and "Softer, Softest")
• J Mascis – mixing (on "Gutless")
• Bob Ludwig – mastering

• Mark Kates - A&R
• Robin Sloane – creative direction
• Janet Wolsborn – art direction
  • Front artwork and portraits – Ellen Von Unwerth
  • Back artwork – Frank Rodriguez
  • Inlay artwork – Juergen Teller, Margaret Morton

Track listing

All songs credited as Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson unless noted otherwise.

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Length
1.	"Violet"		3:24
2.	"Miss World"		3:00
3.	"Plump"		2:34
4.	"Asking for It"		3:29
5.	"Jennifer's Body"		3:41
6.	"Doll Parts"	Love	3:31
7.	"Credit in the Straight World"	Stuart Moxham	3:11
8.	"Softer, Softest"		3:27
9.	"She Walks on Me"		3:23
10.	"I Think That I Would Die"	Love, Erlandson, Kat Bjelland	3:36
11.	"Gutless"		2:15
12.	"Rock Star*"		2:42
Total length:			38:23

• "Rock Star" is a mislabel of a Live Through This outtake titled "Olympia" (in reference to Olympia, Washington). The original song, "Rock Star", was removed from the final track listing before pressings were made and was replaced with "Olympia", but as the artwork had already been printed, the title "Rock Star" remained.

Chart positions

Album

Year	Chart	Position
1994	Billboard 200	52

Singles

Year	Single	Chart	Position
1994	"Miss World"	Modern Rock Tracks	13
1994	"Doll Parts"	Modern Rock Tracks	4
1994	"Doll Parts"	Billboard Hot 100	58
1995	"Violet"	Modern Rock Tracks	29
1995	"Softer, Softest"	Modern Rock Tracks	32
1995	"Asking for It"	Modern Rock Tracks	36

Note: Even though it did chart, "Asking for It" was never released as a single, and it should not be mistaken with Hole album Ask for It, also released in 1995.

Notes

• Weisbard, Eric; Craig Marks (1995). Spin Alternative Record Guide. Vintage Books. ISBN 0-679-75574-8.