Courtney Love: ‘A Hole reunion? We are definitely talking about it’
As Live Through This turns 25, the band discuss the trauma and pop tactics that charged its release – as well as their comeback
Raw, beautiful and extremely angry: 25 years ago the grunge movement birthed its most powerful album. A raging takedown of body fascism, self-doubt and sexual assault in pre-#MeToo America, Hole’s Live Through This was weaponised feminism with frontwoman Courtney Love as its seething general. Yet the release was marred by tragedy, going on sale just four days after the body of Love’s husband Kurt Cobain was found at their home in Seattle and two months before Hole’s bass player Kristen Pfaff died of a drug overdose.
“When it came out, there was so much horrible other stuff happening in my life that I didn’t even think about it,” Love says of just how commercial a record dealing with brutal personal trauma came to be. Across the album’s 12 tracks, Love was dealing with her experience in the only way she and her non-college educated community knew how. “We were from the kick, punch, scream, yell until they leave us alone and/or a combo of that with a guitar kind-of generation; we didn’t have language for that kind of stuff,” she explains. Even so, ideas for lyrics came thick and fast. “It’s really about: ‘Do I have something to say?’” Love says of her approach to songwriting. “And when you’re young you have a lot to say.”