Live Through This
Live Through This (1994)— Hole
Live Through This persists as the most beloved, revolutionary album of the 90s alt-rock band Hole. Frontwoman Courtney Love, in her riot grrrl aesthetics and attitude, embodied a newly forming construction of the monstrous feminine grounded in the repossession of (white) girlhood. The album is a tightly controlled, but violent and poignant, brilliant destruction of easy-to-swallow femininity and a nosedive into the abject.
In music critic David Fricke's initital review of the album for Rolling Stone, he described it as a "corrosive, lunatic wail." In a review of the album in 2018 in Pitchfork, Sasha Geffen responds, "He was wrong on the second point: There’s no lunacy on Hole’s records. But there is anger, female anger, which, to a man’s ear, historically scans as madness." Love has said that the album's hole motif was drawn from Medea, and the venomous, piercing perforations of the "archaic mother-figure," as Creed would say. Live Through This perforates digestible, plated-up femininity and accesses a monstrosity within tenderness and rage. The foremost gore of womanhood, as expressed in this album, emanates, it seems, principally from the physical distortions, invasions, and brutalities coerced upon its construction. Live Through This can function in the cultural iconography of female rage and monstrosity as an unconventional history, a listening-experience as alternate archive. In his Monster Theory, Cohen writes, "Given that the recorders of the history of the West have been mainly European and male, women (She) and nonwhites (Them!) have found themselves repeatedly transformed into monsters, whether to validate specific alignments of masculinity and whiteness, or simply to be pushed from its realm of thought" (Cohen 36). Hole's alternative history of girl-madness is monstrous in its audacity to record, not politely but in enraged, hoarse wails and unfurled screams, the experience of being monstrous, of occupying the cultural territory of the monstrous and the girlish. There is no self-cannibalizing here—the album insists the experience of monstered-identity upon its listeners, imprinting itself as cultural memory, asking to be devoured and spit out by its listener rather than by its creators. Indeed, the roleplay of fandom is, as music critic Anwen Crawford describes in her biography of Live Through This, "If not implicitly female, then the fan is certainly a feminised role to play" (Crawford 33). Thus girlhood, experienced through fandom, is a field of monstrosity, of excessive care and devotion demonized and feared.
In "Doll Parts," Love sings, "I want to be the girl with most cake / I love him so much it just turns to hate / I fake it so real I am beyond fake / And someday you will ache like I ache," her voice crescendoing, repeating the line, until it cracks. The figure of the possessed or haunted doll is almost always feminized in the contemporary horror film, its strange imprisonment of terrifying femininity and inhumanness posing an existential discomfort to those around it. A doll expressing hunger, as in "Doll Parts," troubles the boundaries between the imagined human and inhuman, as femininity is defined as subhuman or fundamentally empty. The non-emptiness comes alive and stirs up an abject desire to listen to what should be voiceless speak.
In Patricia Pisters' essay on the Final Girl trope in Rereading the Monstrous-Feminine, she expands upon the definition and potentialities of the abject, in its relationship to girlhood aesthetics and depiction, "The abject as an ambiguous notion or border, cut and extended into creative abjection reaches beyond the typical horror emotions of fear, disgust, and other negative emotions infusing it with notions of poetry and feminine desire."
