Hole's Live Through This 33 1/3

Author(s): Anwen Crawford

Pop & Rock | Criticism & Analysis | James' Picks

Courtney Love has never been less than notorious. Her intelligence, ambition and appetite for confrontation have made her a target in a music industry still dominated by men. As Kurt Cobain's wife she was derided as an opportunistic groupie; as his widow she is pitied, and scorned, as the madwoman in rock's attic. Yet Hole's second album, Live Through This, awoke a feminist consciousness in a generation of young listeners. Live Through This arrived in 1994, at a tumultuous point in the history of American music. Three years earlier Nirvana's Nevermind had broken open the punk underground, and the first issue of a zine called Riot Grrrl had been published. Hole were of this context and yet outside of it: too famous for the strict punk ethics of riotgrrrl, too explicitly feminist to be the world's biggest rock band. Live Through This is an album about girlhood and motherhood; desire and disgust; self-destruction and survival. There have been few rock albums before or since so intimately concerned with female experience. It is an album that changed lives - so why is Courtney Love's achievement as a songwriter and musician still not taken seriously, two decades on?


Product Information

A positive, feminist reading of Hole's landmark 1994 album and its controversial creator, Courtney Love, which explores womanhood, desire, disgust, self-destruction, survival, and fame.

Anwen Crawford is an Australian writer. She is the music critic for The Monthly magazine, and her essays have appeared in publications including Frieze, Overland and Loops: Writing Music.

Acknowledgements 1. Violet 2. Miss World 3. Asking for It 4. Credit in the Straight World 5. Softer, Softest 6. I Think That I Would Die 7. Rock Star Notes Bibliography

General Fields

  • : 9781623563776
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : 0.457
  • : January 2015
  • : 165mm X 120mm
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Anwen Crawford
  • : 144
  • : 782.42166092
  • : English
  • : 1
  • : Paperback