Live Through This with Me
Or, a love letter to an album.
A little while ago, I turned thirty-one. I’d just turned ten years old when Live Through This came out. I’m the oldest child in my family, so I did not inherit any hand-me-down coolness from a sibling. This meant that I sometimes arrived late to cultural moments, and Hole’s 1994 album was no exception. I consumed Live Through This in bits and pieces between 1995 and 2000, and learned to love it one song at a time.
Between those years, I was growing both as a music consumer and as a person, so the album’s as fundamental a part of my rock education as it is in defining for me the perspective of a woman with feelings. It’s formative for its rage, its body-disgust and — maybe most importantly — its affirmation of the subjective experience. The album flips off the outside world — it’s widely, intensely distrustful of any idea of universal correctness or cool. The album is an important reminder that sometimes you can only rely on your own gut feeling, and that your experience is important even when it’s shitty.
“Rock Star”/”Olympia”
In 1995, a year into our tenure as immigrant children in south Florida, my sister and I had managed to make one friend. This friend had an older sister, Jenny, who was four or five years my senior and into grunge music. I always found ways to spend time in Jenny’s room, which was amazing to me: she had her own TV that was always tuned to MTV. Her furniture was draped with swaths of crushed velvet, and glow-in-the-dark stars adhered to the ceiling as if by some sorcery. She had secret beers in her closet. A lava lamp blazed hot on her desk, and a collage of nineties alt-gods decorated her drawn-on walls (think Billy Corgan when he still had hair; Marilyn Manson’s band the Spooky Kids; things ripped out of Circus and Spin, etc). I sat in her closet on a pile of her clothes, mostly reading erotic novels I found in her parents’ bookcase, trying to stay out of her way so she wouldn’t tell me to leave.
Jenny sometimes played Live Through This on her CD player, but for some reason “Olympia” was the first song that caught my ear. Sitting in her closet, I heard those false starts: “When I went to school. Oh.” Pause. “When I went to school.” Followed by a chuckle, fake. Then, finally: “When I went to school in Olympia.” That dragged-out last vowel leading into the structure of the song, the album’s final track. I had never heard false starts in a song like that. It was a weird breaking of the fourth wall.
The song was a last-minute replacement for the original “Rock Star,” which was pulled probably because it would have been a weird and mean song to release just a few days after Kurt’s death, with lyrics like “How would you like to be Nirvana / So much fun to be Nirvana / Barrel of laughs to be Nirvana / Say you’d rather die.”
Like “Rock Star,” “Olympia” dislikes the idea of coolness and conformity — but instead of sneering ironically at it from a distance, it’s emotionally invested. It alternates between a kind of playfulness and screaming, snarling fuck-yous, and it grips you from the beginning by being stark. Ten-year-old girls live for beginnings if they live for anything, and ten-year-old me would not have cared about the jangly chords at the beginning of “Rock Star.” I needed Courtney’s voice talking about how everyone’s the same at school — something I could relate to. Her voice was alone in the darkness at the end of the album, just like I was listening alone from Jenny’s closet.
As I tuned in to listen, I didn’t know what I was hearing or what Olympia was, but I wanted to. It didn’t even matter that there was satire in those lyrics; it was years before I heard it anyway.
“Violet”
Perhaps because of Jenny’s lasting influence, I grew up knowing that cool girls were supposed to have nonconformist attitudes. By high school, this translated to girls with combat boots, punk patches, and armpit hair (traits I’ve never stopped loving and, to an extent, emulating). Due to a series of lucky coincidences, I ended up playing in a band with two cool girls. They both had painted-up, spiked leather jackets. I had a denim jacket with some pyramid studs on it.
When I say we “played in a band,” I mean that every week, my mother dropped me off at one of their houses, and we played Hole covers and then walked to Burger King. And when I say we played Hole covers, I mean we mostly played “Violet.” I worked hard to learn the riff on my knockoff Strat. I still know how to play it.
My bandmates were fifteen like I was, but they seemed like they knew more than I did. I wanted to be an equal to them so badly, but their knowledge of drug problems and unsentimental fucking seemed far beyond mine. They talked nonchalantly of bad speed and parking lot sex while I was inexperienced with any intoxicant save for cheap beer, and had only pretty recently let some kid touch my boob over my shirt in the elementary school parking lot at night. Mostly I just went along with everything they did: part witness, part hopeful participant.
One day, after “practice,” my two friends went into the bathroom to smoke pot — something else I’d never done. For years I’d hung out with bad kids, but I had always abstained because at first, I was only aspirationally a bad kid. I said I would sit it out just like I’d always done, but when they disappeared into the bathroom, and I could see the edge of the towel they shoved against the bottom of the door, it felt like these two smart cool girls I admired were sealing their entire world off from me.
Suddenly, I started feeling very sad. I couldn’t bear to knock and ask to be let in because I didn’t want to admit I’d made a mistake. But sitting there flipping through magazines in my friend’s room while the two of them shut themselves into the opulent half-bath of her parents’ sprawling, Everglades-draining suburban Florida home, I felt like shit. I wanted to be in there with them so badly. More than that, I wanted them to realize that I should be in there with them and to open up the door for me. I could feel the panic of self-doubt rising up from the middle of my body, the way that heartburn rises, relentless — a kind of tension underneath the sternum that, to this day, lets me know I’m stressed.
“You should learn how to say no,” Courtney roars in “Violet.” I started figuring out what saying no meant that day. It wasn’t about smoking at all; it was about being an intact person. The lesson went something like this: you don’t know how to say no to anything in a way that will convince anyone, much less yourself. You should figure out how to do that. You should have conviction.
“Miss World”
I went to an academic magnet high school, so finding smart friends was not difficult. Finding the weirdos and bad kids were the hard part, but I did OK — they’re usually easy to spot even if they’re few and far between. So on the first day of school, dressed in my petticoat and black skirt in the early Florida fall, I introduced myself to the gothest girl I could find. She turned out to be an academic overachiever too, so we sat near each other in all our college-credit classes, chugging coffees and Mountain Dews to stay awake.
My best friend Julia was six feet tall, pretty, and always dressed to excess the way only teenage freaks can do. She was captivating and smart, but she was also nice, and hanging out with her felt good because she never questioned me. Spending lots of time with someone so visible and beautiful also meant that I could watch other people watch her. In class, this meant that I dutifully finished my tests and then shook Julia awake behind me because she’d dozed from spending the previous night awake. Outside of class, it meant that I could see people approach her with fear and respect, and then fall apart conversationally because she actually turned out to be so nice. And for some reason she never, ever seemed to see the way everyone looked at her.
She was my window into being watched.
Around that same time, I wrote “I’m Miss World, Somebody Kill Me” huge across the top of the notebook for the US Government class where we both languished twice a week. I liked the phrase: it felt simultaneously glamorous and self-loathing, and I wanted to be glamorous and self-loathing more than anything, but I didn’t like anyone looking back at me too closely.
The song “Miss World” is about watching. It’s about making the viewer look at you as you fall apart: Watch me break and watch me burn. The speaker is someone who only exists because people look. It was an attitude that I — self-conscious, shrinking, and keenly aware of criticism — desperately wished I could possess.
My friendship with Julia was both loving and complicated. She was the wild card, and I was the one who held it together. At our best, we had amazing adventures catching rides in strangers’ cars or sharing our beers with homeless guys who wandered up to us outside the pool hall. At our worst, she would call me up at my mall job, sobbing, or disappear for weeks without telling me where she went. But we loved each other. I wanted her crazy experiences and (as I learned later; we are still friends) she wanted the stability I seemed to have.
My only regret about our friendship is that I wish, in the middle of all my watching, that I could have told her more real things about me. In “Miss World,” the speaker (I always think of the pageant queen from the album cover) dares you to watch her: “Watch me break and watch me burn.” Her destruction is glorious, spectacular, and total. But it’s a one-way mirror — there’s no exchange with the viewer. She turns dark and secret; she can’t look you in the eye. It’s too excruciating to be totally known by anyone.
“Jennifer’s Body”
In my late teens, I read a lot of true crime accounts late at night on the family desktop. The crimes I read about often tilted toward violence against women, because even in the early 2000's the internet knew the best material for lurid crime writing — abductions, sex murders, and indiscriminate, gory killings made good link bait even then.
Reading those things made me feel horrible, but I could not stop. With the lights turned low and the silence of my sleeping family surrounding me, I spent many weekend nights poring over article after article in the “Truly Weird and Shocking” section on Crime Library (an extensive database documenting major crimes and criminals, trials, and forensics that’s now offline as of February 2015).
I thought most about the abducted girls, alone for months or years in enclosed spaces, alive by someone’s whim. The ones that didn’t escape, and the ones that did. I thought about what they must have thought about during their captivities, and the incredible resilience of the ones that got out — the Elizabeth Smarts of the world, the Colleen Stans.
Although the song “Jennifer’s Body” has many layers, taken literally, it’s about a girl being trapped and murdered. The lyrics are part headline (the detached, newspaper headline-like observing tone of the statement “Found pieces of Jennifer’s body”), and part creepy confessional (the assailant talking to you, directly, saying “Just relax, just go to sleep.” ) When I first listened for the words, this juxtaposition hit me hard.
Taken together with the language of matrimony also present in the song (references to better halves and other intimacies), the song is about a violent loss of self.
But for the beginning: “I know it, I can’t see it / But I know it enough to believe it.”
The song’s opening line is a life-changer. Even when you have no control over what’s happening to you, even when there’s no evidence that what you think is right, you have to know that you are right. You remain yourself even (and especially) when you are forced to mentally muscle past bad things. This is how you survive.
What you know is what it means to be you.
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So this is a late love letter to Live Through This. Both the timing of my write-up (the album’s 21st anniversary passed months ago) and its piecemeal form are an accidental metaphor for how I consumed it: after the fact, in small chunks. For years, it’s felt to me like the way people describe a favorite movie: every time I experience it, I notice something that I didn’t see before. And the other thing about favorite movies (favorite anything, really) is that your description of it is always personal. There’s no way to convey the things that you feel or love in objective terms. It’s pure you.
I’d like to say that Live Through This is the most important album of my youth, but that would be an oversimplification. Its influence never ended even after I climbed out of the hormonal darkness of those weird years. I continue to binge-listen to it every few months because it never stopped talking to me. I listen to it regularly, and I mostly listen alone.
