Are Courtney Love and Hole one and the same, or are they both Nobody's Daughter?
by Jason Shawhan
Stasis is not something to expect from Courtney Love and the gang — whoever happens to be in the gang — so the news of Hole's upcoming performance shifting from The Ryman to The Cannery shouldn't be a surprise. You never know whether you're going to get the "rock 'n' roll exorcism" Courtney experience or the "in dresses making messes" Courtney experience in concert: It's part of the legend at this point. Rants, slander, dramatic monologue, guitar shredding — any of these might be in play when La Love holds court. If she's not quite a Schreikünstler like Diamanda Galás, she's got the sound of emotional turmoil locked up inside her throat, and when she lets loose, it's some Ark of the Covenant fury.
I saw Hole at CMJ in 1994, and it was unforgettable — baby dolls flung from the stage, Drew Barrymore hiding behind the curtain and so very many kinderwhore outfits. This was five months after, well, you know, and during the opening blitz of Live Through This as it emerged, bloody and bruised, into this world. We go back, Hole and I. Not just Live Through This and Celebrity Skin, though both of those albums deserve to sit among some of the finest of the '90s. There's Pretty on the Inside, which threw down a lace-around-the-wound gauntlet, and the bad taste in cover art — on the level of Geto Boys' We Can't Be Stopped — of 1995's Ask for It, with its take-no-prisoners "Pale Blue Eyes," and the 1997 comp My Body, The Hand Grenade, which finally put Hole's transgressive covers of "Season of the Witch" and "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" in the public's hands.
So why did it take the prospect of this upcoming show to make me pick up a copy of the new record? Nobody's Daughter has been out since April, and I'm inclined to like Hole. I follow Love on Twitter. (If you don't, you should. It's a roller-coaster ride of too much everything, veering from epic legal briefs and procedural questions into poignant moments of meta-consciousness, with names named and demons cast out left and right — not even Lindsey Lohan's play-by-play of police coming to her house packs as much drama into 140-character fusillades.) I have all of the other records, and I even have the dance mixes from the late '90s. If this record wasn't speaking to me, then who was it speaking to?
Nobody's Daughter has a little of the coke-addled L.A. sheen of Celebrity Skin, which is always nice, and it seems Courtney's voice is in better shape than on her 2004 solo record America's Sweetheart. It's still a raspy wail, but when she dips into her lower register, she brings some Broken English-era Faithfull into the mix, and that's kind of awesome. Just little bits, here and there. Nothing as transcendent as the Zen pre-chorus of "Violet," nothing as scathing as "Playing Your Song" or "Plump." Nobody's Daughter feels oddly balanced, and that's unexpected.
So this is a Hole show, but the only remaining original member is Love. So is this a Courtney show trading on devotion to that particular brand, or is this a reinvention of what Hole is? It's a difficult endeavor to convince me that Hole is simply whatever Courtney says it is, simply because guitarist Eric Erlandson was an integral part of that process, playing on every record up to this point. That Nobody's Daughter only became a "Hole" album late in the six-year process it took to make the record is problematic.
But I can't hate on Courtney. There are more than enough people in the world willing to do so (some for what they'd call nouveau Yokoism, others for her habit of being a mess in public). But anyone who can turn out a video like "Mono," or preside over a record as perfect as "Boys on the Radio," or deliver a performance like she did in 1996's The People vs. Larry Flynt is not someone to be counted out easily. When you go to see The Love Show, you're going for its many fissures and furies; getting rocked in the process, well, that's just gravy.
Email music@nashvillescene.com.
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