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ABSTRACT
This article analyzes the sources of the anger in the early work of Courtney Love and rock band Hole, which—in contrast to much of today’s mainstream rock, pop, and indie music, which more often draws from singer-songwriter, country, and electronic forms—was inspired by confrontational punk, underground, and post-punk influences. I argue that Hole’s early work, especially debut album Pretty on the Inside, constitutes a coherent protest against the broken promises of the 1960s counterculture and the second wave of feminism. I consider the price paid by Love for playing the “angry woman” and lessons for today’s artists.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Plenty of punk rock music is, of course, still being produced—for example, by cartoonish Australian band Amyl and the Sniffers and by the bands associated with London’s Rebellion Festival, such as Dream Nails and Big Joanie. But none has had anything like the mainstream crossover success of Hole in the 1990s.
2. The musical categories set out here are not mutually exclusive. For example, Sufjan Stevens drew on folk traditions on Carrie & Lowell but also made the electronic album The Age of Adz. What he has never done is make a heavy metal, punk, or grunge album.
3. Several developments have encouraged the growth of “bedroom pop”—first, the ease with which music can now be made at home and released straight onto the Internet; second, the detrimental economics of streaming, making it difficult to tour with a large band; third, the impact of the various 2020–21 Covid-pandemic lockdowns on artists’ ability to tour. Love herself considered the future possibilities of the first of these developments as long ago as 2000, in her Salon article lamenting the dire state of the record industry (“Courtney Love Does the Math”).
4. True has it the other way round than most in his account of Hole’s origins, with Erlandson posting the advertisement and Love answering it (255)—although, as True himself has observed (in an article written under his real name, Jeremy Thackray), quibbling over such details is unlikely to be a means of locating useful truths in rock biography.
5. Hole first recorded “Olympia” for B.B.C. Radio in March 1993. The song was mistitled “Rock Star” on Live Through This when “Rock Star” itself—another song entirely—was withdrawn from that album at short notice following the death of Kurt Cobain.
6. Love’s birth name is Courtney Michelle Harrison.
7. The back cover of the “Retard Girl” single is reproduced in the booklet accompanying The First Session. Anne Sexton was much in the news in 1991 following the publication that year of Diane Middlebrook’s controversial biography. Several reviews, such as that by Joyce Carol Oates in The Washington Post, referred to the fact that Sexton was in the habit of carrying “kill-me pills” in her purse.
8. Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland did have a similar look as Love at this time. Dispute amongst the principals as to which of them originated the look is recorded in Yarm (353).
9. The changes wrought by grunge were so profound that Anwen Crawford is surely right to describe Hole as a “crossover band, a conduit between the underground and the mainstream at just about the last moment when that structural distinction still held” (111).
10. That said, there are striking similarities between the album covers of Pretty on the Inside and Crocodiles, the first Bunnymen album, both of which feature what appear to be trees or bushes filtered through strange bright phosphorescent colors and pictures of all four band members, with Love and McCulloch, the lead singers, in the foregrounds.
11. Smear chose his own punk rock name as follows: “I was in health class, 11th grade, and I read about Pap Smears and I thought that was the most disgusting thing I could imagine” (Rubin). Other punks—Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Rat Scabies—chose their names for similar reasons. As Jon Savage explains, such pseudonyms “originated as insults … which were then taken on board and flaunted as a badge of pride” (192–93). Savage draws a contrast with the “Superstars” promoted by Andy Warhol in the 1960s, such as Candy Darling and International Velvet, who took on pseudonyms “to advertise their wish for celebrity” (192). Love’s new name was more in the lineage of these “Superstars,” as she revealed in the October 2021 Instagram post: “I wanted to be ‘Courtney Loveless’ … [but Smear] said ‘Love, would be more popular!’” Love says she accepted Smear’s recommendation as, in the end, she was “New Wave,” not punk (“Parliament”).
12. By 1975, Fleetwood Mac consisted of Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, and Christine McVie—all of whom were veterans of the 1960s UK counterculture—and the Americans Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, who had only recently joined the band but who had themselves been active in the 1960s Californian counterculture.
13. Echoing Love’s attitude, it is striking that, even in the midst of all the appalling indignities he recalls suffering in his memoir due to his drug addiction, the one that seems to have rankled most for Love’s friend Mark Lanegan, of Seattle grunge band Screaming Trees, was the accusation that he was “a rank Jim Morrison imitator” (63).
14. As Love told Raphael, “Drugs in Seattle are fucking problematic” (Never Mind 16). Drugs were involved in the deaths of Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone, Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch, Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and Layne Staley of Alice in Chains. Love dedicated Pretty on the Inside to Rob Ritter of Los Angeles punk and underground bands the Bags, the Gun Club, and 45 Grave. Ritter, with whom Love lived in Los Angeles during the late 1980s, died of a heroin overdose whilst on tour in 1990 with Celebrity Skin. This Los Angeles band had a number of links to the Germs and surely inspired the title of Hole’s 1998 album.
15. As envisioned by radical feminists of the second wave, the idea behind the discussion groups of consciousness-raising was for women to deliver political action by “personal transformation,” but liberal feminists dismissed the practice as “navel-gazing” (Dicker 81).
16. Love told Lucy O’Brien: “I met Susan Faludi, and that’s as close as it gets to Elvis” (158).
17. Nehring provides an overview of work on anger in feminist philosophy and psychology in the 1990s, produced in parallel to riot grrrl music, arguing that “because a number of the Riot Grrrls are college graduates, I think it is fair to say they represent a literal fusion of feminism and punk” (109). With her antipathy to the colleges that produced riot grrrl—Love told Dennis Cooper that “the Women’s Studies program at Evergreen State College, Olympia, where a lot of these bands come from, is notorious for being one of the worst programs in the country”—it is fair to say Love was not part of this fusion.
18. In a recent letter to The Guardian, still rightly raging, Love points out the inequities of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, only eight percent of whose inductees are women, arguing the Hall is “replicating the violence of structural racism and sexism” in the wider industry, dismissing it as a “boomer tomb” (“Why”).