A Hole Lot of Fascination: Part 1—Why?

 I can’t stop talking about Courtney Love. Even when I fervently claimed to hate everything about her, I couldn’t stop talking about her. She was the worst thing to happen to music. She couldn’t sing. Hole was a sell-out band. All she cared about was money and making friends with celebrities. It was disgusting how she brought up Kurt’s name as if she had a right to talk about him. Remembering my hollow self-righteousness makes me cringe. The fact that in August I loved Hole and by October I was declaring I had never liked them, not even one song, not at all, just proves how strong—and sad—my desire to be liked had become by that point. I’d like to go back and shake 15-year-old me into understanding pretentious misogynists who think refusing to bathe earns them a badge of honor are not worth her time.

I didn’t yet understand part of my isolation was chosen. I avoided social situations because I naturally preferred to be alone, and generally speaking, my attempts to bond with my peers ended up sounding like Daria’s trip to the school counselor. At that point I just believed it was time to finally make a few friends. I was feeling an unprecedented level of confidence, taking my self-esteem from a dangerous -10 to a simply unhealthy 0.

Had my life been a poorly written teen movie things would have worked out. The guy with Robert Smith hair would actually have turned out to be a sensitive poet, with whom I would fall madly in love. His asshole friends would either have revealed themselves to be decent people shielding themselves from a cruel world or simply been dropped from the story by the end. The vapid girlfriends who hated other girls more than I thought possible would reform or, like the asshole friends, be written out by the end. Actually, if I could snag a writing credit for this thing I’d like the girls to be saved by feminism and a few buckets of cold water to get thrown on the guys—and eventually some feminist enlightenment for them too. Why not?

That didn’t happen, though. The guy with Robert Smith hair ended up being a pretentious asshole who needed to spend some time being honest with himself about his sexuality, and I don’t know what happened to the others. I lost track of them after I came to my sense and realized how much time I was wasting with them. They loved the idea of Nirvana. I loved Nirvana. They thought the world was a stupid, empty place out to make them miserable by sending them to Baptist church services on Wednesdays and keeping acid out of their unwashed hands. I thought reality was probably made up of a lot of social constructs than most people realized or admitted, and I wasn’t sure what to do with that thought. I thought the world was probably an awful place most of the time, but I still wanted to go on living in it, even if it was just to play “All Apologies” one more time. They thought the world sucked because thinking the world sucked was the most rebellious act they could think of that didn’t require moving. In hindsight, I see how my strangely sincere cynicism didn’t endear me to this crowd.

All that’s to say, when they mocked my collection of Hole albums, I should have told them to stop bitching about a band they admitted never listening to. I should have told them to go fuck themselves for relying on slut-shaming Courtney to discredit a band with three other people in it. Instead, I hid the albums and joined the ranks of Courtney haters. That lasted for a few years, and there were times when it was almost real. She’s such an unabashed spiteful trainwreck of a person most of the time it seems impossible not to hate her, if only because her near-constant histrionics have exasperated you into hating her. I want to grab her by the hair almost more than I want to grab Past Me and refuse to let go until she takes responsibility for herself at least some of the time.

The thing is, though, what can drive you to hate her is what keeps most fans coming back for more. Nirvana are always going to be That Band for me. I can’t put into words how I felt the first time I heard them or the (cliché alert) sense of being spoken to by the headless photo of Kurt Cobain on the back of their greatest hits album.

Not that I ended up tattooing that photo onto my arm or anything. Who would do something like that?

This post isn’t about Nirvana, though now that I think about it, I’ll have to do one (or eight) about them at some point. This exciting first post is also the first in a series on Courtney Love and Hole because, goddamnit, I can’t stop talking about them. Yes, Courtney is pretty much a terrible person. Yes, their last good album was in 1998, and Hole fans are divided over whether or not that one was good despite being their most successful. Yes, Courtney Love has humiliated herself enough for fifteen people with similar abandonment issues and addictive personalities over the past twenty years. And yet there’s something about her and about the band that’s impossible for me not to love.

Without further missing the point, when I heard Nirvana it was like finally meeting someone who understood me. Every ragged note that came out of Kurt Cobain’s mouth was a validation of what I thought and felt. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t too angry. I was just fucking frustrated. I was too smart and too sensitive for the people around me, and they got that. There were things they couldn’t express, though, and places they couldn’t go. Hole could. Until Courtney decided it would be fun to front a band of leather-clad guys, one of whom looks as though he’s wearing a bad Sid Vicious Halloween costume, Hole were a decidedly feminine band. As much as Courtney wanted to bitch about the lack of testosterone in music making it weak when she started out—a weird complaint for a self-proclaimed feminist—she fronted a band that expressed, more than anything else, a decidedly feminine rage. It was a kind of rage Nirvana could never tap into, and I’m okay with that. I’m not sure I want them being able to reach the same inner parts of me Hole can. I’m not sure if, as guys, they could even if they wanted to. Kurt Cobain may have become one of the most feminized men in music—if not the history of the world—but he could never have sang “Pretty on the Inside” and sounded convincing. He couldn’t have written “Good Sister/Bad Sister.” Sure, those are both songs from the same Hole-era, but I think early Hole wasn’t just the angriest; it was also the most feminine.

By now I’m sure you’ve realized my use of the world feminine has nothing to do with frills and dolls, unless those dolls have had their heads pulled off and their dresses cut up. What I’m talking about is something I’m still struggling to define. Hole was a sexy band, and not just because of that Rolling Stone photo shoot where Courtney looked like she could fuck you with her eyes. 

Their songs have a kind of unchecked emotional energy I can only imagine letting myself have. That’s part of the continuing fascination with them and with Courtney. She propped her leg on an amp, didn’t care if you could see up her skirt, and screamed out everything girls are supposed to repress. She’s every stereotype and misogynist belief about women—overwrought, illogical, vindictive, needy, promiscuous, et cetera. She’s an Emily Brontë character come to life, minus the British accent and eloquent speeches.

Yet she radiates a strange kind of power, or perhaps it’s charisma. I want to be like her, even if all I ever manage to do is stop holding back every time the words “Insipid fuck” beg to be snarled at someone.