Listening to Hole's 'Pretty On The Inside' again, I was struck by the raw venom. It's relentless and poetic. Songs like 'Teenage Whore' and 'Good Sister/Bad Sister' involve you in the choked turbulence of one woman's experience. Slammed together with disgust, howled with distain, it never let's up in vivid horror. What had happened to her, where would she go to after purging her hatred and untamed emotion? Courtney Love divides people, some see her as a fuel of reckless honesty, others as a shameless opportunist. She is full of contradictions. A well read raconteur, a druggy mess, someone dying to be loved, someone hellbent on causing trouble. But always, without doubt, living right now, fluid in thought and opinion.
After the violent splurge of 'Pretty', she begged for solace in the mainstream. This wasn't a sell out, it was a cry for acceptance. 'Live Through This' is a great, wracked punk pop album, containing wild, sensational entertainment. 'Violet', 'Miss World' and 'Doll Parts' are thrilling feminist anthems, beautiful, valiant and harsh. 'Celebrity Skin' had many bittersweet songs, burnt by the L.A. sun, but was diluted by an unsatisfying production. After a long spell in the wilderness a solo album appeared and musically it was an ugly monstrosity. But 'America's Sweetheart' is tough and funny lyrically, the acid was unleashed once again, deceptively sloppy, sharp as a razor. She also appeared in two films by Milos Forman, 'The People vs. Larry Flynt' and 'Man On The Moon', both offbeat biopics centred on irrational iconoclasts. Receptive and natural, her acting felt untainted by Hollywood artifice. Then there was Nick Broomfield's morally dubious documentary 'Kurt And Courtney', which denies the integrity of an essay for a tabloid bogusness. The elitist and the naive may fail to detect the joker's parody or the clown's pathos.
'Nobody's Daughter' has a laboured history. Along with the infamous, self-proclaimed 'Joycean' rants, she uploaded, then deleted some very fine demos on her My Space page. They were moving, confessional songs coated in unobtrusive AOR arrangements. Love's vocal delivery was bruised and rasping, her words revealing a latent tenderness. She sounded her age, signifying a sage-like maturity. Then predictably this was all scrapped for the reformation of Hole without any of her former bandmates. Despite the absence of guitarist Eric Erlandson, a loyal deputy, 'Samantha' and 'Skinny little Bitch' roar in an accurate approximation of their original glory. She sounds fierce again, ready to chew and spit out all the pretenders half her age. But what of the remakes, the new versions of those touching laments, dissolving in cyber land?
With ex Material man Michael Beinhorn back in the control room, compression is turned up to the max. This makes 'Pacific Coast Highway' less a melancholic eulogy, more a feisty piece of work. Somehow 'For Once In Your Life' survives, as a brutalised country-rock lullaby. Yet many of the songs suffer from a methodical, unimaginative uniformity, a wall of commercial noise. Which is a shame, since her voice is often affecting and candid, at times stirring the heart with an expressive anguish. No more so than on 'Letter To God', Linda Perry's power ballad, which should be dreadful but is sung with such rough feeling that it twists into something riveting. She believes in every lyric, and this shot self-assurance places her in the mould of Dylan and Faithfull; essential, ravaged singers with enormous authority over anything they touch. And yes, praise be, past masters and mistresses of savage regret, 'Loser Dust' gives us the fingers up, being a very likeable slice of bubblegum. Crass, flawed, unfashionable. A rock 'n' roll rebel.
