Live Through This is the second studio album by the American alternative rock band Hole, released on April 12, 1994, by DGC Records. Recorded in late 1993, it departed from the band's unpolished hardcore aesthetics to more refined melodies and song structure. Frontwoman Courtney Love said that she wanted the record to be "shocking to the people who think that we don't have a soft edge", but maintain a harsh sensibility. The album was produced by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie and mixed by Scott Litt and J Mascis. The lyrics and packaging reflect Love's thematic preoccupations with beauty, and motifs of milk, motherhood, anti-elitism, and violence against women, while Love derived the album title from a quote in Gone with the Wind (1939).
Live Through This was met with critical acclaim, and charted in nine countries before being certified platinum in the US in April 1995. Despite this, it was also the subject of some public discussion regarding unsubstantiated rumors that Love's husband, Kurt Cobain—who died by suicide less than one week before the album's release—helped ghostwrite the album. This claim has been disputed by band members, producers, and music biographers, though the band confirmed that Cobain sang additional backing vocals on two tracks during a visit to the studio. It was also the only Hole album to feature bassist Kristen Pfaff, and the final album to be released during her lifetime, as she died two months after the album's release.
In critical circles, Live Through This is considered a contemporary classic, and was included in Rolling Stones 2020 updated list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time at number 106. It has also been featured in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and was ranked number 84 on NME<nowiki/>'s The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. As of 2010, it has sold over 1.6 million copies in the US. Following the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, "We had been going more pop, less journal-entry noise stuff," said Erlandson. with Geffen subsidiary DGC Records, reportedly with "an advance of a million dollars and a royalty rate considerably higher than Nirvana's". On November 8, 1992, Hole recorded "Beautiful Son", "20 Years in the Dakota" and "Old Age" at Word of Mouth Recording in Seattle with producer Jack Endino. The songs were released in April 1993 as Hole's fourth single on the City Slang label. On January 21, 1993, Love and Schemel recorded five demos at BMG Ariola Ltda. in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Produced by Craig Montgomery, the session had originally been scheduled as a demo session for Nirvana, who were recording material for their upcoming studio album In Utero (1993). During breaks in Nirvana's session, Love and Schemel recorded a number of songs later featured on Live Through This, including "Miss World", "She Walks on Me", "I Think That I Would Die" and "Softer, Softest".
In 1993, the band recruited former Janitor Joe bassist Kristen Pfaff, an accomplished cellist and classically trained musician who brought a new level of professionalism to the group. After a brief tour of the United Kingdom in mid-1993, the band sent a series of demos to the record label. "When we got the Live Through This demos, I realized very quickly that Hole had gotten a new rhythm section," said producer Sean Slade. "It was much more musical." which he initially refused, as he was unfamiliar with the material.
Composition
Music
Packaging and artwork
thumb|right|upright=.9|The album's back artwork features a childhood photo of Love in [[Springfield, Oregon]]
Fashion model Leilani Bishop is shown on the cover of the album, shot by photographer Ellen von Unwerth, dressed in beauty pageant attire with a tiara and a bouquet of flowers, with mascara running down her eyes in tears of joy. Love stated in an interview that she "wanted to capture the look on a woman's face as she's being crowned... this sort of ecstatic, blue eyeliner running, kind of 'I am, I am—I won! I have hemorrhoid cream under my eyes and adhesive tape on my butt, and I had to scratch and claw and fuck my way up, but I won Miss Congeniality!'" The band logo introduced on the front cover of the album shares stylistic similarity to the contemporary Mattel Barbie logo.
The back cover of the album features a family photo of Courtney Love during her childhood in Springfield, Oregon, with the individual track listings appearing to the right, printed on embossing tape. Music scholar Ronald Lankford commented on the contrast between the images on the front and back cover, interpreting the back image of Love as symbolizing the "antithesis of the contest winner on the cover. The young girl, then, seems to represent femininity in its natural state, before the fall of adolescence."
Release
Live Through This was released on April 12, 1994, by DGC Records on compact disc and cassette in North America. Overseas, the album received a short-lived LP pressing by City Slang on a standard black vinyl and a limited white vinyl. The album was dedicated to the memory of Joe Cole, a roadie for Black Flag and the Rollins Band who was shot to death in a December 1991 robbery after attending a Hole concert at the Whisky a Go Go.
The album debuted on the U.S. Billboard 200 at number 55, eventually peaking at number 52 in January 1995 during its 68-week stay. In December 1994, the record went gold, having sold a total of 500,000 copies, and went platinum six months later for having sold one million copies. As of 2010, the album had sold more than 1.6 million copies in the United States and has well over 2 million worldwide. It has also achieved platinum status in Canada and Australia. The tour was subsequently postponed until the end of the summer, after which Melissa Auf der Maur, a Canadian bassist from Montreal, was hired to join the band and accompany them on tour.
Four singles were released from the album and three promotional videos were shot, for "Miss World" (still with Kristen Pfaff), "Doll Parts" (with L7's bassist Jennifer Finch replacing her) and "Violet" (already with Melissa Auf der Maur). "Softer, Softest" was also released as a single, and Hole's performance of this song at their MTV Unplugged session was used as a promotional video.
Authorship myths
Following the album's release, rumors began circulating alleging that Love's recently deceased husband, Cobain, had ghostwritten some of the songs. Although these rumors circulated for years to follow, multiple songs on Live Through This had been written and performed during Hole's Pretty on the Inside tour: Both "Violet" and "Doll Parts", among other tracks, were written in 1991 during the release of Pretty on the Inside. The first studio recordings of the songs took place during a BBC Radio broadcast for John Peel in 1991, in between US and European tours to promote Pretty on the Inside; these recordings would later appear on the group's 1995 EP Ask for It.
In a 2006 Time magazine piece, it was noted that "[the rumors] started immediately that it was Cobain, not his wife, Courtney Love, who wrote the majority of these churningly catchy songs. Forget that there's no proof, that their marriage was collaborative and that it's a nasty thing to say, Live Through This is clearly a woman's work [and is] far more swaggering than any album any grunge man ever came up with. When Love sings, "I went to school in Olympia / Where everyone's the same," it's obvious she thinks she's not, and that she's right."
Love made several responses to the songwriting allegations, first in 1998: "All this time I have never addressed this. But here I am finally saying for the very first time that Kurt did not [write] Live Through This. I mean for fuck's sake, his skills were much better than mine at the timethe songs would have been much better. That's the first thing." Love later addressed the issue, stating: "I wanted to be better than Kurt. I was really competing with Kurt. And that's why it always offends me when people would say, "Oh, he wrote Live Through This." I'd be proud as hell to say that he wrote something on it, but I wouldn't let him. It was too Yoko [Ono] for me. It's like, "No fucking way, man! I've got a good band, I don't fucking need your help." However, according to the BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated) repertoire, the songwriting credits of the majority of the album's tracks belong solely to Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson, while "Doll Parts" is credited to Love alone.
Reception
Lauded by critics and periodicals, and the Village Voices annual Pazz & Jop critics' poll. It was also named among the best five albums of the year by Canadian publications, including the Edmonton Journal and the Toronto Star.
Rolling Stone noted, "Love delivers punk not only as insinuating as Nirvana's but as corrosive as the Sex Pistols'. More significantly, Live Through This may be the most potent blast of female insurgency ever committed to tape." Entertainment Weekly awarded the album a B+: "What Live Through This makes perfectly clear… is that Love is a greater star. She has charisma and attitude to burn, and she knows it."
In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau noted the album's less caustic sound than Pretty On The Inside but praised Love's songwriting: "Punk aesthetic or no punk aesthetic, Courtney Love's songs wouldn't be compromised and might be deepened by steeper momentum and more articulate guitar noise. But they prevail anyway. Their focus is sexual exploitation, and not just by the media, evil straights, and male predators of every cultural orientation. She's also exploited by Courtney Love, and not only does she know it, she thinks about it."
Musician Magazine wrote, "[Kurt] Cobain's much-discussed, little heard other half finally gets the chance to escape gossip-column purgatory and succeeds with flying colors... Courtney Love's foul, funny eloquence… cuts through all the bullshit with a mighty flourish." This sentiment was reassessed in a 2008 BBC review of the album: "In 1994 and the years that followed, tragedy and controversy seemed to overshadow everything Courtney Love touched. Thankfully, with every year that passes, it becomes easier to put the record's emotional baggage to one side and appraise it on the strength of its songs."
"Since the last Hole LP… Courtney has learnt the art of writing a decent pop hook," observed Selects Clark Collis. "Disgorging your cathartic trauma in the studio is an admirable pastime but if you really want to compete with Corgan, Vedder or even Cobain, then the Top 40 is still where it's at."
"Although for the most part Hole rarely stray from now familiar grunge territory," noted Q, "on tracks like 'Softer Softest' and 'Miss World' they mine a rich vein of twisted country."
Spin awarded Live Through This a 9/10 rating, noting, "Love rode her band's gargantuan riffs through a shy loner's air-guitar fantasy: rock stardom as revenge upon the entire human race."
In 2003, Rolling Stone included Live Through This in its list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, ranking it at number 466, with the ranking climbing slightly to number 460 in the 2012 revision. For the 2020 reboot of the list, the album's ranking shot up to number 106. In 2011, Kerrang! included the album in its "666 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die!" list. It was also included in Time magazine's All-Time 100 Albums list, as well as the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (2006). NME ranked Live Through This 84th in its list of the 500 all-time greatest albums, published in 2013. In May 2014, Loudwire placed Live Through This at number seven on its "10 Best Hard Rock Albums of 1994" list. The album was also ranked at number 15 in Guitar World magazine's "Superunknown: 50 Iconic Albums That Defined 1994" list. Spin named Live Through This 6 on their list Spin: Top 90 Albums of the 90's and 19 on their list Spin 100 Greatest Albums 1985–2005. The album is ranked number 980 in the All-Time Top 1000 Albums (3rd. edition, 2000).
In 2018, Pitchfork writer Sasha Geffen rated the album a ten out of ten, praising the "juxtaposed visceral imagery with catchy, vituperative sloganeering" with the album "switching gears between repulsion and attraction at a moment’s notice, bombarding the listener with noise and then sweetly luring them back in." Geffen concludes: "[Courtney] Love makes a bid for universality on Live Through This in that it’s hard not to get swept up in her energy, but she also acknowledges that female pain is marked, that it is compartmentalized and dismissed because it is felt by women, not people." In 2019, Rolling Stone ranked the album at number four on its list of the 50 greatest grunge albums. In 2024, Rolling Stone ranked the album's cover at number 13 on its list of the 100 best album covers of all time.
Commercial performance
In the United States, Live Through This peaked at number 52 on the US Billboard 200 chart, and spent 68 weeks on the chart, making it the band's longest charting album in the US. It was ranked at number 86 on the year end chart of the Billboard 200. It was certified Platinum in the US in 1995 with one million copies sold. The album has sold 1.6 million copies in the US to date.
The album peaked at number 13 in the UK and charted for 17 weeks. It was certified Gold in the UK in 2013, with 100,000 copies sold. In Australia, it peaked at number 13 and spent 16 weeks on the chart. It was certified Gold in the country, with 70,000 copies sold.