by Alana Massey
In light of its other striking visuals of motherhood, death, and addiction, it is easy to miss that Live Through This is thick with witches. The music videos for the album’s tracks are shot through with the particular sadness of working-class school dances, and Courtney’s commitment to dressing like an overripe figurine during that era links the album to macabre children’s games and girls who bleed too early. But a witch first appears in the third track, “Plump,” when Courtney shrieks, “My baby’s in her arms / Crawling up her legs / Like a liar at a witch trial / You look good for your age.” On “Softer, Softest,” there are two and a half lines sung with uncharacteristic sweetness, “Burn the witch / The witch is dead / Burn the witch,” followed by just the briefest pause before screaming, “Just bring me back her head.”
Beyond the explicit references to witches, there is a pronounced misanthropy and a notable commitment to the manipulation of others that borders on shape-shifting. Courtney declares, “I’m the one with no soul,” in the opening song “Violet,” while there is madness born of missing babies on “I Think That I Would Die” (a classic witch-making formula if there ever was one). “Miss World” and “Doll Parts” are both odes to the woman morally disfigured by virtue only of her own wretched thoughts, barely human in their wantonness. If these are unconvincing pieces of evidence of witchcraft enthusiasm, it is nothing more to me than confirmation that Love has done an especially thorough job with her sorcery.
Meghan’s cadre of adolescent girls were devoted disciples of the witchy Love, and we were hardly alone in our devotion. Despite the mourning shrouds that covered the landscape of rock criticism in the days and years that followed Kurt’s death, the genius of Live Through This was not entirely obscured by its attendant tragedies. The Rolling Stone review from 1994 is awash in adoring metaphors: “daydream whispers,” “crushed-velvet guitar distortion,” and “a woman who measured the depth of her abyss by taking the plunge” all feature in David Fricke’s praise.1 The NME review concluded, “It wakes rock from its cliché coma, leads it, laughing, to a lake of stinking mud and honey, and there drowns it; quietly, efficiently and with surprising gentleness.”2 Spin and Rolling Stone both identified it as the best album of 1994. The sheer volume of positive criticisms surrounding the release that were written primarily by male critics with no particular allegiances to Love made disparaging the contents of the album a less compelling measure by which to fuel her growing mob of detractors. Because it was not acceptable to call the album a failure, rumors began to circulate that it was a forgery.
Word spread quickly from rock scene whispers and embryonic online forums that it was Kurt who had written the bulk of the album, despite the sworn and repeated word of those who witnessed the album’s entire development and creation. Producer Paul Kolderie was present for the recording of Live Through This and noted, “He [Kurt] was very interested in what was going on, but I could tell that he wasn’t behaving as someone would behave if he had created it himself, or if he knew the songs.”3 Numerous accounts affirm essentially the same story: Kurt seemed impressed by but unfamiliar with the songs. It also notably doesn’t really sound like anything Kurt had written before. But this fact is attributed to Kurt’s otherworldly genius and versatility—rather than Courtney’s.
Courtney broke her silence over the issue in 1998, telling the Observer, “I mean for fuck’s sake, his skills were much better than mine at the time—the songs would have been much better.”4 Her claim was entirely uncontroversial: It was taken for granted that Courtney was the lesser talent in the duo. But in revisiting Hole’s work outside the immediate context of Kurt’s death, critics have emerged to suggest a truth that might have been unseemly to print before this decade. “Live Through This is, in a lot of ways, a melodically sharper and more inviting album than anything Nirvana or Pearl Jam or Soundgarden were doing at the time,” writes Tom Breihan on StereoGum in 2014.5 Alex Galbraith writes on UPROXX in 2015 about how listening to Nirvana through the lens of “the Cult of Nirvana” obscures a very important point: A lot of their songs were self-pitying gibberish. “Hole had their fair share of angsty songs, but they always used that angst to shine a light outward. Both Love and Cobain wrote songs about intensely personal situations, but only the former couched her complaints in universal language,” Galbraith writes.6 But the large-scale public investment in despising Courtney would not let itself be devastated by the fact that she was talented. The audacity to be more brilliant than a fallen hero required punishment, so punish her they did. Courtney was the one who sang “I love him so much it just turns to hate,” but those words could just as easily have been the motto of the hate mob that came for Courtney Love.
In the wild west of the early Internet, conspiracy theorists made the case for Courtney orchestrating Kurt’s murder with often melodramatically named websites like “Justice for Kurt.” Some still exist today on Tripod and Geocities mirror platforms. America Online had to delete a Hole forum on its platform in part due to a death threat sent to Courtney in 1995—a relative rarity at that time. And then there’s the case of Tom Grant, the private investigator hired by Courtney to seek out information on Kurt’s whereabouts when he would disappear amid the decline of their marriage. Grant turned against Courtney in the wake of Kurt’s death after learning of evidence that he saw as indicative of a murder plot.
More than twenty years later, the struggle by some fans to get closer to Kurt via violence toward his family continued as recently as 2015. Frances Bean Cobain, who reported that a stalker had stayed in her home for three days while she was on vacation, said, “This person’s twisted explanation was that he was meant to be with me because my father’s soul had entered my body.”7 Though such unhinged behavior is rare, there are plenty of fans who have deified Kurt to the point of reducing his child to a sacred relic. And while Courtney still makes headlines on a semiregular basis, her daughter, Frances, has become the more sought-after spectacle of the Cobain tragedy.
Frances often appears gracious and accommodating during media appearances, in sharp contrast to her frequently evasive late father and notoriously combative mother. But you often have to look hard for Frances in every story in which she appears because writers still tend to veil her in the features of her father. And while she shares physical similarities with both of her striking parents, the public still insists on casting her as Kurt’s beautiful shadow—ghoulishly demanding that she be like her father who died instead of the woman who insisted on living.
I tried to accept Courtney as the girl with the most cake for years, silently complicit in narratives that dismiss female rage as symptomatic of a juvenile character rather than the logical response to a hostile world. She was simply on a little rampage when she offered too many sexually explicit details about another rock star she had fucked. She didn’t mean to be such an embarrassment or such a bitch all the time. But my own transformation from girl child to woman, and the attendant punishments from the world, saw my view of Courtney shift. I surmised that these were not the missteps of immaturity but the intentional humiliation of her detractors in a brilliant performance of ignorance that disguised her true malevolence. It is in these moments that I see Courtney’s vicious bile as a rational reaction to the public’s attempts to keep her on trial in perpetuity. Now when I conjure the outsized specter of Courtney as a venomous witch, I see the woman I aspire to be rather than the clumsy girl I have so often been.
I do not know if I was naturally inclined to trip over myself or if I was rendered this way. There was being labeled a tease by my sixth-grade teacher for holding hands with a boy whose grades weren’t as good as mine. Or the time I was called a condescending cunt by a male friend because I told his drunk friend, in no uncertain terms, that he was out of line for saying he would love to hear the sound of his dick breaking my hymen. Or when at twenty-three I felt my own twisted sense of gratitude that the investment banker who raped me had abated when I pleaded that he not penetrate me anally. Or when my first sugar daddy
held my head on his cock, not releasing it until he had fully ejaculated in my mouth and felt me swallow.
When I worked as a stripper, I regularly heard fantasies from male clients about running away with me, but these were really just stories about these men abandoning the women and children who relied on them. There might still be countless avatars of me being held hostage in the minds of men who would make me complicit in their callousness. For all the years that these vulgar haunts have lingered, so, too, has Courtney’s mordant interrogation: “Was she asking for it? / Was she asking nice? / Yeah, she was asking for it / Did she ask you twice?” It goes to a low volume sometimes, but it is never turned all the way off.
Like Courtney, I have also had the personal misfortune of falling in love with a mild-mannered man whose massive love for me still paled in comparison to his love of heroin. He was two weeks out of rehab when I met him, and he was gentle and handsome, and while we were together I lived in constant fear that I would find him dead one day. Even now, after living for years without him, I wonder sometimes if he will die too young. He had an extended relapse in our years together, and I spent the season trying to conjure a heartbeat from the shadow he had become.
I have learned that I crave the myth of a formidable woman rather than a little girl rotting from the inside out, and the witchcraft at play on Live Through This is but one example of how Courtney always had a stronger taste for blood than for cake. The guiding image for this revision is Courtney devouring Kurt’s heart. Courtney told Vanity Fair in 1995 that she had taken not just hair from Kurt’s head, as was documented in People the year prior, but pubic hair as well. “‘I wanted his heart,” she says. “I wanted his heart to put an oak in it.”8 She claimed that this is a Saxon tradition, but experts in medieval Saxon magic and folklore with whom I spoke had never heard of this ritual, though occult historians were quick to tell me that there are spells aplenty involving the extraction of a person’s heart to access their power. The image of the wicked queen in Snow White demanding the beautiful child’s heart delivered to her in a box comes to mind (Courtney was fittingly cast as this witch in a childhood production of the play). Mad with jealousy and rage that Snow White has survived in the wilderness, the queen transforms into a witch and hunts her down. Unfortunately, we are never clued in to how the queen was made wicked or if she was born that way. But a document trail through Courtney’s past makes it possible to indulge in the wild speculation that the curses she breathed into the world were a long time coming.
In a 1998 biography of Courtney, Poppy Z. Brite describes how Courtney was called “Pee Girl” by her peers because she was notoriously unclean.9 This was due to hygiene negligence in the commune where she lived. Her mother, Linda Carroll, told Vanity Fair that Courtney seemed to always be in physical pain, reacting to human touch with genuine suffering. Carroll also told Vanity Fair that Courtney had frequent nightmares and drew pictures of wounded figures while her peers scratched away at butterflies.10 Courtney told Spin in 1995, “I forever looked like I was seven. And then I got ugly; I was ugly until I was 25. But back then, I was usually one of the most attractive people in the room, except in an unusual way. Still, I knew what I had, and I worked the fuck out of it. And so when it was gone I really missed it.”11 A sensitive, beautiful child suddenly cursed with ugliness and tortured by ghastly dreams is an origin story that lends credence to both black magic practice and perhaps an equally unforgivable crime: mortal ascent to power through female cunning.
The vanishing of Courtney’s beauty was among the least of her worries in a childhood characterized by frenzy and motion. “It was autumn in San Francisco, the season of the witch, 1964” is how the legend begins in Brite’s biography. Her father, Hank, was already ambivalent about his pregnant wife, Linda, who “nurtured her fetus in a heady broth of fear and sugar” as she was drawn to sweets but increasingly repulsed by her own reflection. The prenatal potion in which Courtney was forged was the first of many odd pairings in her early life: a cripplingly attached mother who was hopelessly inept at child care, and a mostly negligent father who gathered his attention together for Courtney just long enough to dose her with LSD at the age of four, a claim that her father denies. After her parents’ divorce, she was shuffled around the globe, her life spent with a network of friends and relatives and punctuated by time in boarding schools and in the juvenile justice system. Brite’s biography features detailed reports from the institutions where she stayed. Her disruptive anger and penchant for obscenity make frequent appearances, but the most consistent remarks are about Courtney’s exceptional intelligence and her chillingly brilliant imagination. “Courtney dreamed about keeping tiny people in jars and starving them, about starting a farm for women where she would beat them and make them beautiful” is among the more colorful descriptions from Courtney’s otherworldly mind.12
The 1980s were Courtney’s stumbling apprenticeship through social climbing that prepared her for the more ambitious scaling she would perform in her wicked prime during the ’90s. “Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love first locked eyes on each other at eleven in the evening on Friday, January 12, 1990, and within 30 seconds they were tussling on the floor” is how Charles R. Cross introduces their courtship in Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain.13 Both have infamous eyes: Courtney’s were described in Spin in 1994 as “perpetually startled blue eyes capable of great ferocity,” while the “cornflower blue” of Kurt’s eyes is well-documented.14 Michael Stipe recalled during Nirvana’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, “The first time I looked into his eyes I just went, ‘I get it. He is all that. He is a very special person.’”15 This fact did not go unnoticed by Courtney. “He was super cute but he carried himself like someone who didn’t know it. That was part of the charm,” Courtney would later recall in the documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck.16
A fan who attended a 1992 show at Australian National University told music critic Anwen Crawford about seeing Courtney on the side of the stage. “I couldn’t take my eyes off her, because she was transfixed on him. It was such a romantic, fucked up, rock ’n’ roll thing.”17 “By far the most frequently mentioned physical distinction of the witch was the possession of unusual eyes or an uncanny gaze,” Professor Owen Davies writes in Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736–1951.18 Operative witchcraft manuals frequently refer to witches training to fix their gazes on objects or persons in order to manipulate or control them. What if Courtney was not projecting a signal of infatuation with Kurt but siphoning his psychic energy, his genius, his very will to live with her gaze?
Like a bird accidentally crushed in the hands of a child, it is tempting to blame their unraveling on intemperate love rather than actual malice. Details of their courtship read like those of precocious goth teenagers: He gave her a heart-shaped box full of dolls that looked like dead children; they exchanged love letters characterized by mutual devotion that would read as saccharine if you cut out all the allusions to death. In Montage of Heck, there is a sequence showing the two clearly strung out, playing with children’s toys in their filthy apartment and exchanging loving non sequiturs. “Why do you think that everyone thinks that you’re the good one and I’m the bad one,” Courtney wonders aloud. “Because I know how to use my illusion,” Kurt replies, a clever play on Use Your Illusion, the album title of Kurt’s chosen nemesis, Guns N’ Roses front man Axl Rose. He says this with clarity, but it is ultimately without meaning. It is a turn of phrase that seems like it was pulled from some more ancient, prescient literary source but is every bit a piece of 1990s hollowness imbued with more profundity than it holds.
Later in the film, Kurt appears wearing what looks like some combination of a prom dress and a communion dress, a black rectangle taped over his lip slightly longer than a Hitler mustache. As Courtney reads an angry letter written to Sassy magazine by an irate reader calling herself “Stacy, the Kurt Slave,” Kurt moves his mouth to keep rhythm with Courtney’s reading, miming the outrage of the reader and gleefully
submitting to being a literal puppet for Courtney. The performance is meant as a mockery of Stacy, who is incensed that the magazine printed a feature about both of them rather than just about Kurt, but the humiliation is entirely Kurt’s here. The gag is at once mean-spirited toward the teen girl at which it is directed and humiliating to Kurt himself as he performs it.
Kurt’s behavior during their relationship is a study in surrendering control of one’s identity. Concert footage in Montage of Heck shows Kurt standing onstage in front of thousands and lamenting that Courtney thinks people hate her. He then commands them to shout, “Courtney, we love you.” The crowd obeys him without hesitation, submitting to the disgrace of professing love for a woman they believed to be destroying him. Kurt writes in a note to Courtney, “Fuck of all fucks, let me live forever with you.” He not only exalts her, he seeks permission to take his own breath. “I love you more than my mother. I would abort Christ for you. I’ll make myself miserable to make you happy,” he writes in another letter. But mere submission to her brutality would not do; Courtney required his commitment to an all-out war on God. And he certainly made good on the promise.