Hole's Asking For It

I've given myself the task of writing about one song a week for 2024 because, well, I think it'd be fun.

Hole's Asking For It

Happy birthday, "Live Through This". (In a less cheeky note, on July 9th Courtney Love will be 60, so if I don't touch on her career again this year: I do wish you a happy birthday, Courtney.)

(Right before I published this article, I realized I missed Ian MacKaye's birthday. Damn it. What a wasted opportunity.)

Witness and behold Courtney Love, greatest female rock star of all time. She's stupid, she's abrasive, she loves controversy while disavowing it, is petulant, childish, and meandering, in Messianic abundance as John Lennon possessed. And, to add, peculiarly feminine about it too. There's something deliciously petty about "Rock Star", belonging to the album we're speaking of today, which culminated in her punching Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill in the face; in a later interview, she would say she had no recollection of 1994-1995 as a result of all of the drugs she was taking (understandable, given the trajectory of events then in her life). She once bullishly asked for a "whore from hell" for a bassist. And let's never forget that she suggested that "Heart-Shaped Box" was about her vagina; and in another interesting twist, another "Live Through This" track, "Doll Parts", is derived from the exact same incident as "Heart-Shaped Box" was.

I love Courtney Love. Forget rock wives; to me, Kurt is a rock husband. I find Courtney far more interesting and funny. When you actually dig a little into her biography, she possessed surprising tenderness (and surprising humility, as she thought she was the lesser songwriter to Kurt) in contrast to her more off-the-cuff remarks, which leads me to think only a woman could make the art she did, and, further, only Courtney could do what she did. No wonder Jann snubbed her from the Rock n' Roll Hall of Hame; he had long forgotten the power and anger behind women's milk ("Plump": "milk's in my mouth, / IT MAKES ME SICK!", "Softer, Softest": "Your milk is so sick, / your milk has a dye-ie-eyyyee, / your milk has a dick") Good. Being snubbed just makes her more powerful. And I do find her a more tolerable Lennon.

What makes "Live Through This" interesting is that it's composed of fast parts and slow parts. Compare to "In Utero", whose slow songs are just "Heart-Shaped Box" and "All Apologies", the two best songs of that album. "Miss World" begins with Courtney howling, "I am the girl you want, / can't look you in the eye, / I am the girl you know, / I lie and lie and lie." There's genuine pathos in it. Where Kurt is trying to scream himself into a human being, Courtney is actually trying to figure herself out; she's trying to assemble the doll parts back together into a person ("Doll Parts" so great a song I'm not sure why I'm not writing about that, instead). She's able to do that as a result of not giving a shit about what other people think about her anymore.

The other effect of silence and the band taking their time is that it gives Courtney menace, as in "Asking for It", the song in discussion. Eric Erlandson's strings open up to Love's "Every time that I sell myself to youuuuu / I feel a little bit cheaper than I need tooooooooooo", circling around her subject like a shark looking for blood.

Then there's the great line, full of foreboding typical of grunge: "I will tear the pe-tuls off, of youuuuu", the "off" sung with such emphasis it sounds like a hard stop and I hear "Fuck you" over "of you".

She whispers,

Was she asking for it-ehh?
Was she asking nice?
Yeah, she was asking for it-ehh?
Did she ask you twice?

The song came from an incident touring with Mudhoney. In Glasgow, she stage-dived into the crowd; the audience tore her dress off her body (her account), violated her, and shouted obscenities in her ear, such that at the end of it she was naked. But what really surprised her was that "someone took a picture of me right when this was happening, and I had this big smile on my face like I was pretending it wasn't happening" citation.

You could probably see how this incident compares well with her life in the public eye.

She continues,

Every time that I stare into the sun:
angel dust, and my dress just comes undone,

a lovely image that belies her sense of humor in the horror of it all. Then, screaming sheer defiance:

Wild eye rot gut do me innnnn,
Do you think you can make me do it againnnnn?

which always made me think of her acting career up until that point, particularly "Straight to Hell" whose fame she hated. It also makes me think of the period of time, after "Pretty on the Inside" (1991), Madonna courted Hole for her company Maverick; Love described Madonna's interest as "kind of like Dracula's interest in his latest victim." citation It's here we note that Courtney's elongated consonants and Erlandson's guitar give the effect of a bottomless antlion pit, dragging the audience into her anger.

It's Love's mix of crooning and howling that makes this song so appealing to me. The screaming is not a reward for the audience, as it is in many songs; the screaming is catharsis, it is part of the narrative, as much as the mumbled, simmering anger is. There's no indignation, no moral righteousness; there's only that primal rage, so crucial a theme for grunge, returned from a wounded animal.

Yet despite her origin in the Seattle scene, and for all conspiracy theories that Kurt actually wrote "Live Through This", she reveals a tender-hearted sentimentality:

If you live through this with me, I swear that
I will die for you, and if you
live through this with me, I swear that
I will die for you...

reminding you the rage is not for rage's sake; it's how she copes with the reality around her, which was pretty messed up given that LA's Department of Children and Family Services removed Frances from her (maybe for good reasons, maybe not).

Not to bring up so much of her life into the song's analysis, though - sure, her life is pretty damn interesting, but the fury in it is not necessarily specific to her. It's a song seething with the ridiculous expectations the world has for her, expectations that came out of nowhere, the titular "Was she asking for it?" It is, of course, very punk, as feral and defensive as Blind Idiot God's "Freaked". Her response is to come out swinging, belied by the smirk of the line "angel dust and my dress just comes undone."

I suppose, in that sense, "Asking for It" can be an anthem of sorts, whose theme can be whittled down to, "Nah, fuck you". We should remember that, though Love asked for a "whore from hell" for a bassist, drummer Patty Schemel has remarked that she made it safe for her to come out as a lesbian, as a result of Love's fierce reputation. That's the interesting thing about female expression in music: men always feel the need to justify their anger, women do not. There's no Woody Allen-esque explanation as to why they need to flip people off, possibly because of a female instinct that there's no need for an individual to justify themself. For all of rock's posturing that it can be political and an agent of change, women often do a lot of the doing.