(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

Courtney Love (born in San Francisco in 1965, raised in hippie communes around the world, repeatedly in trouble with the law for petty theft and evasion) formed in San Francisco, together with Kat Bjelland, the first version of the group destined to become the Babes In Toyland.

Having abandoned her friend to her fate, she formed Hole in Los Angeles (with Eric Erlandson on guitar) and quickly achieved a certain fame with the singles Retard Girl (Sympathy, 1990) and Dick Nail/ Burn Black (SubPop, 1991).

The album Pretty On The Inside (Caroline, 1991) is one of those that launched “foxcore” on a national scale. Representative of her ability to construct dramatic atmospheres are the tense psychodrama of Good Sister/ Bad Sister and the solemn requiem of the title-track. Her music offers a terrifying glimpse into moral tragedies; her explicit and brazen lyrics tackle real situations that go well beyond adolescent turmoil. Corresponding to such psychological devastation is a harsh, anti-aesthetic sound: the anthems Teenage Whore and Sassy are sung in the bored, disgusted tone of Lydia Lunch (with an additional overtone of revulsion and sarcasm), played in a sort of trance blues, at times imitating the hysterics of Kat Bjelland in Berry.
Each song gives voice to a different ego, but they are always desperate egos, and the music follows their agony by almost immediately losing, after the opening riff (for example the hard-rock pretexts of Mrs Jones and Star Belly, or the voodoobilly of Babydoll), any semblance of identity, taking refuge in a dense and confused accumulation of rock sounds for the singer’s disjointed deliriums.

After two years devoted to family life (in February 1992 she married Kurt Cobain of Nirvana), Courtney Love returned to the scene with the EP Beautiful Son (City Slang).

Hole released in 1994, a few months after Cobain’s suicide, as well as that of bassist Kristen Pfaff, Live Through This (DGC). A work perhaps a little too subservient to the Nirvana sound, it nevertheless still includes genuine examples of desperate ballads such as Violet and I Think That I Would Die, which abruptly rear up into barely melodic choruses screamed at the top of the lungs and just as abruptly collapse into tender, girlish sadness; and at least a couple of sarcastic reflections on the female world: Miss World and Doll Parts. In reality Love accomplished a linguistic and psychoanalytic miracle: transforming desperation into something extremely superficial, a matter of form rather than content. And in this way she became an irrelevant model. The fury of Rock Star, Plump and She Walks On Me sounds simply fake.

The spasmodic wait for Celebrity Skin (Geffen, 1998) is rewarded only with a timid collection of melodic songs: the new, mature and articulated Hole are a radio-pop band that retains only a pinch of the arsenic of the past. The heart of the record consists of songs, beginning with Celebrity Skin and Awful, that repeat the same scheme: a soft melodicism over a masculine beat and melodramatic riffs. The longer and more complex Reason To Be Beautiful and Use Once And Destroy perhaps stand out from the mass. Around that heart revolve the ballads: relaxed ballads that recall the Byrds more than Guns N’ Roses (Malibu), ballads that verge on the profusions of country music (Boys On The Radio), culminating (for better or worse) in a Northern Star that is half acoustic and half orchestral. But not one of these songs will endure over time, and perhaps the effervescent refrain of Heaven Tonight will bury Love’s painful stories.

In retrospect, their frenzy was the same that animated the desperate punk bands of Los Angeles, such as the Germs. “When I was a teenage whore/ my mother asked me baby what for?/ I said I feel so alone/ I wish I could die”.

Love had learned much from Bjelland, whose poses and singing style she imitated, in particular the attitude of a capricious and dissatisfied little girl (“When I get what I want/ I never want it again”), but she herself introduced a predilection for morbid fantasies and lurid themes.

My Body The Hand Grenade (City Slang, 1997) is an anthology.

Love is the quintessential “sellout” of alternative rock. At the moment when the official media tried to transform even the alternative into a marketable commodity, they found in Hole the ideal product: however much she loves wallowing in the mud, her private affairs are perfectly in line with tabloid gossip.

If after her husband’s death her shows had become legendary for her strip-teases, her off-key singing, her nervous breakdowns, her vulgar theatrics, by the end of the decade Love had “rehabilitated” herself, cured her drug addiction, and enlisted among the jet-set divas, ending up on the front pages even of fashion magazines.