Hole Nobody’s Daughter

We don’t all learn not to hate ourselves, but some do.

Music tracks lives, and at its best, alters them until the worst experiences are re-livable moments, little histories devoid of the gut-wrenching hard facts.

If you’re lucky, songs remind you of your own survival, not the moment a struggle followed you from one town to another, locking itself into the wrong place and time—a sudden feeling your shirt is cut wrong in a city that lets you be.

Like the time you hitchhiked to a college town and sat, sunlit, on the curb outside Tony’s coffee shop, smelling like smoke, trying to pull your fingers through hair whipped by the drive.

“I need a haircut.”

“You’re fine.”

That was Gabe.

Maybe you grew up in a small town on the Olympic Peninsula thinking all cities were nestled between mountains and ocean, all things the color of wheat, like a square of Country Pride cut out of its crust, all people in homes waiting to come outside and yell at you—until Gabe wants to hitchhike to Bellingham and you end up at John and Nellie’s place on High Street, some kind of garage with bunk beds where they eat bagels she brings home from her job at the Bagelry and drink Odwalla John brings home from the juice factory when it was still Dharma Juice.

Nellie was napping, her lips a shade of pink you can still see. It was warm out. You wore a light blue tee shirt and jeans. The Horseshoe had a dollar minimum and a sixty-minute limit.

Any day now you were going to leave home for college and probably fail at life.

Strangers helped you get through adolescence in a small retirement town poised to ruin you: the guy who picked you and Gabe up in Coopeville and drove you through Deception Pass, for one; the Violent Femmes; Gabe, who said you smelled like Pantene and Camel Filters, who wasn’t a stranger, but with whom you shared a lot of silence. T

his was just after Kurt Cobain was found dead and Live Through This came out, and Courtney Love set your life to music for a while, teaching you things like how far one could go being bad, before it had occurred to you to embrace something like that.

When you are eighteen, and Kurt Cobain is dead, and you happen to live in Olympia, songs like “When I Was a Teenage Whore,” are like daily horoscopes asking you to stop and see your life through a new lens—not written for one of twelve kinds of people by an anonymous struggling journalist, but by a screaming psychopathic grunge queen accused of being a murderous whore. In other words, exactly the kind of woman who saves young girls on the verge the guilt of sloughing off all the dead skin of growing up girl in a small town.

If you did survive that and it even seems like that life happened to someone else, Courtney Love’s new Hole album Nobody’s Daughter should reach you.

Those who did not survive—maybe because things were fine already or because stranger love was too few and far between—are going to be harder to please. They’re going to keep reaching.

That’s what I want to say to the album’s discontented reviewers.

What are you reaching for, man? Put the pen down and make your own album. You do better.