Hole – Nobody’s Daughter (2010) [Mercury] // Grade: B-
Hole is back, but it’s all a technicality. Eric Erlandson isn’t back. Melissa auf der Mauer isn’t back. Samantha or Patty either—it’s just Courtney and some kids. And Courtney, for better or worse, never really left. Maybe her relevance is little more than forced limelight—maybe she’s less musician than historical signifier and/or media-instigating basketcase—but Courtney Love has consistently stayed on at least the periphery of our awareness. Hole is Courtney is Hole; that line’s been so blurred over the past 19 years, no one can blame Erlandson for being a little pissed that so many people figured it was all about her in the first place.
Of course, Erlandson’s really pissed that she took the name sans blessing, even when a long-standing contract allegedly precluded her from doing so, but that’s kind of moot. She did it. It’s controversial. Shocker. The question now is whether Nobody’s Daughter sounds like Hole, feels like Hole, breathes like Hole—and if it does, is it as good as Live Through This? Because that’s what we’re after, isn’t it, and have been since 1994; whatever dirt-raw thing the band tunneled then and has only resurrected in flashes. And the answer, from where I’m standing, is a resounding I have no effing idea.
See, it’s difficult for me to evaluate a new Hole record. I don’t even know that Grown Up Me would like Live Through This if I discovered it now, personal context considered. That album was so much my beginning; not the first music to rattle my 13-year-old life, but the first to do it so irreversibly. Because I grew up in small-town Ohio—where girl-freaks were marked by how often they wore black skirts and music recommendations came by way of alterna-boys you met on family vacations—Live Through This got to me before Pussy Whipped. Before Surfer Rosa. Before Sister or even Goo. And though I listen to it less frequently now than I do those other albums, I recall it with the most fondness, with an almost tasteable sense of place.
But I also recall it with fresh, unmuddied eyes; I sing along to “Jennifer’s Body” and “Gutless” because it’s a 16-year habit, like nail biting or smoking Camel Lights. I fucking adore it—the provocation, the broken-doll imagery, every bit of Courtney’s annihilated beauty queen—but I didn’t adore anything after. And I know now, listening to Nobody’s Daughter, that tracks like “Skinny Little Bitch” sound more like L7 than anything and Courtney’s mid-album sob stories get their information from Echo and the Bunnymen and PJ Harvey as much as they do “Doll Parts”. I can hear every ounce of production sheen, every Billy Corgan-influenced melody, because I know to look for them; back then, we weren’t looking. We were just waiting for something to give chase to whatever bullshit our teenage bodies were saddled with that day.
And Nobody’s Daughter isn’t bad. It is, in fact, the most gutteral thing Courtney’s done since the mid-90s, even if the vocals are a little shiny perfect and the slow jams beg for an auf der Mauer harmony or some freaked-out counterpoint. Both Michael Beinhorn’s and Linda Perry’s fingerprints are all over it—compare the hooks and production to both Celebrity Skin and P!nk and see what you get—but it’s catchy and suitably honest. Subdued in the way one tries to subdue a panic attack, you know: Grown Up (ish) Courtney writing songs for the new era of disenfranchised Us. Will I listen to it again? Maybe, though I’ll never hear a song like “Loser Dust”, however great, with the unsullied wonder I did “Babydoll”. But does that mean it won’t give voice to some young, modern teen sick to shit of her mom and dad and town, of Teen Vogue and Taylor Lautner and Miley fucking Cyrus? It definitely stands more of a chance than Celebrity Skin or America’s Sweetheart. And I sort of hope it will.
