Entries tagged with live through this

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"‘We never really doubled Courtney’s vocals,’ says [Sean] Slade. 'I found that, if we tried to double Courtney’s vocals, it took the emotion away, it took the fierceness of it away.’ Slade remembers a squabble that occurred with Geffen executives during the album’s mixing, over a moment in 'Doll Parts’ where Courtney’s voice cracks. The suits wanted it removed, but the producers stood their ground. 'Some people are so square and bourgeois,’ he laughs. 'They think, “Oh she missed a note, that’s bad singing.” Courtney exists beyond all criteria of good and bad singing.’"

— Anwen Crawford, Live Through This, 33 1/3 (2014)

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"Elegance is an attribute of the genuinely wealthy and powerful, while the glamour of the beauty queen is of a kind that, as Rhian E Jones describes, ‘has become identified as either “vulgar” appropriation or defiant class drag, in both cases serving to emphasize rather than disguise the class of the wearer.’"

— Anwen Crawford, Live Through This, 33 1/3 (2014)

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"A line like I am doll parts could hardly fail to resonate with teenage girls – the question is why teenage girls are so casually devalued as artists, and as audience? We applaud young men and their various coming-of-age chronicles, but we presume that girls – and the artists who speak to them – have nothing to tell us."

— Anwen Crawford, Live Through This, 33 1/3 (2014)

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"Violet (or mauve, or mauveine, or aniline purple) was the first colour to be produced as a chemical dye, in 1856, by William Perkins, who was then an 18-year-old trying to synthesise quinine for the treatment of malaria. Instead, he hit upon industrial dye-making and made a great deal of money from violet-coloured clothes sold to women who couldn’t afford purple, a dye created from sea lichens. Purple the colour of emperors and bishops. Violet the colour of suffragettes and queers."

— Anwen Crawford, Live Through This, 33 1/3 (2014)

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All the grossness of female embodiment: Live Through This

I guess I’d always interpreted most of the lyrics about being sick as being about drugs, and a lot of the gross eating as being about gross oral sex.

Though now that I’m pregnant and sick as a dog, I’m wondering about, “They say I’m plump, but I throw up all the time.”

Because I’m old, the album came out when I was 20, during that period when I was steeping myself in every book or song I could find about drugs, particularly opiates, in a none too subtle foreshadowing of my starting to shoot dope. And, Live Through This was constantly on MTV, back when MTV played rock videos. So I was scouring it for any reference or double entendre about drugs. Which I’m sure has skewed and limited my readings of the album. Because, of course bulimia is in there, and pregnancy, and as Caty says, all the grossest parts of being female.

For me, Gutless was about the terror of sex, particularly among injection drug users, before HAART. But, again, I’m probably dating myself there.

It’s also an album that I abandoned for a few years because apparently every guy I knew in San Francisco hated Courtney Love and had some story about her, about skanky sex or her stealing his Doc Martins or about her trying to cop from him, even though he obviously did speed instead of heroin. And I didn’t want to fight about it. So it’s an album I love listening to now, even if my husband is kind of sick of it.