Live Through This still gives me weird tingles and chills In Utero couldn’t and still can’t rival, but, to paraphrase Stephen King’s cryptic conversational refrain in those Dark Tower books, the world has moved on, and so have I. Kurt Cobain wasn’t even dead of suicide yet that spring and I was already mainlining This cassette like grade-A smack all day, everyday, on public transportation buses and en route to Hallmen performances and in my bedroom; after his body was found it seemed that solace and answers might be found there and C.Lo’s Grunge-Lite Sad-Mad-Sadtime Dramarama ground on and on in my oh-so-perishable knockoff Walkmen as one season yielded to the next and then, all of a sudden, it was time to start mailing off college applications. The fix was in, and Hole’s tragic, primal magic had faded to a dim, ghostly glow. The attentive reader will notice that I’ve yet to write a single word about “Doll Parts.” I’ve spun the song maybe five or seven times today, and an entryway into talking about it in any meaningful fashion has yet to reveal itself; I considered maybe switching to a different dynamite tune from This. “I Think That I Would Die”? “Rock Star”? “Plump”? Or maybe I could extrapolate on the liner photos or something. The truth may be that I’m burnt out on the artifacts of this particular alt-rock conflagration, on the albums and the articles and the books and the chin-stroking parsing of it all, if not on the person Courtney Love is -- or believes herself to be -- today. America’s Sweetheart was fantastically slick, trashy, and fuck-all-y’all, and I’ll be first in line to review the Billy Corgan-enabled How Dirty Girls Get Clean whenever it comes out (smart money sez it’ll show up just in time for the Democratic presidential primaries – how cosmicly appropriate). The intermittent hit parade project I’ve embarked on here is intended as a never-ending tribute to songs that’ve struck my sweet spot and left a dent; perhaps the question is whether the obsessions of 17-year old me rank with those of 30-year old me? Because when I listen to “Doll Parts” in 2007, the quiet-quiet-quiet-raging-at-the-end and the “Someday yooooooou will ache like I ache” resonate because in 1994 I truly believed that I was as worthless and miserable as Love probably really felt while in the studio recording with Eric, Patty, and Kristen. We both survived and we’re both still here, but it was pretty touch-and-go for a while there.
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