|
"Yeah, you're right. I think it's just the way it is. It's like guys from Manchester wear hoods, boys from Minneapolis wear flannel and girls from America make confrontational records. I don't think women are given the credit for good song writing. Some journalist called us contrived. He called us contrived because he thought I was lying about my autobiographical past as it stands in the songs. Look, I'm just a songwriter - what right does he have to make assumptions like that? All I want to do is take responsibility for good song writing."
Hole live in Los Angeles. Courtney says that she enjoys living in the vacuum that cocoons the city of angels. No one speaks to her, she can't drive and she claims to have no friends there.
"LA's what you make of it. You know how you can be so cynical you become innocent? It's like alchemy, where you make that quantum leap from cynicism to a new innocence. LA's like that. It's so vile, though. I lived in Hollywood Boulevard for an age just out of desperation. Everyone wanted to be a star, y'know? You actually start believing that the sperm that makes it is the sperm that deserves it. It doesn't take away from personal compassion or anything like that - well, except for personal compassion for Heavy Metal guys."
Hole defy ghettoization. Certainly, they share common ground with their female peers, but Hole are about something smarter and more challenging and spectacular and aggressive and mischievous than anyone else I can think of who is currently making music. By turns they manipulate my emotions; they gang rape my feelings; Hole make me want to take them away from all the bad things everywhere and just hold them and look after them - Hole drain me. And it's been a long time since anyone did that. It suddenly occurs to me that Courtney is like Alice, and for one fleeting moment I envisage Hole covering Jefferson Starship's "White Rabbit". But there's a psychological theory I once heard , that due to trauma early in life, some people have no control over the sensory information they receive from the outside world, and resultantly the only way they can cope with this information is by going with the flow. Basically, they create themselves according to their situation which, in effect, Alice does as she's bombarded with an increasingly bizarre (to her at least) stream of information in Wonderland and Looking Glass House. Through all her time there, though, Alice never loses sight of her intrinsic values or - more importantly - her deepest innermost innocence. But it would be churlish of me to apply this theory to either Hole as a band or Courtney as an individual (even though she is, most definitely, an individual). Perhaps it would be more accurate - and infinitely more gracious - to say that Hole defy and transcend analysis. That Hole are like all those fairy tales - y'know the real ones where Little Red Riding Hood is eaten by the wolf; that Hole have taken innocence to the extreme and the resulting gotterdammerung is actually a catharsis; indeed, maybe it's the only thing that can keep their sanity in one piece.
But maybe they're all totally sane and we're all totally insane.
But maybe it doesn't matter.
'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'
Have a nice Christmas.
__________________
RETIRED
|