Retro Video of the Week: "Violet" by Hole

Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of the release of Hole's second studio album, Live Through This.  Of course, Hole's lead singer is/was Courtney Love, who was married to Kurt Cobain, who shot himself in the head with a shotgun a week earlier (and whose body was found only four days before Live Through This was released).  Presumably, these were not the circumstances under which Love and her band wanted to release the album.

I remember thinking around this time how much of a mess Love was, or at least appeared to be.  But who wouldn't be?  She had just lost her husband -- who was already lionized as Gen X's version of John Lennon -- to a horrific suicide.  She had a 20-month-old daughter that she now needed to raise alone, while also trying to maintain a band that had released their breakthrough album.  Then Hole's bassist, Kristen Pfaff, died of a heroin overdose two months later, on June 16, 1994, right before Hole was supposed to go on tour to support the album.  And to top it all off, there were false rumors swirling around that Cobain ghostwrote Live Through This.

Regardless, Live Through This is a fantastic grunge album.  It's a great combination of angst, punk, and hooks, which is basically how I would sum up grunge.  The album only reached #52 on the Billboard album chart (which was a little surprising to me), but it eventually went platinum in the U.S.  Four singles were released from the album, and three had videos that were pretty prominently featured on MTV:  "Miss World," "Doll Parts," and "Violet."

I've always liked "Violet" the best because it's just a brutal, angst-ridden hard rocker.  The song was inspired by Love's brief, but apparently not so great, relationship with Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins.  And I just learned recently that my favorite bar in Chicago, Delilah's, was the site of where Love and Cobain allegedly started dating after a show Nirvana played at the Metro in October 1991.  Before it was Delilah's, it was Crash Palace, and legend has it that Love was in town to visit Corgan, but walked in on him with another woman, so she and some others went to Crash Palace, and she plotted her plan to court Cobain.  After the show (which Love attended), Nirvana came to Crash Palace, where she and Cobain hit it off (though they had met previously), and then went to another legendary Chicago late-night bar, the now defunct Marie's Riptide Lounge.  And the rest is history.