HOLE
When she brings baby Frances Bean onstage (she didn’t in Chicago) or includes heartbreaking references to her late husband in the video for “Doll Parts,” she’s using them to get attention. Or is she? Her anger toward Cobain is startling. She refers to him as an asshole, screams at him for leaving her, changes the words in her songs about him to the past tense. When some fans at the Chicago show handed her a poster to autograph after the show, she unrolled it and shouted, “Don’t give me your fucking Nirvana poster to sign! Fuck you!” Why can’t she make up her mind? Does she want to play the grieving widow or the sex-starved goddess in a merry widow?
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For the show’s grand finale, Love made a swan dive into the pit, emerging with her clothes in shreds and hunks of her hair plucked out as souvenirs. Afterward, even this was something to debate. While Eddie Vedder, Blind Melon’s Shannon Hoon, and other male rockers do it (and also lose clothes and hair), it’s apparently improper for a woman. Love says she wrote “Asking for It” about a mosh-pit experience she had during an earlier tour, when–in the course of trying to do what she’d seen the men doing–she had her clothes torn off, her breasts twisted, and fingers “poked inside me.” As with rape victims, whether Love was wearing a nightie or a suit of armor seems irrelevant; it would have been removed regardless. But Love usually finds herself in no-win situations. If she had stayed locked in her mansion after Cobain’s funeral, it would have been said that she was strung out. When she came out and went on tour, it was too soon, disrespectful. If she carries Cobain’s ashes in a teddy bear, she’s weird, sick. If she sticks them in a box at home, she’s cold, she’s already forgotten him. If she brings Frances onstage she’s exploiting her. If she leaves her at the hotel she’s ignoring her.
