Violet, the opening track on Hole\u2019s 1994 album Live Through This, is a burning declaration of intense feminist rage.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a song that\u2019s capable of sending shivers down any listener\u2019s spine, especially when the band\u2019s leader, Courtney Love, starts screaming during its heavily overdriven chorus sections: \u201cGo on, take everything, take everything, I want you to.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is also a song with a complicated backstory. Not only do the lyrics in Violet refer to Love\u2019s past relationship with Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins<\/a>, but the Live Through This album was released just one week after the suicide of Love\u2019s husband Kurt Cobain<\/a>.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Violet was written by Love with Hole\u2019s other guitarist Eric Erlandson three years before the album\u2019s release, in 1991.<\/p>\n This was the year when rock music was shaken by the biggest revolution since punk, as grunge bands from Seattle had huge hit albums \u2013 Nirvana<\/a> with Nevermind, Pearl Jam<\/a> with Ten and Soundgarden<\/a> with Badmotorfinger.<\/p>\n Hole\u2019s first recording of Violet was in November 1991 at London\u2019s Maida Vale Studios as part of a radio session with BBC DJ John Peel.<\/p>\n The album version was committed to tape during the sessions at Triclops Studios in Atlanta nearly two years later.<\/p>\n The album\u2019s producers Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade were hired because Love was a fan of their work on Radiohead<\/a>\u2019s 1993 debut Pablo Honey.<\/p>\n Violet begins with an E major chord played around the seventh fret with the root on the A-string, the major third on the sixth fret of the D-string and the perfect fifth played on the fourth fret of the G-string.<\/p>\n The same fingering is then moved down to the third fret for a C major chord and then up to the lower strings for a G major chord.<\/p>\n The B and high E strings are often kept ringing to add some ambience, and this riff is doubled by another guitar playing A-shaped versions of the same chords, with the high E barred by the first finger.<\/p>\n Like many songs of its era, Violet follows a quiet verse\/loud chorus dynamic, where the sweeter moments are offset by screaming guitars and pounding drums. The pre-chorus is built from power chords, starting with E5, then F5 and finally G5 and the chorus follows an E5, C5, D5, A5.<\/p>\n There is little record of what guitars were used during the sessions, though in the music video for Violet, Love can be seen playing her vintage green Mercury guitar, which was often used on stage at this point in her career.<\/p>\n Mercury owners Tim George and Danny Babbitt, based in Atlanta, took inspiration from smaller Rickenbacker guitars and created their own string-through-body design.<\/p>\n They had also made an instrument for Nirvana guitarist Pat Smear and had been given approval to build a guitar for Cobain, but sadly the Nirvana frontman took his own life before they could get to work.<\/p>\n Around this time, Love was also known to use an Electro-Harmonix<\/a> Big Muff Pi fuzz and a Boss<\/a> DS-1 distortion.<\/p>\n Love told Guitar World in 1999: \u201cI contend that I was the first person to actually have a Super Fuzz Big Muff, before the rest of the boys. It was when I was in this purist \u201960s garage band called the Venerays, with Kat Bjelland.\u201d<\/p>\n Bjelland went on to lead alternative rock band Babes in Toyland.<\/p>\n Love also told Guitar World about a new pedal in her collection called the Mystic Blue. \u201cI like a good box,\u201d she revealed, especially the ones with a good-sounding or \u201csome kind of girly\u201d name, while joking that \u201cif they made one called Cherry Apple Blossom, I\u2019d run with it every night\u201d.<\/p>\n The lyrics in Violet have attracted much scrutiny and controversy over the years.<\/p>\n Love stated that the song had been partially influenced by poems by Alexander Pope, specifically The Dunciad, and Emily Bront\u00eb.<\/p>\n There is also an element of self-reflection within these lyrics, which she described as \u201cbeing caught between two boys \u2013 representing the angel and devil within me, as well as my own nature\u201d.<\/p>\n In 1995, when Hole performed Violet on Later\u2026 With Jools Holland, Love said by way of an introduction: \u201cThis is a song about a jerk, I hexed him, now he\u2019s losing his hair.\u201d<\/p>\n Given that she had dated Billy Corgan at the beginning of the decade \u2013 a musician who had gone from having long flowing locks to completely hairless around the same time in the mid-\u201990s \u2013 it was widely speculated that lyrics such as \u201cwhen they get what they want, and they never want it again\u201d were written about him.<\/p>\n As a result it was surprising that Love and Corgan would work together on the two Hole albums that followed \u2013 1998 landmark Celebrity Skin and 2010\u2019s Nobody\u2019s Daughter \u2013 with Corgan recording bass parts on the former and co-writing several tracks on both.<\/p>\n However, in 2024 Love clarified some of her comments about Violet in quotes provided to the NME.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not just about Billy Corgan, as many might assume,\u201d she said. \u2018It\u2019s about sitting on the fire escape of his flat, sipping cheap wine and taking a Vicodin \u2013 oh, to be young! \u2013 while the Chicago sun sets, leaving behind a bejewelled amethyst sky\u201d.<\/p>\n Love also reflected on how the comments she made to Jools Holland on national television were \u201ca bit mean\u201d and indicative of her \u201cbeing bitchy beefy\u201d while joking that \u201csomeone has to uphold the standards of good faith beef\u201d.<\/p>\n Violet became a top 20 hit in the UK singles chart and Live Through This climbed all the way to No.13.<\/p>\n This was an unbelievably tough time for Courtney Love.<\/p>\n On 16 June 1994, just two months after the release of Live Through This, Hole\u2019s bassist Kristen Pfaff died of a heroin overdose. She was 27, as was Cobain.<\/p>\n In the wake of this second tragedy, Hole toured with Melissa Auf Der Maur on bass.<\/p>\n There were also rumours that Cobain had written Hole\u2019s album. Rumours that neglected the fact that Violet, for one, had been recorded before Love and Cobain were in a longterm relationship.<\/p>\n In 1998, Love replied to those rumours in the best possible way.<\/p>\n She told the NME: \u201cAll this time I have never addressed this. But here I am finally saying for the very first time that Kurt did not [write] Live Through This.<\/p>\n \u201cI mean for fuck’s sake, his skills were much better than mine at the time \u2013 the songs would have been much better.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Violet, the opening track on Hole\u2019s 1994 album Live Through This, is a burning declaration of intense feminist…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12987,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-12986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12986\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}