Hole- Violet/He Hit Me… (Saturday Night Live 1994)
I had been looking for this video on Youtube to show my sister, and couldn’t find it, probably due to how SNL flags any of their content on youtube, but luckily I remembered I had downloaded it years ago and found it hidden on my external hard drive.
This is a thunderous performance of Violet, and one of the things that’s so striking about it is how none of the anger in it feels artificial or put-on. This isn’t Courtney going through the motions and playing her big hit because it keeps the crowd happy, there’s real rage and fire behind it that’s just burning her up. That moment :30 in when Courtney swings her guitar behind her and throws her leg up on the amp is perfect. This video also made me miss Melissa Auf Der Mar too. Don’t get me wrong, I love the new guys, but there’s something special about seeing Melissa throwing her body around as she plays bass and provides back-up vocals that isn’t there anymore.
The other special thing about this video is the small bit of He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss) at the end. After the fury of the previous 2:45, Courtney shows some vulnerability to the audience, with a pained but powerful vocal and alternating between staring directly out in wide-eyed defiance and keeping her eyes tightly shut to the world. This thirty second snippet of the song, for me at least, expresses much more than Hole’s full cover of the song and works as a perfect coda to Violet.
Jesus fuck. “One above and two below.” Good lord.
There’s a lot we could say about this, even without getting into biography. Autobiography, though, is a different story. For instance, I could talk about Matthew’s distinction between 90s indie as emotionally reserved and cerebral and 00s indie as emotionally open and visceral. For me, this sorta explains why I didn’t listen to a lot of indie in the 90s. I was into “alt” acts, sure, but they were all major-label, and the acts I was into most were things like Tori Amos and Blur. Tori, after all, is the woman who once covered “Raining Blood” under the assumption that it was about a vagina raining blood on Afghanistan, so this is not really subtle, emotionally reserved stuff, you know? Whereas Britpop, for me as an American teenager, was appealing because it didn’t need to worry about American authenticity, and so could play with theatricality and archness in a way I found appealing. It was cerebral but not reserved, putting its social commentary out there blatantly and then kind of swanning around it. Tori would have taken the opposite approach, hiding the social commentary with her body as she tried to gnaw it to death. But indie wanted to turn its back on the social commentary and pretend it wasn’t there. That never really interested me, and still doesn’t, I guess, since I’m still not the biggest Pavement fan, either.
But if I learned anything from 00s indie, it’s that I liked when those impulses I was drawn to were leavened by a more cerebral mood in the culture surrounding them. The more sincere style of 00s indie was created in the context of a decade filled with fear and anxiety, and while I understand that, it’s not what I come to music for. When Tori - or Polly Jean Harvey, for that matter - put her emotions on the line, it was as a way of controlling them, and expressing mastery over the situation. 00s indie carried a tone much more of submission, or resignation, and since I come to music for triumph and energy, it never really hit me much. I engaged with indie much more in the 00s, but ultimately, it’s hard to tell if that’s because my tastes changed or because the music biz changed, and a lot of the acts I love might have been major-label alt bands in the 90s. I love the weird Brooklyn moment in the first half of the decade that produced electroclash and garage rock, and a lot of the more interesting bands that came out of it, but the tendencies since then have largely fallen flat for me.
What’s interesting about Hole is that they cycle between those two modes I liked in the 90s, going viceral for Live Through This but arch for Celebrity Skin. Courtney even embodies both impulses in this one performance, insistently screaming her anguish for “Violet” - whereas 00s indie’s tendency would be to mutter it, I feel like - and then turning arch with “He Hit Me.” It’s the kind of performance that leaves an audience speechless, and though that was a regular occurrence at Tori concerts, I don’t see a lot of that being pursued now. Which is fine! I’m always a bit out of step, and there’s more than enough stuff indie-wise around to keep me happy.
Anyway, all that said: please watch this video.
