
Released a week after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, rumors started immediately that it was Cobain, not his wife, Courtney Love, who wrote the majority of these churningly catchy songs. Forget that there’s no proof, that their marriage was collaborative and that it’s a nasty thing to say, “Live Through This” is clearly a woman’s work. It’s about exploitation, which explains Love’s amp curdling anger on “Jennifer’s Body” and “Plump,” but it’s also funny, self-aware (“I fake it so real I am beyond fake”) and far more swaggerning than any album any grunge man ever came up with. When Love sings, “I went to school in Olympia/ Where everyone’s the same,” it’s obvious she thinks she’s not, and that she’s right.