When Courtney Love spoke at the Digital Hollywood Conference last month in New York, she promised to provide more content for fans via her band's Web site www.holemusic.com than former label Geffen ever could. And Hole has delivered.

The site now offers over fifty MP3 downloads of tracks as recent as the band's cover of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now Baby Blue," which appeared on the soundtrack for the film The Crow, to early tracks like "Teenage Whore" from the band's first record Pretty On the Inside. The selection is also sprinkled with covers including the Lemonheads' "Into Your Arms", Guns N' Roses' "Paradise City" and Nirvana's "Pennyroyal Tea." But the rarest of the tracks features Kurt Cobain singing along with Love on the bridge to "Asking For It" from the band's major label debut and breakthrough album Live Through This. Cobain's vocal is slightly out of time with Love's on the lyric "If you live through this with me, I swear that I would die for you" before repeating the line "live through this" solo.

In addition to downloads, the site's message boards also offer a forum for fans to trade bootlegs as well as learn how to play Hole songs, read lyrics and discuss all things Hole related. The variety of content reaffirms Love's decision to go the DIY route she had abandoned back in the band's early years, she freely admitted during her speech at Digital Hollywood. "I'm lazy," she said. "I never had the time for it. I wanted to get more famous than that. I was shallower and sometimes, I hate myself for it."

CHRISTINA SARACENO
(June 29, 2000)