Until they were parted by a shotgun blast, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were almost too perfect a match: sneering, ironic, bleached, tattered, raging. Walking around with their apple-faced baby Frances, they were like the Sid and Nancy of the 90s—but new and improved, with 300% more musical talent and maybe 50% more of their shit together.

Though Cobain’s trio was the one that would define the decade and ultimately become one of the most acclaimed bands in rock history, Love was no slouch: her band Hole were one of the best and fiercest outfits of the early 90s. Live Through This, their second album and first major-label release, appeared in stores just four days after Cobain’s 1994 suicide; the ensuing tour was pretty much what anyone would have guessed, with Love imploding in tears and rage as she dodged shotgun shells thrown by Nirvana fans who believed that the suicide story was a ruse, that Love had in fact killed Cobain herself.

Live Through This was immediately recognized as a great album, and it was a commercial hit. When I started as a DJ at the Boston University student radio station in 1994, “Doll Parts” was one of the songs on rotation, and I played it almost every week in my early morning slot. I’d sit there alone in the basement of the Myles Standish Hall annex, eating pastries stolen from the dining hall delivery tray and wondering if anyone out there was listening to Love’s wailing. (Almost certainly not, at least not via the microwatt signal of WTBU.)

The album still sounds great, an angry but accessible collection of meditations on sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a feminist classic that’s “Precious” (a la the Pretenders) rather than precious, not letting up from the furious strumming of “Violet” through the smashing crescendo of “Olympia” (called “Rock Star” on the album due to a last-minute change in the track lineup).

After the requisite stormy breakup, Love reformed Hole in 2009—though without the involvement of, and under protests by, Eric Erlandson, the guitarist who cofounded the group and cowrote Live Through This with Love. The ensuing release, Nobody’s Daughter, earned reviews of the sort tactfully described as “mixed.” Though the live shows promoting the album were generally well-received, the tweets I followed during the band’s Minneapolis gig on that tour suggested that people were there to gawk as much as to listen.

Has Courtney Love become a joke? If so, it’s one that she refuses to get in on. It’s hard to know whether Cobain would be appalled or proud.

– Jay Gabler

The 1990s Project is my attempt to give the decade’s music a fair shot at disproving my offhand assessment that the 90s were the armpit of modern musical history. My goal is to visit, or revisit, 100 of the decade’s most acclaimed, popular, and/or interesting albums. Here’s the road map.