In her column “Made a Mixtape, Hope You Like It,” Amanda Altarejos ’26 curates a “mixtape” of modern music for older artists. Listen here for a playlist “for miss world.”
No one is listening.
Courtney Love, the lead vocalist of the 90s alternative rock band, Hole, sings it in “Miss World” — “no one is listening.”
So please — be quiet enough to let Love’s shrieks and screams and dizzying roughness ring and ring and ring in your ear, for however long it takes you to feel her ache and hear her nails raking against the skin of her scalp.
But I’d want Love to listen, too. To others that sing of the same frustration, the same fire of what it means to be a girl. Below are songs that I think would let Love know that it is perfectly acceptable to be triumphant in the woman that she is — the women that we all are.
1. “all-american bitch” by Olivia Rodrigo
Love would love it — the deep purple hues of the album cover, Rodrigo’s angsty portrait — she would love all of it. The scraping, saccharine legacy of female punk rock lives on through Rodrigo’s second album, “GUTS.” Love’s “Miss World” is apologetic and abrasive, and this perfect “all-american bitch” is exactly that — maybe just a little bit sweeter. But as the song ends, Rodrigo’s postured pissed-offness brings consolation to us girls everywhere.
2. “A Mistake” by Fiona Apple
Hole’s “Live Through This” is an album that lets girls live through it. Love’s singing is brutish and beautiful, just like the female voices (characters) that she speaks with. Desire and hatred for good and bad, everything and nothing, simmer in the heat of her lyrics and the fire of the woman speaking. Fiona Apple’s “A Mistake” is sung by that kind of woman: she wants to mess things up and revel in it.
3. “Men Explain Things to Me” by Tacocat
A DIY-esque pop-punk rock band from Seattle, Tacocat developed out of a shared love for the Riot grrrl scene. Love prods her listeners provocatively. It is sometimes feminist, sometimes not. In “Asking For It,” Love seems to be holding a man down by the throat, with her eyes and words and endless interrogation. Tacocat’s “Men Explain Things to Me” takes Love’s questions and turns them into cheekier demands.
4. “Can You Deal?” by Bleached
The guitarist sings too. Terribly fantastic sounds of the stringed instrument do not just belong to icon Kurt Cobain, lead vocalist and guitarist of grunge band Nirvana. Love takes it for herself, too, and it provides a cathartic release to listeners that resonate with her fiery passion. Not only does Bleached’s “Can You Deal” offer that classic 90s release through a fast-paced melody that pushes and shoves, but it rightfully affirms the kind of woman that Love is — a (cool) girl in a band, a (cool) girl that listens to Sabbath. Can you deal with that?
5. “Ptoleomea” by Ethel Cain
In Canadian poet Anne Carson’s essay, “The Gender of Sound,” she discusses the rhetoric of female sound. Namely, she picks apart the male conception of female sound as “abhorrent,” turning to Ernest Hemingway’s dislike of Gertrude Stein’s voice and other literary examples of the woman’s voice as one of “madness, witchery and bestiality” that needs to be controlled. Both Love and Ethel Cain bite at this control as they embrace allegedly abhorrent sound. “Ptoleomea transforms Love’s feeling” — palpable in her grating voice and furious screams — into a religious experience.
6. “Bus Ticket” by Cayetana
Hole’s punk-rock background would lend to an appreciation of the DIY music scene that Philadelphia-based Cayetana developed from. Like Hole’s “Plump,” “Bus Ticket” is narrated by a poised but guttural voice that seems to be poking fun at someone that has hurt them. Unapologetic once again, this voice echoes the sentiment Love pushes in our faces throughout all of “Live Through This” — she is this girl. This is who she is, and she will never be sorry about it.
7. “Girls like Us” by The Julie Ruin
Do not let the 80s synth and nasal monologue disturb you – let it bring you comfort. The big feelings that Love sings about can be isolating; I feel this, Love feels that, you feel another. We may all sound different, but there are, as sung by ex-Bikini Kill lead singer in her experimental band, The Julie Ruin, girls like us. Be that girl! Be any girl you want.
Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.