Who's Afraid of Courtney Love?

Cracked and dirty glasses are always welcomed at the banquet of rock and roll. The outcasts, the punks, the misunderstood heroes traumatized by the world - all find a seat at the table, revered for what they've brought forward. A view of a different world, a tarnished painting in a world so keen on adding a glossy topcoat. Everyone is welcome. Everyone except Courtney Love, that is. 

The name is bound to cause a reaction even just being read. Me seeming to mention her in a positive light is bound to send shivers down spines. To be upfront now, I do not like Courntey Love as a person. I do, however, love Courtney Love as an artist. Oftentimes that’s forgotten about her. She’s just this evil mock-up of a person that’s painted in the corner of 90s rock, a shadow in a genre she is one of the pioneers of. It scares people to think she can have anything of worth to say, that her personality could draw upon a rich backstory that connects to the pitfalls of womanhood and provides an outlet for the unbridled female rage that is often disregarded and written off. 

Courtney photographed by Kevin Cummins in 1993

It’s scary to see the defining image of a female rock star in the flesh. A babydoll dress paired

with smudged eyeliner, and scrapes adorning her knees from a scuffle backstage. She’s rude, she’s an addict, she’s self-centered, she can’t sing, and her lyrics mean nothing to so many. We don’t want to see a woman like that. There is a fascinating line Roger Ebert wrote when reviewing Taxi Driver, it’s a line that can never seem to leave my mind, reading “Scorsese wanted to look away from Travis’s rejection; we almost want to look away from his life. But he’s there, all right, and he’s suffering.” It flashes through my mind whenever greeted with a less than pleasurable idea brought through rock music. Often times these stories are disgusting, the people who take part even worse. The art they create still tells a story, or offers up a fact of this life so many tend to hide away.  It’s a fact of the genre that not many of it’s heroes are good. They don’t have to be. They only have to be once they’re a woman. 

Courtney writes about the world as someone who was jaded by it from a young age. By thirty she already felt the wrath of the world, became a widow, and still had to keep trekking forward. It’s not for the weak. Courtney Love is not for the weak. The same people who upheld the jaded nature and unflinching honesty of her husband were the same who complained she was too much. Courtney is no different than any other rockstar in the sense she had a horrible upbringing, a life marked by tragedy in the spotlight, and was a punching bag via the media for far too long, disregarded for her work and cared too much about her unsavory personal life. If she wasn't a woman no one would care how close she got to Nirvana at their creative peak, she would never be accused of not writing her own music, she would never be accused of being too much. She would be seen as the badass rock star that every degenate man is. The unfortunate fact of the matter is Courtney Love is a victim of misogyny. If her work was about the a more universal experience, if she wasn’t a woman who wasn’t afraid of controversy, then we would never question her talents. 

When she writes of fellow women in the scene by saying We look the same, we talk the same / We even fuck the same - she is sharing the male-domianted opinion that all women are the same, talking of them not as people but objects. It was uncomfortable to hear a woman tear others down, even if that’s what most were doing under their breath to one another. Suddenly, you have a woman speaking your worst thoughts into existence, tearing down others to put herself upon a pedestal. Even if that had been done countless times through faux media battles through the decades that the press and culture ate up for each and every false jab, the difference came because we all knew Courtney wasn't kidding. We love to watch people fight but once the punches get too close we avert our eyes. It’s what makes Hole so uncomfortable and primal, what makes it feel so wrong to listen to the noise that radiates through each song and the feelings through each pained screech. Rock and Roll was always commercial, but Hole wasn’t even applicable for that. Not with our favorite fucked-up frontwoman, that is. Rock and Roll is meant to feel wrong and rebellious, but it feels like that can’t extend to a the woman of the genre. They are meant to be perfect, held to standards no one could adhere to - just as women in day to day life. Nothing is good enough. Nothing is right. To compete in a man’s world you must to it backwards and in heels, not skipping a beat. 

"It took a special kind of guts to be a fuck up as a woman, I thought. To say to hell with being the nice girl, the responsible one, the one who makes sure the man takes care of himself and earts properly and doesn't take too many drugs. To be just as nihilistic and self-destructive as a man, knowing all along that you'll get crucified for it, because somehow, the world will make everything your fault. He'll be a martyr, and you'll be a succubus. He'll be a genius and you'll be a groupie. He'll be a hero, and you'll...deserve to die." - Courtney Love, 1997

I find Courtney Love to be one of the best songwriters of her generation. Her pen seems to drip with the blood of her own flesh, each song seems to have been ripped from her in a haunting yet beautiful, honest way. In Doll Parts, she compares her lust to being a child's doll. To the object of her affection she is nothing more than a toy, breaking herself into pieces while pleading to be wanted and loved. She writes of what she feels in the way that makes one uncomfortable to hear, her discomfort with her own feelings translating into words for the rest of the world to be right in her broken-buckled mary-janes. I want to be the girl with the most cake - I love him so much it just turns to hate. The use of cake in place of the man she is infatuated with leads one to ponder the image of getting everything you wanted till it makes your stomach ache in pain. Her writing is simple, but the images she paints and the unpolished nature of her voice communicate a sort of suffering that could never be described any other way. This is one example. One of countless on Live Through This alone. 

On Miss World she screams the chorus, I’m Miss World, watch me break and watch me burn / No one is listening, my friends, I’ve made my bed and I’ll lie in it - speaking about the unfortunate reality of being a woman in the public eye, what she deals with for her success. Plump is her anger at being accused of being a poor mother before ever giving birth, Shakes like a death rattle, spittle on his bib / I don’t do dishes just throw them in the crib. Asking for It tackles rape culture and sexual assault, Gutless talks of growing up as a woman and realizing the world is not a safe place. Courtney writes to the female experience. It’s not something everyone can relate to, but how little is actually geared towards women in the rock music sphere? How much music, before Hole, spoke to the rage that builds up within a woman as she goes through an increasingly worse and worse world? She speaks to a certain anger that so few could distill into the perfect mixture of genuine frustration and sarcasm-laden remarks. Her writing is singular, you could never confuse her lyric or sound for anyone else. There's a belief that the writing on Live Through This was so good that she didn't actually write it. That it was Kurt Cobain that wrote the lyrics and that is why the album was so good. There's so much wrong with that line of thinking (be that Cobain wrote in a completely different style than Love, or that the root of the rumor is based in the idea a woman could do nothing of worth without the accusation a man did it for her) but think about why it's so hard for men specifically to give this album and it's writer her flowers: the album calls upon a distinctly female experiences from a distinctly female voice. Even if most can't relate word for word to the lyrics at hand, Hole was a techincally great band to listen to. They were hard, noise for the sake of noise. I would even venture to argue they were harder than most of the male-lead bands in the grunge scene at the height of their fame. But people never quite got far enough into the songs to know.

Why do you hate Courtney Love?

You tell me you hate her racist outbursts, and turn around to tell me how great Eric Clapton is. You hate her for being lewd, but tell me again about how much you really listen to rock music. She can’t sing, and I know Mick Jagger is a canary. Too much violence against audience members and other artists, but Guns ‘n’ Roses is an impeccable band. She was an absent, addict mother, and John Lennon was winning father of the year. 

To be fair, I hate Courtney Love for all those things. I hate all those men for the same reasons. I still think she’s one of the best lyricists of her time, that Live Through This is one of the greatest albums of the 1990s, and that she is an important figure in the pantheon of rock and roll. I respect the artist within the person even if I don’t like the person. This seems to be the hard part for most people - the idea Courtney Love could say anything of worth in her music because her antics overshadow so much of her artistry. It never overshadows men like that. Eric Clapton is still considered one of the greatest guitar players of all time despite a well-documented history of racism and sexual assault, Axl Rose still sells out stadiums with whatever hired guns he’s calling Guns ‘n’ Roses, and John Lennon is still considered one of the cultural figureheads of his time because their outbursts don’t affect the way people engage their work. Only with Hole, it seems. 

No one actually cares about her parenting. No one cares about her racism. No one cares about her misogyny. No one cares about her violence. No one cares about her addiction issues. No one cares about her lack of technical proficiency. No one cares that she threw a compact at Madonna in 1995 because the same people were calling Madonna a slut just three years before. 

You don’t care about what makes Courtney Love a bad person. You care what makes Courtney Love a bad woman. 

People are much too used to women being perfect in the public eye. Courtney took a hammer to that mirror and arranged the pieces back to show how stupid the premise was. Women aren’t perfect. Women have the capacity to be destructive, horrible, ill-mannered people. I can say she has one of the most important and consistent great outputs of music in rock and roll and say she’s one of the worst fucking people to ever get famous. But that admission that she has created great and meaningful art, while it can’t be divorced from her, can be talked of without being misconstrued for me co-signing each and every horrible thing she’s ever done. 

I love Courtney Love the artist. More people should. We just can’t get past the fact she’s a fucked up and horrible woman.

---

My favorite Hole performance - 1995 MTV Unplugged. Showcases Courtney's amazing songwriting, as well as some stellar arrangments of classic songs in her style.