This article has three openings. Choose which one you like, according to taste, then read the rest.
Opening 1:
Poor Courtney Love. She’s a tragic footnote in the story of one of music’s cultural icons, the late lamented lionised Kurt Cobain. She’s a woman in a man’s world whose junkie husband ran out on her in the worst possible way, and whose life has been a struggle ever since. People like Michael Stipe and Billy Corgan reached out to her to try and keep her together with varying success as she struggled to remain true to her artistic muse in the face of the most difficult set of circumstances any female rock musician has ever faced. Still, the very fact that she’s still on this planet is a testament to her tenacity, the power of the human spirit. She’s flawed, sure, but she’s beaten the odds to even be here. This album happened against all the odds. For that she is to be commended.
Opening two;
My god, what a bitch Courtney Love is. A fucking obnoxious monster who destroys everything she touches, ruined her husband’s life and causes chaos in her wake. She’s a disaster area, a piece of human wreckage who squats on her wonderful husband’s legacy like a shit stain on the Mona Lisa. She’s an embarrassment, a modern day Nancy Spungeon who is wedded to her own pathetic drama, and her life is a cautionary tale for musicians, celebrities, and women anywhere. Her life is a mess, and thank goodness her daughter has finally been taken into care. The only surprising thing about her is that she isn’t dead right now.
Article Opening 3;
Courtney Love was actually a musician, once. the frontwoman of Hole, she was a captivating, mesmerising stage presence, a tattered angel in a torn baby-doll dress, spitting venom and sparing no-one, not even herself in the bravest act of truth-telling to come along onstage for a long, long time. She’s the woman who wrote ‘Doll Parts,’ ‘Celebrity Skin,’ ‘Miss World,’ and ‘Jennifer’s Body,’ which still sound as awesome as they ever did. She was a musician worthy of being discussed in the same sentence as PJ Harvey, Bjork, or Patti Smith, and she has been an inspiration to a series of female performers ever since.
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And now she has a new album out. Of course, it’ll be judged not just on the music, but upon which version of Courtney Love you believe in.
Let’s be honest, none of us actually know her. We know what we see, and what we read, in the press. This isn’t going to be a rant about the media, it’s merely an old philosophy student’s acknowledgement on the limits of knowledge. I don’t know what Courtney Love is really like. You don’t either. We project our picture of her across her music in a way that we do with everyone. Everyone who makes public statements is doing so with one agenda or another. She can come across as a bitch. Fair enough. I don’t pretend to know that for certain.
But what does it sound like?
It sounds like Hole. Maybe the drumming isn’t as good as Patty Schemel’s was back in the day, and Eric Erlandson isn’t on board, but let’s be fair- this band is defined by Courtney Love. It always was. There’s a bunch of other musicians on this album, but there’s no doubt whose vision is being carried out here.
And, well, it’s not bad. It’s a bit slick in places, closer to ‘Celebrity Skin’ than ‘Live Through This’ or ‘Pretty on the Inside’ in its sound, but she’s still got it. Her voice is still the powerful instrument it always was. Listen to ‘Loser Dust’- she’s yelling like she always did, shredding her throat in that way you get from no other singer since…. some guy in some Grunge Band.
Lyrically, the same themes are here- the girls who let themselves be used, the superficial lure of glamour and excess, and just how desperate those moments when you wake up alone can be. ‘so you’re lying in your underwear/in someone else’s bed/and the silence is so dangerous..so I have another cigarette/ and I try to forget’ is the same story as ‘When I wake up in my Make-up/it’s too early for an address,’ still being told.
‘Samantha,’ with her refrain of ‘people like you fuck people like me’ is another girl caught up in destructive behaviour, pitied and reviled in equal measure.
You know she’s talking about herself. You also know that the biting contempt in her voice is directed inward more harshly than anyone else ever could.
She also still rocks pretty hard: Skinny Little Bitch is one of a couple of songs on the album which seem designed to make a bunch of young folk jump up and down and bang into each other. It seems to be working, too, if this live video is anything to go buy;
She isn’t always successful; on Letter to God, she asks how on earth she got to where she is:
‘I never wanted to be the person you see… I always wanted to die but you kept me alive/can you tell me who I am?…I never wanted to be/some kind of comic relief’ It’s groaning under the weight of The Myth of Courtney Love. She’s sick of it. She wants to escape it. But here’s the rub- she seems in love with the attention it gives her. Plus it doesn’t have much of a tune.
Long Ride Home, the last song on the album, is just her and a guitar. I may be nuts but it sounds like Bob Dylan, I swear it. And strangely, the comparison’s apt- the two are both so completely in thrall to their own mythology that no sound they make, no word they speak is judged in and of itself. Dylan, you could argue, is more in control of that, but Courtney isn’t going down without a fight.
‘It’s a long ride home and my head is bowed/and you’re no comfort to me now/and it’s fully loaded/and it’s set on stun/at least I know that I have won/and my wig’s on crooked/and I got no shoes…I don’t care what it takes my friend/I will never go hungry again.’
This is the song that seems to be most directly about her. She knows how fucked she is, and she knows it’s a long way back up from where she’s been. It’s a fitting final statement of who she is, and where she is. Maybe she’s a little wedded to her own mythology, but this is her story, it’s who she is. She can’t let it go, she doesn’t dare. It’s all fucked up, but she’ll find a way to go on.