In
a year-end wrap-up of the best and worst of the pop climate circa
2003, New York Times rock critic Neil Strauss claimed that two
months earlier, an editor had asked him to write an obituary for
Courtney Love. Love recently had been arrested for attempting
to break into ex-boyfriend Jim Barber’s mansion. On the
same October evening, she had overdosed on prescription painkiller
Oxycontin, and in the resulting legal fracas, had lost custody
of her 11-year-old daughter, Frances Bean, the product of her
marriage to late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. “America’s
Sweetheart,” her first solo record — her first new
music of any kind to be released in six years — had at the
time of Strauss’ writing been postponed several times and
wouldn’t end up hitting store shelves until well into 2004.
In all of the tabloids in all of the world, there are not enough
column inches to say something productive about someone whose
behavior has been so destructive.
But,
dear god — she hadn’t died.
Poor,
poor Courtney Love. Ordinarily, I’m suspicious of those
who cry victim when speaking of the rich and famous, but Love
could not, under any circumstances, be confused with “ordinary.”
And yet, there seems to be a universal wish, because she can’t
conform to garden-variety standards of what a famous person should
be, to make her suffer. We’ve never known a case of a scandal-prone
celebrity quite like Love — she refuses to apologize for
the behavior that we don’t like, and she refuses to go away.
So why do we keep begging her to do one or the other, if not both?
The
texts surrounding Love have amassed immensely since, 10 years
ago last week, Cobain was found dead of a shotgun wound to the
head. Her tumultuous four-year relationship with Cobain, the controversy
over his suicide (several books have named Love as a murder suspect
in the case), and the subsequent royalties feud with the surviving
members of Nirvana have earned her a lot of Yoko stigma that she
doesn’t necessarily deserve.
Her own insatiable appetites and resultant bad behavior have created
a lot of chatter that, in a bit of a vicious circle, she necessarily
provokes. Really, there’s never been just one Courtney as
far as the media is concerned, but there has been one media as
far as Courtney is concerned. There is always a party line, an
overwhelming majority opinion, with little room for dissent: Courtney
Love means trouble.
She
first became a household name in 1991. As her engagement to Cobain
became top-shelf entertainment gossip, hardcore Nirvana fans worried
that the band’s frontman somehow had gotten himself wrapped
up with a ruthless junkie, groupie gold digger, Nancy Spungen
but fundamentally evil — an opinion not helped by journalist
Lynn Hirschberg’s infamous expose of Love, which appeared
in the September 1992 issue of Vanity Fair.
Citing
the testimony of many anonymous friends and associates of the
couple, Hirschberg claimed that not only had Love turned her husband
on to heroin, but that the couple had continued to shoot the drug
well into Courtney’s pregnancy. Damning allegations to be
sure, but with no one willing to speak on the record, what really
stands out in Hirschberg’s article is her overall contempt
for everything about Love as a person. Love tries too hard. She
talks too much. Smokes too much. Her look, her hair, her makeup
— it’s all too much. She’s too opinionated,
too much of a smartass. She wields too much power — over
Kurt, over her band. And worst of all — Courtney too badly
wants to be a star. It kills me to beat the double-standard horse,
but it’s impossible to imagine any male rock star indicted
for the very same crimes for which Hirschberg chooses to indict
Love. It’s probably the most misogynist piece of rock journalism
of the 1990s — although Liz Phair might want to argue with
me on that.
“Live
Through This,” Love’s second record with her band,
Hole, was released in April 1994, just four days after Cobain’s
body was found. A recently widowed single mom, Love set out on
a grand catharsis of a world tour, performance-as-therapy-as-commerce.
She used her eerily prescient lyrics (“If you live through
this, I swear that I will die for you”) to hawk her wares
to sold-out crowds who might have been more interested in gawking
than rocking. “I’m not psychic,” she told MTV’s
Kurt Loder five months after Cobain’s death, “but
my lyrics are.”
Love never has made herself easy to love, but at times it has
seemed more than worth the effort. 1994 was one of those times:
Her very public mourning of Cobain’s death was hard to watch,
but no one with any investment in either of the mythologies she
was so successfully marrying — counter-cultural martyr meets
mainstream celebrity trainwreck — could stand to look away.
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For
past columns by Karina Longworth, visit her archive page at http://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/karina/.
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