First,
the music: “Live Trough This” is a glorious deconstruction
of every barrier standing between Love and the mega-rock stardom
she so clearly is certain is her destiny. She steamrolls her way
through everything from the beauty myth to motherhood to the Pacific
Northwest indie-rock establishment. Cobain’s death only
adds additional layers of fury, rage and remorse. And every song
is good. People said that Cobain wrote it, but the fundamental
Nirvana formula of Beatles+Black Sabbath+The Pixies-sense of humor
isn’t there. “Live Through This” is more like
“Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” meets Bauhaus, with
a self-consciousness Nirvana never came near.
Four years
later saw the release of Hole’s last record, “Celebrity
Skin.” Here, Love, in full-on Stevie Nicks mode, grafts
golden California sunshine over more post-feminist, post-British-rock
gems — and maintains enough of a sense of self-mockery to
be able to sing a line like “I’m glad I came here
with your pound of flesh.” This time, co-writer Billy Corgan
got the credit. And now, with the release of “America’s
Sweetheart,” there should be no doubt in our minds that
Love can craft a pretty good Echo and the Bunnymen record. But
unfortunately, no one seems to be paying attention.
We’re distracted by our other reward: the sheer visual spectacle
of The Courtney Love Show. In her early to mid-90s heyday, the
ultimate punk-rock fashion plate, Love’s shock of bleached
hair, smear of red lips, miles of thick caked mascara lashes and
overall ironic femininity formed the bedrock of contemporary hipster
fashion. But she also cleans up good, and that’s a problem
as far as her street cred goes. Who is the real Courtney —
the authentically messy Courtney, the prom queen of the gutter,
sporting the self-professed look of “a 14-year-old rape
victim”? Or is it cleaned-up Hollywood Courtney, smoothed
out by plastic surgery, yoga and colonics, typified by her appearance
in white Versace at the 1997 Academy Awards?
What no one
seems to notice about Love’s “transformation”
as debuted at that Oscar ceremony, is that conceptually, her new
look is really only monetarily different from one of her old ones:
The Versace dress, white satin, bias-cut, with its Marilyn-esque
plunge of a neckline, is an almost exact copy of the dress she
wore whilst accompanying Cobain to the 1993 MTV Video Awards.
Is this a whole new person, or is the joke on us, imagining that
an apparent submission to the celebrity game is synonymous with
a quelled anarchistic instinct? Perhaps the only difference between
the two Loves is that by 1997, she doesn’t need to wear
her rebellion in her haircut - she understands that her very appearance
at the Oscars, in good-little-rich-girl finery, is subversive
enough.
Serial-memoirist
Elizabeth Wurtzel, in her book “Bitch: In Praise of Difficult
Women,” very neatly summed up the Courtney problem: “The
scariest thing about her ... is that she wants to be accepted
in the White House and the whorehouse.” This is the fundamental
conundrum of rock ‘n’ roll superstardom. Rock ‘n’
roll, when done right, is inherently rebellious — celebrity,
when done successfully, is an inherent submission to the dominant
culture. Love is a “bad girl,” in both the most contrite
sense of the term and the most engaging. She does not traffic
in the focus-grouped mediocrity that a Jessica Simpson takes to
the bank, but she still wants, demands and fully expects to be
handed the spoils of mainstream fame. That’s even more anarchistic
than the bad behavior in the first place. And, yeah, it’s
also kind of scary.
But what
do we expect? Why are we so eager to label a woman as ferociously
talented as Love as at best a dilettante, and at worst a killer?
As her two-time director Milos Forman told Premiere magazine,
“You want brilliance? Don’t expect you’ll have
it for free.” Love knows that she might be hard to look
at it — that her very way of being might tax the spectator
on a fundamental level — but she’s not going to let
us off the hook just because we’re squirming in our seats.
Love might
be a living legend, but I suspect that’s not good enough
for her — I suspect that what she really wants is to be
a martyr. She offers herself up to it, and the public is all too
eagerly leading the slaughter. And I suspect that her detractors
would go a bit easier on her if they knew they were giving her
exactly what she wants.
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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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