Pretty on the Inside

I've been thinking a lot lately about Courtney Love. The fiasco of Rockstar Supernova trods all over the graves of Nirvana and Hole weekly, and this recent reminder has made me realize that Courtney is never too far from my thoughts. There are some musicians who form an impression during a formative time in life and seem to become embedded in the conciousness like a distant lost friend, for me she is one. (Honestly, I have given her life more cumulative thought than many of my distant relatives.) Long before the invasive media told us nothing but too much information about people we don't really care about and who are disgusting and famous for less than nothing, the last interesting rock god and his "bitch whore" wife shook the world. Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love and their saga of music, drugs, ill-fated love and premature death (leading to this generation's most unshakable and impossible to disprove scandal attaching itself to Courtney, the sole survivor, like a bad, 10+ year hangover. Note:I love conspiracy theories as much or more than anyone, but I will not post my opinion on the death of Kurt Cobain. I feel safe in stating, however, 40 years on, that Marilyn Monroe was murdered. )

What I find most interesting about Love is that after all these years I still find the music with Hole enduring and important- and has any mainstream female rocked like this since? After a decade of mostly bad to horrible press and self-destruction (karma?), and music ranging from great to ok, I am still loyal to this unhealthy friendship. Would my friends and I have survived our early 20's as well as we did if not for her? From the world of Morrissey's covertly gay romantic isolationism (the closest we could find to a womanly voice in music), we were awakened by someone who spoke of "bad skin" who admitted to ugly behaviour "I want to be the girl with the most cake" (Doll Parts) and later, when hungry self-entitlement led the widow to a move into the movies and the L.A. lifestyle (like most everything else she did, this was greeted by skepticism, bile and bitterness in the media), chin up, Love still offering an edgy voice of truth, one that perhaps only an ex-stripper whose father wrote a book accusing her of murder could: "You want a part of me / Well, I'm not selling cheap /No, I'm not selling cheap (Celebrity Skin), and self-effacing honesty that I couldn't help but adore " I was punk / Now I'm just stupid "(Awful).

Among the many ugly rumours and emotions that attach themselves to Love, a persistent one is that her music and lyrics were written by more talented men: Cobain, and later Billy Corgan and Trent Reznor (HA!). This is one of the most fascinatingly disturbing (and deeply sexist) things about Love-hate- it attacks the one thing she claims as her own, the real accomplishment she has achieved on her own terms to great success, and strikes me as truly ignorant; with the exception of maybe Cobain, (a sensitive writer and self-described feminist), I highly doubt any man could write this raw and this female.

I told you from the start
just how this would end
When I get what I want
I never want it again

(Violet)