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Home , Beautiful Garbage, Beautiful Son, Celebrity Skin, Courtney Love, Doll Parts, Eric Erlandson

It Felt Like A Kiss: The Anthology

BREADCRUMB TRAIL BOOKS Introduction: 20 Years In The Dakota

“And I know all you devils by your Christian names/and I know all you bitches by your Christian names…”

– Turpentine, 1990

There isn’t one creation story. Courtney Love didn’t pop into the world fully formed. She was a shadow at the edge of for years. She’s a glimmer in ’s Straight “I made my bed: I lie in it. I made my bed: I’ll die in it.” To Hell. She’s was bit part player on the edge of the Miss World, 1994 scene. described her as: Those words from Miss World sort of sum up the mad media “So full of energy that it looked like she’d make a strategy of Miss Love. She knows what the chaos will bring wonderful icon for ugly girls everywhere.” but she does it anyway. She knows what the drugs can bring but she did them anyway. She is always at the heart of a Reads funny but said with love. The kind of love, that Court- maelstrom but unlike say Keith Richards she is not venerated ney would get, the kind of screwed up, fucked up, contradic- for it, she is vilified for it. tory hell of it statement she aces. Because mothers in rock’n’roll are meant to learn their lesson. Courtney Love wasn’t born Courtney Love. On July 9, 1964 They are meant to turn into brand ambassadors for fucking the screaming baby girl was Courtney Michelle Harrison. awful makeup and do Got Milk? commercials in pristine Pho- toshopped splendour. Courtney went through several names and personalities be- fore Courtney Love rose from the ashes of a terrible Around the time of the People Vs , Courtney childhood. turned into Hollywood Love but it didn’t last. The spit and vinegar rose again. It cannot be quelled. She is her own creation. This wicked witch’s brew of mythol- ogy, trivia, folk wisdom and folk foolishness. She’s This collection springs from a long gestation memory. I sat her own dream of made real by force of will, she’s one day with a gaggle of male music writers pitching figures Madonna in the fairground mirror. She is herself always and for a series on heroes. I raised the idea of Courtney and almost everyone else at the same time. reflexively one of them spat: “She’s a fucking stupid slut.

Why is Courtney so fascinating? Because she swerves like a From that moment I’ve wanted to put this together, a monu- car with the breaks cut. She’s a terribly brilliant singer, a ment to the fascinations held by not just the and films scrappy pup pummeling the guitar strings. She’s a punk who of Love and Hole but in her life, her very existence. wants to be as smooth as . She’s a who never, ever shut the fuck up and certainly didn’t preach She is an icon for messy times and these are messy thoughts peace and love like a pull-string doll. in her honour.

2 Mourning Sickness

“I live my life in ruins for you/And for all your secrets kept/I squashed the blossom and the blossom's dead…” Some day you will ache like ache. So Sings Courtney Love in Mourning Sickness her single . To ache like Courtney aches – is that a threat or a promise? Surely no one can ache like she aches and Suzanne Moore that is why we love her: she has been to hell and back. (Originally published in . She has lived through her husband’s suicide and carried on Taken from Head Over Heels (Collected touring, being a mother, being a star. She has mourned and Columns 1993-1996) ranted and raved in public.

She has shown us how it is to be on the edge. Our fascination with her is entirely morbid, like watching a road accident, as some have said, yet somehow she’s coming through, coming into her own. She will be bigger than Madonna, bigger than Nirvana so they tell us.

She is the anti-Madonna. A rock chick to Ms Ciccone’s pop tart. Madonna is hard-bodied and always in control. Courtney is fleshy and continually threatening to lose it, big time.

Madonna, saint of health and efficiency, with her pip squeak of a voice, inhabits a different world from Courtney’s rocked- out Scotch and smack rasp. Madonna’s sexuality is entirely inner-directed, her object of desire is fundamentally herself.

Courtney’s sluttish, Blanche Du Bois persona draws in who- ever will watch her. She behaves, not as a widow and mother should behave, and for all Madonna’s calculated taboo- busting, Love effortlessly blurs the lines between the pre- scribed behaviour of a mother, a whore, a grieving widow, a young woman.

4 Which part of Courtney is real? Which parts are skillful image Sylvia Plath is mentioned. Of course, Courtney has become a manipulation is not a question that can be answered. We as- Sylvia Plath replacement. Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of Pro- sume her pain is for public consumption even though the zac Nation, a book about depression, is also being marketed as burden of representing other people’s fantasies contributed to the Sylvia Plath of the MTV generation. ’s misery. And here she is on the cover of Vanity Fair, photographed by to show us how far she Instability is in. Madness is kind of sexy. Depression drips has come. authenticity and depth when nothing else does these days. To be depressed is at least to feel something and something is Last time she featured in this magazine, she was pregnant and better than nothing. But Sylvia Plath didn’t take Prozac she said to be taking , resolutely a bad girl providing a little just put her head in an oven. frisson of freakiness, of celebrity low-life among the usual Vanity Fair gloss. Courtney has not committed suicide though the public seems to have judged her guilty of this act by association. Ever The bigger she gets the less we can have of her and the resent- astute, Love has said: ment starts to build. Already it’s there. In this week’s NME she is accused of ‘signing Faustian pacts with the voyeuristic “One of the largest duties I have is to report on that madness tabloid sordids so as to keep the celebrity machine whirring, and try not to become a victim of it in the same way as Anne while knowingly exorcising their torment’. Sexton or Sylvia Plath or Zelda Fitzgerald.”

She is lost to the underworld of those who study their NME as The recent anniversary of Cobain’s death has sparked a if it was the Bible, and has become a creature of the main- recognition of a culture of suffering that has afflicted the stream media. She no longer belongs to that cult because we young, who pour their tormented little hearts out in the pages all know about her. She’s not the same anymore, she’s not so of the music press. real. Maybe it’s true but why isn’t it said of the boys too? Anorexia, bulimia, self-cutting, all the angst turned inwards

eventually spills out. Love used to cut herself, she says. Are the Gallagher boys of Oasis lost now? Is Damon Albarn as Elizabeth Wurtzel describes in her book the patterns she used real as he used to be? Why can Courtney Love not make her to make on her legs with razor blades. own myth? What do you want her to do? Open her veins on stage? Now her story of self-laceration is to be made into a movie. Wurtzel is to be found this month posing topless in GQ. 5 Having exposed her tortured psyche, she tiredly exposes her illness reminded us, there is not much glamour about being breasts. Is this to make us believe she is a better writer, or mentally ill. more depressed than ever, or so zonked out on anti- There was a woman where I used to live who roamed the depressants she couldn’t care less, or fully recovered? streets in mid-winter, wearing nothing but a nightie and God only knows, although the copy that reads “Feeling down? begging for money for Lucozade. ‘Lucozade aids recovery’ she A little depressed? Sounds like a job for Prozac girl” simply used to intone whenever I gave her some change. With her trivialises whatever it is she is trying to achieve. Prozac girl, it matted hair and calloused feet, she was a far cry from today’s seems, is so depressed she might even sleep with a GQ reader. psycho-babes whose mental disarray adds to their allure. A far cry from the artists who, on the programme Prozac Diary, Some might say that our authors are now our rock stars and took the drug as if it were lucozade in order simply to unblock we like our rock stars to live their lives for us. We want them them creatively. to be extreme, to have bigger lives than we do. To pose in the nude for us. The media obsession with Prozac points to a generation gap not just between doomed and mystified elders, but As Courtney’s mother puts it, ‘Her fame is not about being between those who seem surprised that a drug can make you beautiful and brilliant, which she is: it’s about speaking the feel better and those who grow up taking drugs precisely voice of the anguish in the world’. because they do make you feel better. Wurtzel’s writing is so thoroughly self-involved that she can barely acknowledge the anguish of any world but her own. We are unhappy about offering Prozac as a cure-all because Courtney’s job is bigger – to absorb all the pain that is we feel that chemicals cannot truly be the answer to existen- projected onto her and to throw it out again. tial crisis.

If anger turned in on itself causes depression, we are among a It is no coincidence that the young find no meaning in their lost generation who seem no future in getting angry. lives when so many of our bigger belief systems have im- ploded over the last twenty years. Depression is on the increase, especially among young people. Women are three times more likely to suffer depression than It is almost twenty years since punk first proclaimed that men and, as BBC2’s excellent States of Mind series on mental there was no future. A generation raised in its shadow finds it

6 could only claim its alienation second-hand and so couldn’t be bothered.

Thus the new heroes and heroines, from Courtney to PJ Harvey to Kurt, sing of deep, dark things and show that all this suffering may be worth something, even if that something is only a pop song.

They show that madness is not ordinary, even though we know differently. Is Courtney Love and her media circus for real? ‘Is this what you really want? Really?’ an anguished NME writer asks. Yes, it’s what we want. Really. Or, as the woman herself drawls it: ‘I fake it so real I am beyond fake’.

7 Glory in the madness

“I can really fuck you up/because I’m the demon buttercup…” Courtney Love is a mad bitch. If she was a man, that'd be Courtney’s a mad bitch: rock'n'roll but she's a mother so she gets sneered at. She takes drugs, she gets drunk, she embarrasses herself in public, she why I love Hole rocks when she straps on a guitar, she's not the ideal parent.

Mic Wright Those are all qualities Keith Richards had in the 70s and 80s but he had a penis, the universal membership card for being a rock'n'roll arsehole. Once a woman squeezes a child out of her vagina, the press acts as if she is then not allowed to behave badly: be quiet, be decent, shut up woman.

Well, Courtney Love hasn't done that. Sometimes at expense of her music, her career, her sanity. She has been painted as a Nancy Spungeon type and frequently put in the frame for the 'murder' of her drug addict, depressive husband. Who appar- ently wrote all her records. Including the ones that she wrote before she met him and the ones that came out after he died.

Live Through This is one of the finest rock albums of the 90s. 's guitar is driving and serrated, Patty's drum- ming is heavy and hard hitting and at the forefront is the sweetness and acid of Courtney Love's vocals and her dirty, sloppy guitar playing.

Lyrically, is about the experience of being a woman. It is motherhood in all its horrid beauty, it's jealousy, self-image, sexuality and more. Courtney Love is a mad bitch. It's her best quality.

9 Prettier on the inside? “Slut kiss girl won’t you promise her smack/is she ?/is she pretty from the back? Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, ligula suspendisse nulla pretium, Pretty On The Inside: rhoncus tempor placerat fermentum, enim integer ad vestibu- lum volutpat. Nisl rhoncus turpis est, vel elit, congue wisi primal screams and enim nunc ultricies sit, magna tincidunt. Maecenas aliquam maecenas ligula nostra, accumsan taciti. Sociis mauris in inte- pretty ugly memories ger, a dolor netus non dui aliquet, sagittis felis sodales, dolor sociis mauris, vel eu est libero cras. Interdum at. Eget habi- Luci O’Brien tasse elementum est, ipsum purus pede porttitor class, ut lo- rem adipiscing, aliquet sed auctor, imperdiet arcu per diam dapibus libero duis. Enim eros in vel, volutpat nec pellen- tesque leo, temporibus scelerisque nec.

Ac dolor ac adipiscing amet bibendum nullam, massa lacus molestie ut libero nec, diam et, pharetra sodales eget, feugiat ullamcorper id tempor eget id vitae. Mauris pretium eget aliquet, lectus tincidunt. Porttitor mollis imperdiet libero se- nectus pulvinar. Etiam molestie mauris ligula eget laoreet, ve- hicula eleifend. Repellat orci eget erat et, sem cum, ultricies sollicitudin amet eleifend dolor nullam erat, malesuada est leo ac. Varius natoque turpis elementum est. Duis montes, tellus lobortis lacus amet arcu et. In vitae vel, wisi at, id praesent bibendum libero faucibus porta egestas, quisque praesent ip- sum fermentum placerat tempor.

Curabitur auctor, erat mollis sed fusce, turpis vivamus a dic- tumst congue magnis. Aliquam amet ullamcorper dignissim molestie, sed mollis. Tortor vitae tortor eros wisi facilisis.Consectetuer arcu ipsum ornare pellentesque ve- hicula, in vehicula diam, ornare magna erat felis wisi a risus. Justo fermentum id. Malesuada eleifend, tortor eros.

11 Live! Tonight! Witch trials! “I know you haven’t saved me and you haven’t saved her yet… Cobain’s fame and wealth for her own advancement. It is also Liar at a witch trial: Courtney suggested that Love had introduced Cobain to heroin. We vs. Vanity Fair know from the publications of Kurt’s letters, and diaries that this is spurious nonsense, he had made a conscious decision Sara Jayne Morris to be a regular heroin user prior to meeting Courtney.

In fact, Love was a huge star in her own right prior to her relationship with Cobain. Her band, Hole was an influential component of the musical movement where predominantly female musical acts took the previously patriarchal community by storm.

Gina Davis was on the cover of September 1992’s Vanity Fair They pioneered the “” style, comprised of 1920’s but the article that would be remembered for years to come is tea dresses, barrettes, exaggerated makeup, and Mary Jane featured as a byline under the title; “Plus; Courtney Love”. shoes that was a hugely influential fashion movement in it’s own right . Love, and her friend and sometimes band mate, The article was titled “Strange Love” and was written by Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland, coined the style as an Linda Hirschberg, whose name you may recognise from the attempt to parody society’s gender stereotypes through their legions of (particularly female) celebrities that she has on-stage artistic personas. denigrated over the years. The most prominent of late being M.I.A. She responded to the criticism by posting Hirschberg’s Love first encountered Kurt Cobain at a concert. He recalled: telephone number on . “I thought she looked like …like a classic punk-rock chick. I did feel attracted to her. Probably wanted Hirschburg “examines” Courtney Love and her career, mainly to fuck her that night but she left”. Indeed, Love resembled through the restrictive lens of Love and Kurt Cobain’s Nancy Spungen (70’s punk rock extraordinaire and relationship. She paints Love in an almost entirely ’s girlfriend, but unlike Nancy, Love moved be- unflattering light throughout the article calling her a “train- yond the passive role of spectator; she wrote her own music. wreck personality” and characterising Love’s marriage to Co- bain as nothing more than a career move. Hirschberg’s article Hole’s debut “Pretty on the Inside was released by Caro- paints Love as little more than a groupie, cashing in on line Records in September 1991 and the album was unani- mously well reviewed. When Love first met Cobain her band’s 13 debut was outselling his band’s initial record, Bleach, two to shortly after the Vanity Fair issue containing the interview one. The confusion for the mainstream press came from the was published. It is sad that, instead of celebrating a pregnant fact that Nirvana released their wildly popular woman’s triumph over a crippling addiction for the sake of album a week after the couple got together. her unborn child, society tends to publicly shame and judge her for the addiction in the first place. This is especially Hirschberg was very keen to write that Madonna had fa- galling when we know that Cobain had continued to use mously asked: “Who is Courtney Love?”. This is yet another heavily throughout this time, as well as after Frances’s birth. example of untruth within the article used to shape out a negative view of Love. Hirschberg neatly skirts around discussing Cobain’s hugely problematic heroin addiction though it must have been Earlier that year Maddonna’s had been chasing glaringly obvious. Damnation of male rock stars really does Hole for a record deal which Love turned down on the not sell as well as the demonisation of women. grounds that Madonna was trying to cash in on the / riot grrl movement rather than admiring Hole’s music. In deciding to ignore this in her article she neatly avoided a debate about whether or not it appropriate for an expectant It is fair to say that Courtney was majorly misrepresented father to be as addled by drug addiction as Kurt was at this throughout the piece, much as she has been has been point and happily focused on the “unfit mother’ Love. misrepresented throughout her career. It was, however, the quotes from an unnamed source close to the Cobain family There are plenty of irresponsible, drug addicted rock star expressing concern over the health of France Bean and their fathers who retain an air of “cool”, especially if, like Cobain, couple’s drug use during Courtney’s pregnancy that caused they die. The best rock star death comes from a drug the most damage. overdose. Tt is the martyrdom that leads to sainthood, so long as you’ve got that all important Y chromosome. Heroin and We are aware now that whatever protestations Love made at rock and roll romanticism, is one of those nonsense notions the time that she did take heroin in the first trimester of her that is saved for the boys, it seems. pregnancy with Frances Bean. She admitted this in later inter- views. However, she did make a huge effort to give up and was Hirschberg also fails to address the issue that drugs had successful in the later trimesters of her pregnancy. This is become a looming component of the music circuit in general evidenced mainly by ’s healthy, non at this point. The scene was flooded with the brown stuff. opiate dependent arrival in the world on August 18th 1992, “When the grunge thing first started happening,’ an insider in-

14 terviewed by related, “I never met a band out of Six days later on 24th August the first court hearing ruled that that wasn’t either dabbling or full-on heroin addicts” the couple were only allowed to see Frances in the presence of a court appointed guardian, alongside this Kurt would have to Where no respectable journalist would ignore the fact that a undergo a 30 day drug treatment programme and both pregnant woman was using heroin, Hirschberg had an oppor- parents would have to give random urine samples. tunity at this point to open a genuine and useful debate about drug use and vulnerability in this community, to question the The punitive method of treating mothers with addiction wider social implications of this substance that was eating peo- problems as if they need to “earn” their children is as highly ple up. Instead she chose to begin a pop culture witch hunt, dubious as writing nasty articles about pregnant women. waving her whilst wearing a fake mask of piety and concern. But Hirschberg had smarts, this stuff sells, people Studies have shown that far from addiction itself, the gravest love to hate a bad mother and Courtney fit the bill. risks related to children of drug-involved mothers during Twenty years down the line we’ve still eating up the chance to infancy come from the harsh and punitive treatment of judge a bad mother. Last year ago, Stacy Soloman was berated mothers by aggressive and overzealous courts. for smoking three cigarettes a day whilst pregnant. It’s fair to Research has repeatedly shown that newborn babies need a say, this is not sensible or responsible behaviour but society’s present and consistent care giver in order to have the best enthusiasm for attacking vulnerable women struggling with chance of meeting the first psychosocial milestones which addiction is about as helpful as beating them around the legs specialists recognise as being crucial to social and personal de- and arse with a sign saying “you’re shit”. velopment throughout the lifespan. As a result of Hirschberg’s article, social services became As Courtney was present, at that point clean, and willing it involved with the family and Love was not allowed to take her seems absurd that she was kept from spending those first few daughter home when she left the hospital three days later. weeks with her child. The court ordered that she must be kept in the hospital for There is an assumption that empathy and “mothering observation despite being declared healthy by the medical behaviour” are innate female skills, where actually they are a team that delivered her. set of behaviours which are triggered by physical and emo- Frances was released a few days later into the care of a nanny tional reactions to spending time with an infant. as the court would not release her to her parents.

15 One of the main problems with this set of beliefs is that allows This culture leads to social exclusion, lies, and self loathing all mothers like Courtney who struggle with motherhood as a re- of which are known to perpetuate destructive behaviour. sult of a set of complex social and emotional circumstances to All those factors hold women back from being brave enough be labelled “unnatural” and gives birth (if you’ll pardon the to ask for help at this vulnerable time. All of which hold pun) to the notion of the bad, or unfit mother. Labels that women in those polarised positions of “mother” or “whore” have hung over Courtney Love’s head to this present day. which have held us in shackles for eons. All of which are There seems to be a general lack of empathy for Courtney and unhelpful for men and women and the childhood’s of her struggles throughout her life. Courtney was a talented generations to come. musician and unwell drug addict with very little in terms of current or historical familial support who has been reduced to a caricature of the “bad woman” for public entertainment.

It feels like it’s less about her conduct during her pregnancy and much more to do with the combination of being a woman in “man’s world” at the same time as having huge struggles with addiction and her mental health.

Rather than endeavoring to understand the ways in which the act of being a drug addicted mother could be psychologically damaging or demeaning, the media has used these tragic anec- dotes as ready proof against Love’s general value as a human being.

I worry about the impact of the demonisation of “Courtney Love-the mother” in a plethora of arenas. The increased pressure on expectant mothers to become perfect individuals as soon as the blue line appears on the piss soaked pregnancy test helps no one, least of the child .

16 Doing It for the Kids “…we look the same, we talk the same, we even fuck the same.” Broken Doll, Shattered Whore, Any extended biography of Courtney Love will refer to her childhood, the deadhead deadbeat dad and the estranged Doing It for the Kids: Courtney, mother. It will make reference to the odd, dirty, smelly ‘pee- girl’, bumped from family to family, school to school, country juvenility and pedagogy to country. And it will, , cover the time in slumming Jamie Woods in Liverpool, stripping in Asia, stints in and Sugar Babydoll.

A piece of contextual, artist-led analysis on Courtney’s oeuvre would, I believe, be negligent were it to ignore the impact these experiences have had on her recorded output. Images of childhood, pre-pubescence, and adolescent isolation permeate her lyrics: with both nascent, naïve Courtney cemented in vile, desperate, juvenile teenage ; and bitter, experienced, smarter Courtney as both precautionary teacher, and third-wave feminist leader.

Punk rock has become the accessible white-noise-riot of protest for many generations: but in its accessibility it has be- comes devalued and diluted, sound pollution, a soundtrack cli- ché of rage. As The Indelicates put it: “absolutely anyone can play the fucking guitar”.

Such audio universality is where good singers can plead their respective cases, to become lauded rock stars, manic preach- ers, spokespeople and heroes. Succinct poetry, heartfelt melancholia, conscious and rebellious lyrics, grand anthemic statements: these, combined with the fury of spiky three- chords and vitriolic solos effectively elevate lazy slant-rhymes and badly mixed tenses into inspirational, aspirational axioms

18 for the masses. The feminist writer Hélène Cixous declared: Courtney sings of boys, whose kisses “taste of candy” and who ‘There is no revolution… without there being people who get “crash and burn” like high-school rebels, the leaders of up and begin to yell” and Courtney sure can yell, and get her the pack. message, her voice, over and beyond the grungy guitar noise Courtney isn’t shy about her mothering instinct: ‘Plump’ docu- and mass of other angsty shouty contemporary bands. ments her pregnancy while ‘Heaven Tonight’ shows the For all the labels, self-proclaimed, derogatory and celebratory unconditional love and awe for her daughter – “…the finest – ‘hooker / waitress, / actress’, junkie, whore, slut, sweetest thing in the world”. witch, Yoko – Courtney Love has become an idol, an icon. The video for her solo single ‘Mono’ shows Courtney as a de- Courtney exploits the ingénue. The vintage silk and tattered structive, messianic sleeping-beauty / mother hen, leading an lace places her somewhere between Lolita and Miss army of little girls, all silk and taffeta and tiaras, wielding Havisham, a naïf malnourished waif, encapsulated in a time power-tools-as-weaponry while they trash everything they forgotten, a love forbidden and lost: seductive to men and come across. boys; identifiable to women and girls. Years earlier, while touring , Courtney would in- Her ‘doll eyes, doll mouth’ align Courtney with the girls in the vite the audience up on-stage. Teenage girls along to schoolyard. But these are doll parts, torn and ripped snatches the last songs of the set. Glitter make-up, fairy-wings, tiaras. of childhood. These are the fragments of girls whose mothers Heavy eyeliner, heavy mascara, heavy metal. Doc Martens and ask: “Baby, why are you a ?” Girls who are “ripe Converse. Ripped fishnets under babydoll dresses. for the plucking’. She returns to the theme later, in ‘Nobody’s “I have run into some of those women [who joined us on- Daughter’ – “The world’s broken doll, the world’s shattered stage] in the last ten years’ writes , ‘and whore”, linking the images of a ruined childhood with it seems those on-stage experiences left a lasting impression sexuality. As she grows up she’s still stained by her ‘pee girl’ on those people.” persona, her bullied and ridiculed self, in ‘Softer, Softest’. Courtney’s greatest success as an artist is her ability to use her She dismisses the conventions of childhood and societal position as stage matriarch and airwave-filler to express her morality, and instead mourns the passing of the more gratui- beliefs: Crucial themes run through Courtney’s lyrics. ‘Asking tous and exciting fantasy: “I don’t really miss God, but I sure For It’ remains a vital piece in the ongoing discourse of miss Santa Claus”. and rape; ‘Pretty on the Inside’ exploring body-

19 image and sexual worth; she violently tears through misogynis- tic Hollywood culture on the album Celebrity Skin.

The title track looks at the wannabe actresses, willing to sacri- fice anything to be a star, being ‘used up’ and spat out, left out as ‘’, ‘forgotten’. Courtney here uses herself – her reputation and her experience – as an example and as an indication of what happens in Tinsel Town.

She is, by this point in her career, a Golden Globe-nominated actress and therefore as reliable a source of LA practice as any. ‘Awful’, from the same LP, takes the lessons of a burned, embittered Courtney – “I was punk, now I’m just stupid” – and apply them to ‘girls like you’, aged ‘only 16’ who would go on to be heart-broken and exploited by the record companies.

’20 Years in The Dakota’ marks Courtney as grown-up, mature, ‘the pee girl burns to be the bride’. Celebrity, notoriety, clutching that ‘pound of flesh’ is overrated, she’d ‘rather die’ than be Madonna, or be in Nirvana.

In ‘Mono’ she realises ‘rock is dead’ but asks for ‘one more song’. And if she can continue to inspire and influence through her vitriolic and dialectic lyrics, combined with sensitive childhood imagery and adolescent discomfort, then who would deny her that?

20 My body, the hand grenade “Hey hey, this much is true, baby I burn black for you…” There are unlikely to be many essays that begin with Hole and My Body, The Hand Grenade: Oasis being compared. This is possibly the only one. So do an unexploded bomb please enjoy. Mic Wright Oasis’s best album is not officially an album at all but a b-side collection. On The Masterplan, Noel Gallagher flicks out an entire record of wonders that could kick merry hell out of most of his post Be Here Now output. B-sides can do that sometimes: horde all the good ideas for themselves.

My Body, The Hand Grenade is not Hole’s best album but it is Hole’s most fascinating record and home to Courtney Love at her most unrestrained. With Turpentine as its opening salvo, it is gorgeous and profane, a fury let out of hell, given a guitar and told to have her revenge.

“I can really fuck you up, yeah! ‘cause I’m the demon butter- cup…” Ladies, gentlemen, bastards, bitches, sluts, gigolos and witches, I present Ms Courtney Love. On Phonebill Song, Courtney is just flayling at enemies left, right and centre in- cluding herself. It’s a squalling mess and goddamn brilliant for it: “I’m a loser buttercup, uh huh…”

Retard Girl, Burn Black and Dicknail form a trilogy of face- kicking, ball-breaking, love-spurning beauty.

Three harsh little punk songs that owe more to 1977 and Manchester 1978 than Seattle, Portland or any of those obvious places, they are raw, raging id.

22 , a single which came bedecked with a picture of The trio of songs from MTV Unplugged – Softer, Softest, He Kurt as a toddler, is Courtney singing an odd oedipal hymn to Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss) and Season Of The Witch – add her husband. It is both disturbing and beautiful, a three-word up to two separate conclusions: one – it is outrageous that the descriptor that almost always applies to Courtney Love. entire Hole MTV Unplugged is not available and two – that Courtney was once again picking at the scab of her relation- 20 Years In The Dakota is the best meditation on the nature of ship with Kurt there. rock widowdom ever written. Courtney in the role of Yoko Ono for the grunge moaners, blamed and blaming herself: “… Drown Soda and Asking For It, both included in live versions, they want to burn the witches inside us/oh you/you don’t fuck reveal to the doubters how much emotion, anger and skill she with the Fabulous Four/or you spend the rest of your life pick- injects into her performances. Courtney Love is one of the ing things up off the floor…” finest rock performers alive, one of the most visceral too and those tracks capture that in acidic clarity. The Miss World demo has the wonder of all demo versions kicked out into the world. It is like a small, determined calf just about standing on its feet, more honest for its fragility and the brittle nature of its skeleton.

Old Age, a song written with Kurt and that existed in both Nir- vana and Hole versions, is haunted and mystical with an open- ing that sounds like the prayers of the morphine monks of grunge high on a mountain:

“What was she for halloween? The ugliest girl you’ve ever seen, somebody she will die alone…”

Courtney in dark mood spits out prophecies about herself and fairground mirror images of the world sees her: “She seems to me to know/all that glitters is sour/all the lies in place/Jesus saves/old age…”

23 Celebrity Skin “…a walking study in demonology.” Courtney Love is one of the few musicians who I actively wish The Middle Of The would go closer to the middle of the road. (In fact, there’s Road To Malibu probably only one other – Scott Walker.) Let me explain why. There’s clearly a part of Courtney that wants to make an Eddie Robson album like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. It might even be the biggest part of Courtney. She would love to make an album that sells to everyone and speaks to everyone, the kind of record that you see in everyone’s collection.

There is nothing at all wrong with this kind of ambition as long as it doesn’t adversely affect the quality of the product; in recent years we’ve lacked people who can pull this off whilst making music of real character, that doesn’t achieve mass suc- cess by simply hitting the lowest common denominator.

It’s hard for her to make such a record just because of the baggage she carries. Discussion of her music is often an afterthought. She’s much more famous than any of her songs.

Even many of her most fervent fans treat her as if her life is her art, that she justifies herself merely by being. This is a shame as it obscures what a very good she is.

The ever-more-epic gaps between her records – she’s man- aged just five albums in twenty-one years – are partly attributable to her chaotic personal life. But the 2006 docu- mentary The Return of Courtney Love suggested another rea- son: she genuinely does seem to work hard on her records, and is determined to make the album she hears in her head.

25 The solo album she was seen working on in the documentary Wikipedia, but I can’t say it makes much difference to how I was scrapped (though it sounded good in the clips we heard) feel about it. and begun again as a Hole album, eventually appearing four Quite often, the most successful pop songs are those which years later: above all, she wanted to avoid a repeat of the take a specific experience and make it universal. In ‘Malibu’ disappointing America’s Sweetheart (which she’s admitted Courtney abstracts her experience, turning it into a sequence featured some weak songs and was badly produced, her own of evocative images. judgement clouded by ). The song is undoubtedly stronger for being born of painful re- Courtney’s more crafted approach was best expressed on ality, but as far as the listener is concerned, none of this is nec- Celebrity Skin. Overshadowed at the time by the fact that it essarily important: you can bring your own meaning. was her first record since you-know-what, it stands up well today: the title track sounds like Courtney’s signature song The glossiness of the music doesn’t compromise this at all: in now, whilst ‘Awful’ is the most anthemic thing she’s written. fact its slightly brittle lightness is perfectly matched to the But the outstanding track, ‘Malibu’, shows what she’s lyric, and is keenly judged with a rawer edge constantly threat- really capable of. ening to break through.

When I hear this, I wish she would write a whole album of Above all, Courtney’s own voice is insurance against any of ‘Malibu’s. Until I came to write this piece, I’d never bothered her recordings becoming slick to the point of airlessness. The finding out what the song is actually about, or what relevance result is a poppier rendition of the bruised melancholy of the location has. It’s so specific, you presume it has some ‘Miss World’ and ‘Doll Parts’. meaning and wasn’t just chosen because the word sounds nice. It’s not hard to guess the subject – you only need the The song transports you to another place with cinematic vaguest notion of who Courtney Love is and when this song vividness: we probably all imagine a different Malibu when we was written to work out who the line ‘Oh come on, be alive hear the song, especially those of us who’ve never been to the again’ is addressed to. real one and have to paste it together from what we’ve seen in movies, but that’s the beauty of it. But I’d honestly never given any of this a great deal of thought, even though I’ve loved the song for years. I now Whilst it was written about literally going to Malibu, it tran- know the story behind the song, because I looked it up on scends the specifics of its creation and becomes a song about a Malibu of the mind, a place we retreat to at moments of crisis.

26 Above all the song is infused with a sense of loss, and you can feel it’s about your own loss, whatever that might be. It’s ex- actly what Fleetwood Mac pulled off on Rumours, in fact: personal chaos and drug abuse, transformed into songs which even the straightest-living person could relate to. A perfect song, perfectly executed.

And then the next track is ‘Reasons To Be Beautiful’ and yeah, it’s good, but as it kicks in the dream of an album of ‘Malibu’s slips away. It feels like an obligation to her roots when she in- cludes a track like this, as if she’ll lose her punk union mem- bership if she doesn’t.

For all the messiness of her public image, I think her brilliance is best expressed within more conventional boundaries, perhaps because, like a lot of wayward talents, she thrives when trying to be structured.

Her personality is strong enough to take a conventional form and own it – she can never be truly middle-of-the-road, but the closer she gets, the better she is. She can still work like that – ‘Pacific Coast Highway’ from Nobody’s Daughter hits a similar note with almost as much success, and the album’s final track ‘Never Go Hungry’ shows she’s superb with just an acoustic guitar.

Is there still time for her to make a truly great record in that vein? I hope so.

27 It’s also a record immensely strengthened by Love finding Celebrity Skin: Ms Love true songwriting partnerships with the radiant Melissa goes to Hollywood Auf de Maur and her ex-beau . The are strong, the hooks are iron-clad and the sing- Mic Wright ing is passionate without the vocal-cord shredding Love had previously employed so frequently.

While Live Through This could be filleted for clues and allu- sions about the darkness in her relationship with Kurt Cobain, Love wrote the songs on that record long before the Rome overdose and Kurt’s eventual suicide. Celebrity Skin is the “I’m glad I came here…with your pound of flesh.” record where she addresses her new and unwanted role as America’s First Widow. Celebrity Skin was the first album after ‘it’ happened. It’s Hole’s biggest selling record. It’s the album that could have Arguably, not since Jackie O had there been such a high- made them into a massive band, operating up in the strato- profile widow at the heart of American culture. Where Jackie spheric mega-selling realms where Courtney’s sometime had lost not just the man but the president and the myth, nemesis resides with . forced to carry that weight with her, Courtney lost not only her husband but a generational icon, a figure who will stare at But Courtney can’t, won’t, wouldn’t play the corporate rock her forever from hoodies and t-shirts, from posters and com- game that Grohl has mastered so effectively. Even on her most memorative supplements. No famous rock star ever truly dies. commercial album, Love drips as much poison as there is sweetness. Celebrity Skin is so raw beneath the glossiness. Images of Courtney hanging herself instead of Kurt, of descent into the Hole had previously covered by Fleetwood underworld, of Malibu as a stand-in for heaven (“oceans of an- Mac and Celebrity Skin is where Courtney Love finally let rip gels…”) and desperate pleas for history to reverse (“Oh come and put her soft-rock, faded-Hollywood-glamour worshipping on be alive again, don’t lay down and die…”) are scattered tendencies into the foreground. over every song. One in particular, Reasons To Be Beautiful, is Courtney’s wail of anguish against her loss put to music:

28 “And they say in the end/you’ll get bitter just like them/ and they steal your heart away/when the fire goes out you better learn to fake/it’s better to rise than fade away…”

That first with its echo of the line quoted in Co- bain’s is Celebrity Skin encapsulated. It is Court- ney Love rebuilding herself as a demonic revenger, a beautiful avenging angel and attempting desperately to exorcise the ghost of Cobain floating around her.

Neil Young was trying to reach Kurt Cobain in the week before the younger man’s suicide. He has rarely spoken about Co- bain’s use of his lyrics in the suicide note but quickly composed a grief-filled record, Sleeps With Angels, soon after Kurt’s death.

Young said of the period: “I wanted to tell him – you don’t have to do anything anyone tells you to do – I had a whole thing I wanted to tell him but I never got the chance.”

That’s what Courtney is addressing in a sense with Celebrity Skin, it is her emotions, her therapy, her message to her lost husband all wrapped up in the sound of the glossy MOR that comforted her as a lost and lonely kid before punk arrived.

Celebrity Skin is Hole’s most accessible record because it is the most human and, beneath the production gloss, the most truthful.

29 The body of evidence

“Oh give me a reason to be beautiful…so sick in this body, so sick in this soul…” “Oh give me a reason to be beautiful…so sick in this body, Pretty on the Inside: so sick in this soul…”

Hole’s lessons on Women are not supposed to be angry, certainly not this angry, in our society. Male rage can be labelled bravery or passion, body image. but there is no generally accepted “label” for feminine rage, no Ruth Michaelson social box to tick to understand and digest it easier.

Hole’s music, lyrics and aesthetics were filled with references to traditional feminine expectations being inverted, twisting and warping expected female behaviour and throwing them back in the face of anyone listening, or watching.

Hole is a band that came of age at the height of the “MTV years” when music videos were almost as important as the songs they accompanied. It was all about subverting visual expectations, whether in Courtney Love's lyrics or in real life. In other words, they took the visuals of a Stepford Wife and showed the rage that bubbles beneath the surface.

It could be said that society desires mute, passive little girls, and nothing could subvert this more than a grown woman dressed like a doll, screaming obscenities as her mascara runs down her face to meet the lipstick smeared across her cheek.

While members like or Melissa Auf de Maur definitely had an impact on the look and sound of Hole, no discussion of what the band was can happen without refer- ence to its dynamic centre, the behemoth of female rage that is Courtney Love.

31 The band has been through many incarnations (with the most male-dominated society’s expectations on women, not any recent being an all-male lineup with Courtney as the one man in particular. front-woman) but Love remains the beating heart of Hole, Women screaming about society was not new, and guiding its style and spirit with her lyrics and the punk scene had defiantly broken through that barrier over on-to-offstage controversies. a decade previously, but this was not just anger, this was bit- Love is not just an experienced provocateur, it is also clear terness, targeted at the society of the 90s which told women that she loves to play with being shocking in public and she that they were freer now than ever before, yet increased the fo- doesn’t give a fuck who knows it. It is almost refreshing in cus on the female body and heightened ideas of beauty. some ways to hear how many people dislike her because of The 90s was, in a certain sense, a time of progress for women, this- it is confirmation of the fact that she needs to exist. but as women entered more boardrooms and assumed a more Love courted this controversy with her behaviour, swearing visible place at the core of a society, the focus on their bodies and spitting at journalists, but signified it through her appear- and appearances increased. This was the “having it all mo- ance: channelling a kind of obscene, screwed-up Marilyn Mon- ment”, and female bodies had to reflect this by having toned roe or a beautiful child from a horror film. abs, albeit hidden under a suit.

“I am doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs, I am doll arms, big Hole’s own image combined with visuals and lyrics to describe veins, doll base…” something beautiful that’s somehow been ruined or dese- crated, evolving from the fucked up baby-dolls of Pretty on [Doll Parts] the Inside, the weeping beauty-queens of Live Through This Hole weren’t just angry: they were angry about being made to tarnished celestial, pre-Raphaelite figures of angry in the first place. Celebrity Skin.

Female anger in music is traditionally directed at men, at bro- Songs from each of their five albums are peppered with refer- ken hearts or promises; think of the muted wails that pene- ences to whores and the selling of bodies (“You want a part of trated ’s “”, the sneers of Debbie me? Well I’m not selling cheap” Celebrity Skin), or even body Harry or the pleading cries of in “Take Another parts (“I’m glad I came here with your pound of flesh”, Celeb- Little Piece of My Heart”, but this is anger about a rity Skin or “the pieces of Jennifer’s Body” Jennifer’s Body) and playing with the idea that conforming to how society

32 wants women to look can often feel like selling yourself, in beautiful in a society that demands women feel pain to other words: society ruins beauty, by packaging it up and mak- achieve it. ing it “sellable”, and in so doing, it destroys it. “And they say in the end, you’ll get better just like them. And “She’s too pure, for the likes of this world, this world is a they steal your heart away, when the fire goes out you’d bet- whore… ter learn to fake…”

All the lilies bloomed and blossomed, wilted and they’re shiv- [Reasons to be Beautiful] ering, I can’t stop their withering, oh this world is a whore…” "Fake it so real I am beyond fake. Someday you will ache [Petals] like I ache.”

Female body image and self-harm lie neatly at the intersection [Doll Parts] between female rage and the visual: women are not supposed At the heart of this were also constant references to ideas of to get angry at society, they are supposed to turn their rage fakery and artifice, the sense that the goodness, wellness and inwards. It’s difficult to think of a Hole song that doesn’t beauty is actually a façade. In other words: society’s expecta- involve some reference to pain or self-harm, all tied to the tions are wrong. idea of beauty and suffering. It may seem like these ideas are only relevant to those who are To some, this might sound like a love-song to an eating disor- angry, or at least beleaguered, by such expectations: the der: but the combination of thrashing guitars makes it seem raging feminists or the psychology students. more like rage at the society that makes such demands on women, that projects eating disorders as desirable. This is part of the falsehood, that being pissed off at society’s expectations of you makes you a freak. In many ways, the only In essence, this isn’t pro-eating disorder, it’s anti-society. This appropriate response to the level of pressure placed on is two-fingers-to-you-for-making-me-feel-this-way, lamenting women about their appearances is anger, and this is a mes- at being demanded to harm oneself and call it beauty. sage that sadly has only grown more relevant with time. Everything about Hole’s aesthetic, lyrics and music was about If Hole were pissed off by the 90’s, then we need a renaissance screwing with traditional perceptions, particularly those about of this kind of agitation for now, as demands on women to femininity, trying to scratch away the surface of traditional, conform with their bodies has only grown. There has never socialised appearances to show what it takes to appear 33 been a greater need for women to scream messages that effec- tively tell society and its expectations to go fuck themselves.

Even those who previously hated her need to start uttering the following words like a mantra: come back Courtney Love, all is forgiven…

34 The future “Your whole wide world is in my hands…”

Photo by rufusowliebat used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic Licence Most established bands hit tipping point, Nobody's Daughter: Hole's the stage at which their albums become just like mile markers rather than explosions of glitter and glam lighting up a dull beautiful neglected child sky. For the Stones themselves the point at which that oc- Mic Wright curred is a point of debate. Plenty of people will tell you its Some Girls, others will plump for Emotional Rescue. Either way, best case scenario: The Rolling Stones haven't made a truly great album since 1980. 1980! 19-bloody-80.

It's controversial – i.e. some folk get antsy – to say that Hole/ Courtney Love have not reached that point but in my not so humble opinion they haven't.

America's Sweetheart, Courtney's only solo album to date has been savaged – even by who co-wrote on it and produced the record – but it's not a fair assessment. It was a good album with more ideas and anger than most bands manage in a whole career. Mono and All The Drugs alone mean that record stands up.

The latest Hole album, Nobody's Daughter, finds Courtney writing some of the best lyrics of her career. But, as often hap- pens to bands which shed original members, the absence of Eric and the presence of Courtney's new collaborator, British guitarist Micko, means it has been brushed aside by many. Again: wrong! WRONG! WRONG!!!

Nobody's Daughter opens the record in a brash clattering at- tack of acoustic guitars, as nakedly autobiographical as Court- ney has ever been: "I'm not stupid, I just need a lot of help to understand how stupid you really are." 36 She picks at the scabs of her romantic and family life and digs under-sexed/baby what did you expect?/I'm over-wrought deep into her history, she understands herself as a character and so disgraced…" in her own and other people's fictions. Since the very beginning of Hole, Courtney has written bril- #solidarity is not something Courtney Love has ever signed up liant female protagonists into her songs. Samantha is another to. She writes both feminist tracts and utterly frank take- brilliant one: downs. sits in the latter category: "Skinny "Keep waiting for war/you'll never win/you'll lose again/ little bitch, stare at the mirror, in your desperation to disap- watch her wrap her legs around this world/can't take that pear, you would be oh so dumb to fuck with me because baby gutter from the girl…" you're much to young to end up with me…your bedrooms are falling down, cause everyone can see you now." Somebody Else's Bed is dark and from the sweaty aftermath of disasters: Honey is the ragged romance Courtney has always specialised in. Channeling the spirit of Stevie Nicks at her least witchy "So your lying in your underwear/in someone else's bed/and and most bruised: "Are you up there? Do you listen?" the silence is so dangerous/there's a terrible sense of dread…" Being a widow is like a scar, it never completely heals, it is a mark on your forever and it runs through Courtney's work like Courtney, an over-sharer before it was mainstream, sings to a message in rock. herself and lets us in there too.

Pacific Coast Highway enters the territory that Courtney cov- For Once In Your Life is a similarly self-help, self-delusion, ered so powerfully on Celebrity Skin – as a prism self-obsessed piece: for focusing her feeling of loss and lust. "You just don't love me and I just don't care…" Kurt Cobain is a living thing in Courtney Love's mind, a maths problem she will never solve, a sentence without a full A rehab record, a record coming when Courtney was at her stop: lowest, Nobody's Daughter is as raw as a skinned knee:

"I knew a boy, he came from the sea, he was the only boy "And when you're gone/it gets so cold/I swear I'm too young who ever knew the truth about me/I'm overwhelmed and to be this old." To be famous is to be childlike and ancient.

37 "I've been cheated/covered in diamonds/and covered Can her lover stay as she rebuilds herself? He should but by in filth." god, what a raw list of mental collapses to listen to, no matter how nice the guitar might be: Letter To God takes the record even rawer to even more pain- ful places: "What angry star runs your devil heart?"

"Dear God, I'm writing this letter to you because I don't have Never Go Hungry – Courtney always said, despite the spite a clue/can you help me? I'm sitting here simply trying to fig- spat her way, that the money was not her money but Kurt's ure out what my life's all about, can you tell me? I never money, Frances Bean's money. wanted to be the person you see/can you tell me who I am? I Without parents to save her Courtney Love has always had to always wanted to die/but you kept me here alive, can you tell make her own money and this song sings of that clearly: me who I am?" "I don't care/what it takes my friend/I will never go hungry/ Kurt went but Courtney stayed. The tougher path, living is not go hungry again…" the best revenge, it's the hardest struggle. Happy Ending Story – wishful thinking and wistful thoughts. Loser Dust. Pretty On The Inside was a punk record with Kim Courtney sounds utterly ragged on this one: Gordon at the desk. Loser Dust is that back and bold and beautifully brutal: "Tell me a happy ending story/is there a happy ending story?" "I love every inch of you/you're going down for what you love/every single part of you/you're going down for It's a song for 4am when the world looks like it could end be- your loser dust…" fore sunrise.

How Dirty Girls Get Clean – rehab rock gets literal: Nobody's Daughter isn't a busted flush final strum from a rockstar out of ideas. Hole has not reached Rolling Stones "I've lost my money/I've lost control/I've lost the feeling in point. Rather it is a chapter in one of the most remarkable my arms/I'm a lost soul…this how dirty girls get clean/don't catalogues of art about the experience of a woman in the mod- leave me now…" ern world, an extraordinary woman experiencing extraordi- nary fortune and incredibly public humiliation and pain.

38 Authors, photographers and artists INFO TO COME

©2012 Breadcrumb Trail Publishing

The essays contained in this collection are the property of the respective authors. Lyrics quoted for reasons of scholarship and criticism. xxxix