It Felt Like a Kiss: the Courtney Love Anthology
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It Felt Like A Kiss: The Courtney Love 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 rock music for years. She’s a glimmer in Alex Cox’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 Liverpool Miss World, 1994 scene. Julian Cope 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 Larry Flynt, 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, pop music trivia, folk wisdom and folk foolishness. She’s This collection springs from a long gestation memory. I sat her own dream of Stevie Nicks 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 albums 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 Fleetwood Mac. She’s a Yoko Ono 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 Doll Parts. 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 The Guardian. 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. Kurt Cobain’s misery. And here she is on the cover of Vanity Fair, photographed by Herb Ritts 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 heroin, 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 youth 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’.