Courtney Love is an amazing person. No doubt you are currently thinking that the words “Courtney Love” and “amazing” should never belong in a sentence together unless “amazing” is followed by such adjectives as insane, crazy, or fucked up. Just trust me on this, she is amazing. And that is not necessarily good. Courtney Love is the only pop culture icon I can think of that manages to purposely attract the attention of the media by doing the most fucked up antics her coked-out brain can imagine. And then she hates them for it. She actually expects the world to believe that the press has been unfair to her and that she is a good musician, even when her records aren’t selling, and that she is a good mother, especially when she is shooting heroine while pregnant.
The flipside to this coin is that out of all the female musicians to emerge out of the Seattle scene, she is by far the most gifted and talented. Melissa Auf Der Maur may be the hottest female artist (maybe even hottest human) in the entire world, but her solo record is less than stellar. It’s good, but it’s not Live Through This good. Love’s solo record America’s Sweetheart however is very, very good. But did it sell? No. And I suspect this has a lot to do with all of the negative attention she has received in the media. At some point, even one’s most loyal fans are going to get fed up and move on, and I suspect that this is the fate Love and her music have suffered.
Love almost seems to go out her way to get all this attention, so one could only assume that she would be prepared for the media backlash. But if you ask her, she has been portrayed as a self-obsessed drug-addled bitch who can’t appear in public without a gallon of booze in her blood stream and her shirt nearly falling on the ground. This portrayal may be pretty mean, but it seems accurate enough, if not damn funny. The sad thing is that if she could (would may be a more accurate word) stop the drugs and drinking, she could be a powerful force in the music industry.
She owned most of the rights to Nirvana, which I still find amazing seeing as how she wasn’t even part of the fucking band, but that’s not my concern. She also maintains a lot of the rights to Hole’s catalog, which is worth significantly less than Nirvana’s, but still worth more than I will ever make in a lifetime. And she has somehow managed to lose the majority of both, as well as most of her money in the bank as she has had to file for bankruptcy. Poor Francis Bean Cobain is probably going to be hoping for student loans when she gets old enough, because it looks like her mother is pissing it all away.
Had Love been able to control herself and her habits, she would most likely still have most of her money, her stakes in Nirvana and Hole, her sanity (what was left of it at least), and her solo record probably would have sold better. I even dare to assume that people might be looking forward to her next album, had she stopped being a total fuck up. Unfortunately, she is now considered a joke, has almost no professional colleagues willing to put up with her shit to help her make a new record (except Billy Corgan, but only God knows why), and is pretty much irrelevant.
What does all of this mean for Love? Well, if she wants her next record to sell even one copy, she better get her shit straight. And the funny thing about her is we all know she won’t. One could invent a drinking game based on Courtney Love’s outbursts and public mishaps. This is sad because she is a good musician. I enjoyed America’s Sweetheart, and I liked every Hole record. I would almost be looking forward to her next record if I actually had faith in it being released, but as of right now I have about as much faith as I did in Axl Rose when he said we would have Chinese Democracy on store shelves before the millennium. Hell, I’ll be amazed if that record hits stores before China actually does have a Democracy. I give it 50/50, and I’ll give Love the same, just cause I’m feeling generous. Until then, lets hope she can get by just on being America’s fucked-up, insane, hopeless and broke sweetheart.
-B
And the sky was made of amethyst, and all the stars are just like little fish.
No comments:
Post a Comment