Courtney Love FTW

Courtney Love played Warsaw last week at Orange Warsaw Festival - I went to the press conference she gave backstage, which was exciting as hell.

I was never into grunge at all, but I can’t disagree with Rolling Stone when they say Courtney Love is the most controversial woman in rock history. Widely known not so much for her own career, but for her husband’s suicide, she is the object of hate for legions of his fans, and an object of admiration for those who actually listened to her music and lyrics, appreciated her role as a style icon, or just the fact she’s been creatively active for 25 years. She is just as likely to appear on celeb gossip websites and in tabloids as she is on esteemed music blogs. She’s in her 40s, and still an iconic bad girl, transgressing a dozen social norms at a time. Pop culture loves spectacular troublemakers. The more the public hates her, the more symbolic she becomes - but with so much more class and artistic credibility than similar figures who have emerged in the last decade. According to feminist Rachel Shukert, she has the guts to be just as nihilistic and self-destructive as a man, knowing all along that the world, instead of praising her like a genius, will crucify her and make everything her fault.

As Shukert says in her brilliant essay, telling the story of her becoming-a-feminist-lightbulb-moment, Love is no one's role model but she still changes lives. She has, above all, no shame. She says or does what she wants, genuinely not caring what people will say. She's the kind of person always described by the press as 'troubled', her every action being reported as the final condemning proof of her disgusting lifestyle, threatening the morality of the rest of the world. And she would still flash her tits on tv, post semi-nude pictures of herself on twitter, rant all she wants, and above all, continue to write and record. Aged 12, she applied to join the Mickey Mouse Club and was rejected after reading Sylvia Plath's Daddy for her audition. A most recent controversy is that surrounding her loss of custody over her daughter, venting on twitter insulting everyone involved, then on Frances Bean's 18th tweeting a 'crazy-ass incoherent 35-tweet rant', expressing out-of-control, contradicting, yet undeniably sincere emotions. I think there's no doubt that she's crazy: hard childhood, years of substance abuse, personal trauma; but you know what - she isn't trying to pretend like she isn't. She's out there just like she is, crazy, conflicted, troubled, whatever. She's not acting like it's all great and a piece of cake. People naturally hate that: it's disturbing, shocking, and also real. Love isn't scared of being real, whatever it can mean. That's why I may not get what she's about, but I admire her greatly nonetheless.

It was incredible to see her in real life. She was really pale and really skinny, unhealthily so, kept smoking compulsively and jumping from one digression to another, occasionally making little sense. What was incredible though was how confident and calm she was in all that. Much more vulnerable than onstage, but still totally unafraid to be who she is. Piotr Metz, the festival's creative director, asked her about a Pearl Jam cover she played in Paris, and here she's replying to that, sort of, at the same time talking about a million other things:






Further questions were not up to any standard - what do you expect from the Polish public, playing here for the first time? Why aren't you headlining, is it a conscious decision? Were you upset by the reviews of Nobody's Daughter? And Love answers, in a totally reasonable way, even if the questions are inane or designed to intimidate.

I really wanted to ask her about her daughter, but felt it was way too painful and personal. Love mentioned sexism in her previous answer already, talking about her manager and how she's the only female artist he manages; so I asked her about the current state of feminism:






I'm not entirely sure what she was saying about the lunch she was having with another feminist, nor what she said exactly about her daughter in the beginning (I didn't catch it on video, but I think she said Frances Bean doesn't identify as a feminist, yet she recently made a bunch of feminist statements), or why the Credit Suisse bacchanal story was there, but it's really out of order how the interpreter then mistranslated the entire thing, saying that Love believed feminists were unattractive. What she said was that the connotation for the word was still negative, that 'we who wear heels and lipstick' can spell it femme-inist to make it sound more classy and French, but for most people, a feminist is still an unattractive woman. She also said she believed she was the last woman standing from her generation. She said she passed Kathleen Hanna in the street in New York the other day ('who has grey hair and runs a salon'), and they didn't say a word. It was sad.

I should really read Courtney's 2006 memoir Dirty Blonde before I say any more underreasearched stuff.But let me just mention Rachel Shukert's Nice Girls again, which is definitely worth reading, whether you care about Courtney Love or not. For a gist-of-the-story shorter reading, see Standing Up For Courtney Love And Outcasts Everywhere by Anna North. That's only the tip of the iceberg of controversy, but shows some fucked up and sexist shit that women who dare have to deal with.