* “You don’t really love that guy you make it with now do you / I know you don’t love him now ’cause I can see right through you”
– R.E.M.
* “The coach taught me to sing / He couldn’t teach me to love / All the above”
– Pavement
* “Love hurts”
– Nazareth
* “Someone like Donald Trump can’t control the way I show love to my brother.”
– Kamasi Washington
..
We’re on the precipice of another new Kamasi Washington album now, Heaven and Earth, a production theoretically so vast and celestial that fully digesting it takes a significant amount of patience and investment. I guess right now, then, I’m preferring the easy to the difficult in life and in recently watching this Hole performance on Later… with Jools Holland I was practically beaten over the head with a devastating lesson on humanity.
In general, the entity of Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain is a hard thing to handle without encountering a crossfire of virulent opinions, whether in conversation with other people or just in one’s own mind thinking back to it. Love, no doubt, was not somebody particularly well respected to a measurable extent amidst the populace following Nirvana’s demise — Saturday Night Live made fun of her one time for being a junkie, along with it seems pretty much every ardent male music fan bustling out of the woodwork with some serious umbrage against her, a hate so blinding the reasons get obscured by the general principle that COURTNEY LOVE IS A CU**.
So anyway, let’s get the facts straight. Sadly, the two’s romance was hardly speckled with majesty from the start. As Everett True reports in Nirvana: the Biography, Kurt Cobain made the comment in 1991 on live TV that “Courtney Love is the best fu** in the world.” I guess what I’m saying is that given this, it’s easy to see how what transpired likely didn’t IN-spire anybody, in realms of spiritual enlightenment, or anything like that. Maybe Cobain’s wife named herself “Love” as a way of compensating for the lack of a certain something on the inside.
Now, the counterargument to what I’m saying would be that we’re all biological animals, and that no relationship inundation has ever really HELPED any band, in history. In other words, the idea would be that no development of true romantic love could actually enact an artistic emboldening on any musical endeavor, so it doesn’t matter whether they loved each other or not. In this case, it would slightly assuage both parties, particularly Love, who again, I think calls herself that as a sort of unfortunate spiritual sandbagging, in their crimes against humanity.
Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson states in Nirvana that “‘I think Kurt wanted to live out his junkie couple fantasy with her, like Sid and Nancy.’” The author himself though states at one point in the book that “Courtney didn’t turn Kurt on to heroin, though: even Krist Novoselic, a man who has more reason to dislike Courtney than most, will tell you that.’” Actually, from reading the Nirvana biography in general, you get an even darker sense of what Cobain was feeling and encountering in realms of humanity in general: flanking a vivid account of his seething disdain for ignorant radio DJ interviewers is a relation of him becoming just devastated by people themselves, upon his encountering of fame. “A couple of Montesano kids from Kurt’s old school showed up,” the Biography reads, “demanding autographs — something that freaked Kurt out more than anything.” We then get the haunting graphic: “There’s a famous Charles Peterson photograph from that day, of Kurt sitting looking absolutely devastated, head held between his hands, on the brink of tears.”
The truth is, we don’t really KNOW why these “Montesano kids” bothered him so much — whether it was a girl who maybe demanded his signature but still paid no real affection to him, or if it was a guy with just still a frustrated, sycophantic look in his eye wanting a taste of his glory. Either way, in the vein of the whole “fame driving people crazy thing,” one thing this proves is that it’s not just the “big shots” — it’s the exposure to the human nature of everyday people that can really debilitate someone’s psyche and morale on this level, causing them to “withdraw,” as Novoselic claims Cobain did after the achievement of fame.
Framing Courtney Love against this backdrop, we at another point in Nirvana: the Biography get wind from Northwest musician Ian Dickson that “‘Courtney adopted a lot of her agenda and used it to become famous.’” Hole’s one song (which really sucks) is called “Doll Parts” and it’s obviously supposed to be an ironic perspective of society itself, which attempts allegedly to objectify women and quantify their bodily attributes, but at the same time, she did publish a journals book with her bare a** on it, called Dirty Blonde (a book that was in no way interesting, much like Hole’s music itself) [1]. The most distressing thing to me about Hole’s performance of “Doll Parts” on Later… with Jools Holland is that it is, within 1995, in the direct wake of her husband’s death, yet the song comes from while he’s still alive (the album Live through This literally came out within one week of the singer’s suicide). So in other words, his death caused zero artistic sea change in her: it’s like nothing at all happened, she’s still trolling through this desultory song about how society is supposedly so evil, whining as if somebody made her get up on the mic and sing.
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[1] The one exception to this is the catchy and climactic album Celebrity Skin — I have a theory that she bought these songs from somebody, seeing as her band hasn’t done anything good before or since.
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