“A Tribute to Courtney Love, the Truest ‘Cancer’ of Them All”

Now, please let me preface by saying that I obviously realize it’s not within people’s control in what time of year they’re born, and I’m not deliberately attempting to disparage a group of people for the purpose of propagating my blog. It’s also my intention, within my already perhaps questionable practice of actually believing in the importance of these “zodiac sign” things, to in my own obscenely amateurish way illustrate a lot of the commendable parts of Cancers, a sign that’s two slots away from my own (Virgo) but one which has housed a sister, father, cousin and uncle of mine, off the top of my head, as well as certain people who have been prominent in my personal life for various reasons.

Courtney Love, born July 9, 1964, is the lead singer of the LA alternative rock band Hole, former wife of cross-dresser Falling James and widower, mother-of-daughter-of the late Kurt Cobain. Actually, I just looked at Hole’s Wikpedia page and it lists “Hollywood” as their true town of origin. This makes sense, obviously, as Courtney Love is nothing if not a “rock star” — she hasn’t done any notable side projects other than Hole (having teased at joining Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl for a de facto Nirvana reunion) and all of Hole’s albums were released on a major, mainstream label. This is especially ironic since her late husband, Kurt Cobain, made a regular, adamant practice of championing lesser-known “indie” acts like The Raincoats, The Vaselines and the Meat Puppets [1] and even took to lambasting bands like Guns ’n Roses, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden [2] as excessively “commercial.”

But then, women are a powerful thing. Don’t let anybody tell you different, least of all Kurt Cobain, who wrote the song “Aneurysm” about his girlfriend of the time Tobi Vail (Bikini Kill), replete with the implicit suggestion that he were on the verge of suffering very said physical disorder by direct way thereof, and bequeathing of the line “Love you so much it makes me sick”. That meeting Love spurred some amorousness in him that would border on dementia should be obvious from his going on TV shortly after and proclaiming that “Courtney Love of the band Hole is the best fu** in the world” [3] [4]. As heavy as his heroin addiction was around this time, it was probably Love who killed him off more than anything, what with what was reportedly her dalliance with Smashing Pumpkins singer Billy Corgan and her explicated refusal to have sex with him, even though they were married, during his drug-addled later days [5].

Is cheating a quality of Cancers? I really don’t know and I didn’t necessarily mean to imply that: and either way, adultery is a pretty prevalent sin in our society, hardly isolated enough to pin on one astrological group whatever. Eerily enough, I have two former bosses who are or were restaurant general managers and who are both female, both roughly three to five years younger than me and both, believe it or not, actually sharing the same birthday as Courtney Love. One of them is married but just became so about a year ago and the other one to my knowledge has never been married (though they both have kids), so it doesn’t really look like there’s anything to that. But Love’s proclivity for having Billy Corgan write songs for her that she’d then go to take credit for and make money on might move stepwise toward defining the sort of “noxious” qualities of the sign.

Anyway, here’s my take on Cancers, in a nutshell. They turn neuroses into reality. If you have a glitch in your morale, behavioral set, self-esteem or general habitual repertoire, they will magnify it, without even attempting to. They will show you your own shortcomings and weaknesses by the ironic method of complete blankness and silence. This would have been particularly hazardous for Kurt Cobain (who sang “She eyes me like a Pisces” in “Heart-Shaped Box”) in all his substance abuse and fragile morale.

And don’t get me wrong: I don’t think it’s a malicious intent on the part of Cancers to belittle you. It’s more, if they’re not naturally nurturing people, that they just have nothing to give, through no fault of their own, that would stand to nurture. I think they have a bent toward being successful, as my general illustration of them will concur, and they’re people who are typically capable of demonstrating a pretty minute, if existent at all, chunk of bad social habits. Courtney Love, for instance, had this uncanny ability to cotton on to Kurt Cobain’s set of values and use it as a model to correctly, within its scope, browbeat Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament as a jock and Axl Rose as a typical “rock star” (again ironic seeing as she was so spotlight-driven herself).

Confidence is probably just about a given in Cancers, evident in Love’s cocksure recitation of Kurt Cobain’s suicide note in front of thousands of people in that park in Seattle, right after his death. It’s like they don’t have ENOUGH neuroses, whereas Virgos like me are like MADE of neuroses. If you took neuroses out of a Virgo there would be so little left to us we’d crumble into a pillar of salt. One of my Virgo friends, complete partying jacka** with a beer gut the size of Montana, one time refused to drink MGD when I brought it over. He was just like, No dude, I don’t drink MGD.

But Cancers are born in the wide, expansive realm of early summer, which is a time of year that typically, culturally speaking, has a spotlight on it. Both of my former bosses, in their Facebook pictures, seem to have a predilection for showing some skin, whether at the beach or in risqué wedding dresses, and of course who could forget Courtney Love’s take on Kurt Cobain’s Journals, the Dirty Blonde collection with her bare a** on the front. I really think she’s kind of an a**hole, but hey, it’s not like anybody knows it better than she does. Here’s to Courtney Love and to summer, that entity that every year, over and over, lures us into a false sense of comfort and bounty.

.

[1] He’s probably single-handedly responsible for propelling this particular group into a major label deal, by way of including them in Nirvana’s unplugged performance, a development which spawned the solid if not classic ’94 album Too High to Die and the ubiquitous hit single “Backwater.”

.

[2] Whereas his seething hatred for Alice in Chains is presumably so obvious as to not bear mentioning.

.

[3] As you might of guessed, he was using heavily around this time.

.

[4] You know I’m running out of the gumption necessary for finding official documentation for things like this but I know it happened around late ’91 or early ’92 and the episode is discussed in Everett True’s Nirvana: the Biography, a book I wholeheartedly recommend for any Nirvana fan.

.

[5] This being said, to her credit, it would be exceedingly hard to imagine any woman voluntarily copulating with someone who looked like Kurt Cobain did in that one picture with Pete Shelley.