Since Cobain’s death, Courtney’s antics have been attracting a level of gossip-page, tabloid and evening-news attention that Courtney’s music just can’t compete with. _B_Courtney kisses Evan Dando in hotel room! Courtney stage-dives into audience and has her clothes torn off! Courtney passes out in makeup chair!b Not since Madonna has a singer been so good at being bad. Courtney does it with a punk-rock twist: with her ratted hair, smeared makeup, askew plastic barrettes and tattered baby-doll dresses, she looks like a sullied waif who wants revenge. Everything about her is uncensored. She can’t get through an interview, video shoot or memorial service without saying or doing something outrageously memorable. Courtney is the perfect icon for a talk-show age: from brushes with suicide to drug addiction to sexual promiscuity, she’s an entire ratings sweeps month rolled into one.
It’s a shame, because as a musician Courtney is nothing to sneeze at. Hole’s second album, “Live Through This,” released the week of Cobain’s suicide in April 1994, is a strong, smart alternative rock record. Courtney sings in a flat, petulant voice that ranges from melancholy to rage; she may not be able to carry much of a tune, bless her heart, but male rockers from Mick Jagger on down have been getting away with pitch-imperfect voices for decades. Her songs are angry, dynamic treatises on feminine angst. The album has gone gold, but despite a big push from MTV, it hasn’t cracked Billboard’s top 40. So far those evening-news telecasts haven’t turned into sales.
The rock press, for the most part, has been standing by its woman. The Rolling Stone critics’ poll named Love artist of the year (beating out Cobain) and “Live Through This” album of the year. In December the magazine ran a cover story that painted Love as a grieving widow and devoted mother, despite the fact that in the interview Love admitted to using heroin since Cobain’s death, and described a dual-suicide pact the pair intended to carry out the day after their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was born. Cobain, apparently, brought a gun to the hospital. Spin’s current issue depicts her as a rugged survivor and devoted mother, despite the fact that Love embellishes her tale of Frances’s birth with details of Cobain summoning his dealer and overdosing in the hospital. The Village Voice recently ran an intellectual analysis of Hole’s video “Doll Parts” in which the writer vaunted “Live Through This” as “our fierce feminist manifesto,” then chastised the singer for letting her boobs and butt hang out too much.
But these attempts to lionize Love ring as hollow as the tabloids’ attempts to demonize her. On just about every count, Courtney ultimately fails to live up to her myth. She’s no feminist: her rabid quest for attention in any form fulfills too many archaic female stereotypes. Whether or not she’s a good mother may be no one’s business to judge, but who would want to trade places with little Frances, now 2 and regularly being dragged onstage? And she may be a good musician, but she has yet to prove herself a great one. There’s only one band that can be credited with turning around the listless course of rock music in the ’90s, and it’s not Hole – it’s Nirvana.
Courtney’s background gives major clues to her behavior. Born in 1965 to San Francisco hippie parents, she had a notoriously unstable childhood. Her father was a Grateful Dead scenester; her mother, Linda Carroll, was from a wealthy family and later became a therapist whose clients have included radical ’60s fugitive Katherine Ann Power. Courtney’s parents split when she was very young, and she moved around a lot as a kid – Oregon, New Zealand, Australia, Oregon again. Her mother remarried several times, and at 12 Courtney landed in an Oregon reformatory for shoplifting a Kiss T shirt. The rest of her adolescence was spent bouncing in and out of reform schools, working as a stripper, singing in bands. For a while she thought she would conquer the world through acting, and had roles in two Alex Cox films, “Sid and Nancy” and “Straight to Hell.” Cox, Courtney has said, “put his arm around me and said the most subversive thing he could think of was foisting me on the world.”
In 1990, she met Cobain, and they wed two years later. It’s impossible to credit Cobain for Courtney’s rise, yet it’s hard not to notice that until she hooked up with him, nothing in her life had quite worked out. After Nirvana broke through with “Nevermind,” Courtney signed a contract with Geffen Records that was more lucrative than her husband’s. “I made them pull out Nirvana’s contract,” she said in 1992, “and everything on there, I wanted more.”
Courtney’s big mouth can seem like the source of her undoing – she regularly vents her spleen on America Online – but friends say her outspokenness is a quality worthy of admiration, especially in a woman. “She has an unedited personality, an unedited mind,” says one industry friend. “Some people are offended by it. But it’s something I find really engaging.” Still, Courtney’s antics leave a nagging impression that her music is not an end in itself, but a means to another end, a way to power. The irony is that in the ’90s, more and more women are building solid careers with their music, not their image, as a focus. Melissa Etheridge has sold more than 2 million copies of her latest album, “Yes I Am,” and the fact that she’s an open homosexual hasn’t distracted anybody. Sheryl Crow is the biggest female rock singer of the year, and nobody knows who her boyfriend is. Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth has become the Marmee figure of alternative rock: she’s the female punk prototype who influenced Courtney and so many others. And Chrissie Hynde is still Chrissie Hynde. Courtney could learn a thing or two from all these women. She may be getting all the attention right now, but they’ve got the respect.
