Courtney Michelle Love (born Courtney Michelle Harrison; July 9, 1964) is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and visual artist. A notable presence in the punk and grunge scenes of the 1990s, Love has enjoyed a career that spans four decades. She rose to prominence as the frontwoman of the alternative rock band Hole, which she formed in 1989. Love has drawn public attention for her uninhibited live performances and confrontational lyrics, as well as her highly publicized personal life following her marriage to Kurt Cobain.
The daughter of Hank Harrison and psychotherapist Linda Carroll, Love had an itinerant early life. She spent her formative years in San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, where she was in a series of short-lived bands before being cast in two films by British director Alex Cox. After forming Hole in 1989, she received substantial attention from underground rock press for the group's debut album, produced by Kim Gordon. Hole's second release, Live Through This (1994), gave her high-profile renown with critical accolades and multi-platinum sales. In 1995, Love returned to acting, earning a Golden Globe Award nomination for her performance as Althea Leasure in Miloš Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), which established her as a mainstream actress. The following year, she saw further mainstream success with the release of Hole's third album, Celebrity Skin (1998), which was nominated for multiple Grammy Awards.
Love continued to work as an actress into the early 2000s, appearing in big-budget pictures such as Man on the Moon (1999) and Trapped (2002), before releasing her first solo album, America's Sweetheart, in 2004. The next few years were marked by publicity surrounding Love's legal troubles and drug addiction, which resulted in a mandatory lockdown rehabilitation sentence in 2005 while she was in the process of writing a second planned solo album. That project became Nobody's Daughter, which was released in 2010 as a Hole album but without any other members of the former lineups. Between 2014 and 2015, she released two solo singles and returned to acting in the network series Sons of Anarchy and Empire.
Love has also had endeavors in writing, co-creating and co-authoring three volumes of a manga, Princess Ai, between 2004 and 2006, as well as a memoir, Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love (2006). In 2012, she premiered an exhibit of mixed media visual art titled And She's Not Even Pretty.
Love spent her early years in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco until her parents' 1969 divorce, after which her father's custody was withdrawn when her mother alleged that he had fed LSD to her as a toddler,[11][12] which he denied.[13] Love's mother, who was studying to be a psychologist, had her in therapy by the age of two.[3] In 1970, her mother moved the family to the rural community of Marcola, Oregon, where they lived along the Mohawk River,[14] while her mother completed her degree at the University of Oregon.[15] She described her parents' household as being full of "hairy, wangly-ass hippies running around naked [doing] Gestalt therapy. My mom was also adamant about a gender-free household: no dresses, no patent leather shoes, no canopy beds, nothing."[16] Love was adopted by her then-stepfather, Frank Rodriguez.[14] He and her mother had two daughters and a son who died in infancy of a heart defect when Love was ten. They also adopted a boy.[17] Love attended a Montessori school in Eugene, where she struggled academically and had trouble making friends.[18][19] At age nine, a psychologist noted that she exhibited signs of autism.[18][20][16]
Love resided in Northwest Portland, Oregon in the early 1980s, supporting herself illegally as a topless dancer.
In 1972, Love's mother divorced Rodriguez, remarried, and moved the family to New Zealand.[21] There, she enrolled Love at Nelson College for Girls, from which Love was eventually expelled.[22][23] Love's mother sent her back to the United States in 1973, where she was raised in Portland, Oregon[24] by her former stepfather and other family friends.[25][26] During this time, her mother gave birth to two of Love's other half-brothers, Tobias and Daniel.[14] At age fourteen, Love was arrested for shoplifting a T-shirt from a Woolworth's,[27] and was sent to Hillcrest Correctional Facility, a juvenile hall in Salem, Oregon.[19][28] She was then placed in foster care until she became legally emancipated at age sixteen.[12] She supported herself by working illegally as a topless dancer[29][30] at Mary's Club in downtown Portland[31] adopting the last name "Love" to conceal her identity; she later adopted "Love" as her surname.[14] She also worked various odd jobs, including picking berries at a farm in Troutdale, Oregon,[32][33] and as a disc jockey.[34] During this time, she enrolled at Portland State University, studying English and philosophy.[35][36] Love has said that she "didn't have a lot of social skills,"[37] and that she learned them while frequenting gay clubs in Portland.[38]
In 1981, Love was granted a small trust fund that had been left by her adoptive grandparents, which she used to travel to Dublin, Ireland, where her biological father was living.[39] While there, she enrolled in courses at Trinity College, studying theology for two semesters.[40][41] She would later receive honorary patronage from Trinity's University Philosophical Society in 2010.[42] In the United Kingdom, she became acquainted with musician Julian Cope and his band, The Teardrop Explodes, in Liverpool and briefly lived in his house.[43] "They kind of took me in", she recalled. "I was sort of a mascot; I would get them coffee or tea during rehearsal."[44] In Cope's autobiography Head-On, Love is referred to as "the adolescent."[45] After spending a year abroad, Love returned to Portland: "I thought that [going to the United Kingdom] was my peak life experience," she said in 2011. "—that nothing else [would] happen to me again."[46] In 1983, she took short-lived jobs working as an erotic dancer in Japan and later Taiwan, but was deported after the club was shut down by the government.[47][48]
Career
1981–1987: Early projects; music and film
Love began several music projects in the 1980s, first forming Sugar Babylon (later Sugar Babydoll)[b] in Portland with her friends Ursula Wehr and Robin Barbur.[50] In 1982, Love attended a Faith No More concert in San Francisco and convinced the members to let her join as a singer.[3][51][52] The group recorded material with Love as a vocalist, but she was subsequently kicked out of the band. According to the Faith No More keyboardist Roddy Bottum, who remained Love's friend in the years after, the band wanted a "male energy".[3]
After Faith No More had their first hit—it was a song called "Epic"—I was in L.A. [stripping], and I used to have to dance to it; and when I had to dance to my first band's number one hit song, I was like "I have six months to make it or I'm jumping off a bloody roof."
She later formed the Pagan Babies with friend Kat Bjelland, whom she met at the Satyricon club in Portland in 1984.[3] As Love later reflected, "The best thing that ever happened to me in a way, was Kat."[3] Love asked Bjelland to start a band with her as a guitarist, and the two moved to San Francisco in June 1985, where they recruited bassist Jennifer Finch and drummer Janis Tanaka.[53] According to Bjelland, "[Courtney] didn't play an instrument at the time" aside from keyboards, so Bjelland would transcribe Love's musical ideas on guitar for her.[19] The group played several house shows and recorded one 4-track demo before disbanding in late 1985.[54][55] After Pagan Babies, Love moved to Minneapolis, where Bjelland had formed the group Babes in Toyland, and briefly worked as a concert promoter before returning to California.[19]
In 1988, Love aborted her acting career and left New York, returning to the West Coast, citing the "celebutante" fame she'd attained as the central reason.[3] She returned to stripping in the small town of McMinnville, Oregon, where she was recognized by customers at the bar.[3] This prompted Love to go into isolation, so she relocated to Anchorage, Alaska, where she lived for three months to "gather her thoughts," supporting herself by working at a strip club frequented by local fishermen.[73] "I decided to move to Alaska because I needed to get my shit together and learn how to work", she said in retrospect. "So I went on this sort of vision quest. I got rid of all my earthly possessions. I had my bad little strip clothes and some big sweaters, and I moved into a trailer with a bunch of other strippers."[74]
She was the most gung-ho person I've ever met ... She gave 180%. I've worked with some people that you've had to coax the performance out of them. With Courtney, there was no attitude.
–Don Fleming, who co-produced Hole's debut album with Kim Gordon, on Love[75]
Love performing with Hole, 1989.
At the end of 1988, Love taught herself to play guitar and relocated to Los Angeles,[76] where she placed an ad in a local music zine: "I want to start a band. My influences are Big Black, Sonic Youth, and Fleetwood Mac."[77] Love recruited lead guitarist Eric Erlandson; Lisa Roberts, her neighbor, as bassist; and drummer Caroline Rue, whom she met at a Gwar concert.[78] Love named the band Hole after a line from Euripides' Medea[79] ("There is a hole that pierces right through me")[80] as well as a conversation she had had with her mother, in which she told her that she couldn't live her life "with a hole running through her".[81]
Love continued to work at strip clubs in the band's formative stages, saving money to purchase backline equipment and a touring van,[82] and rehearsed at a studio in Hollywood that was loaned to her by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.[83] Hole played their first show in November 1989 at Raji's, a rock club in central Hollywood.[84] The band's debut single, "Retard Girl", was issued in April 1990 through the Long Beach indie label Sympathy for the Record Industry, and was given airtime by Rodney Bingenheimer's show on local rock station KROQ.[19] That fall, the band appeared on the cover of Flipside, a Los Angeles-based punk fanzine.[78] In early 1991, the band released their second single, "Dicknail", through Sub Pop Records.[85]
With no wave, noise rock and grindcore bands being major influences on Love,[78] Hole's first studio album, Pretty on the Inside, captured a particularly abrasive sound and contained disturbing lyrics, described by Q magazine as "confrontational [and] genuinely uninhibited".[86] The record was released in September 1991 on Caroline Records, produced by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth with assistant production from Gumball's Don Fleming; Love and Gordon had initially met when Hole opened for Sonic Youth during their promotional tour for Goo at the Whisky a Go Go in November 1990.[87] In early 1991, Love sent Gordon a personal letter asking her to produce the record for the band, to which she agreed.[88] Though Love would later say it was "unlistenable" and "[un]melodic",[89] the album received generally positive critical reception from indie and punk rock critics[90] and was labeled one of the twenty best albums of the year by Spin magazine.[91] It also gained a following in the United Kingdom, charting at 59 on the UK Albums Chart,[92] and its lead single, "Teenage Whore", entered the country's indie chart at number one.[93] The underlying feminist slant of some of the album's songs led many to mistakenly tag the band as being part of the riot grrrl movement,[94] a movement that Love did not associate with.[95][96] The band toured in support of the record, headlining with Mudhoney in Europe; in the United States, they opened for The Smashing Pumpkins,[97] and performed at CBGB in New York City.[98]
1992–1995: Breakthrough
After the release of Pretty on the Inside, Love began dating Kurt Cobain and became pregnant. During Love's pregnancy, Hole recorded a cover of "Over the Edge" for a Wipers tribute album,[99] and recorded their fourth single, "Beautiful Son", which was released in April 1993. Love and Cobain married in February 1992 and, after the birth of their daughter Frances Bean Cobain, relocated to Carnation, Washington and then to Seattle.[3] On September 8, 1993, Love and Cobain made their only public performance together at the Rock Against Rape benefit in Hollywood, performing two acoustic duets of "Pennyroyal Tea" and "Where Did You Sleep Last Night".[100] Love also performed electric versions of two new Hole songs, "Doll Parts" and "Miss World", both written for the band's upcoming second album.[100]
In October 1993, Hole recorded their second album, Live Through This, in Atlanta. The album featured a new lineup with bassist Kristen Pfaff and drummer Patty Schemel. Live Through This was released on Geffen's subsidiary label DGC in April 1994, four days after Love's husband, Cobain, was found dead after having committed suicide in their Seattle home. Two months later, in June 1994, bassist Kristen Pfaff died of a heroin overdose,[3] and Love recruited Melissa Auf der Maur for the band's impending tour. Love, who was rarely seen in public in the months preceding the tour, split time between two Washington homes, Atlanta, the Paramount Hotel in New York City, and the Namgyal Buddhist Monastery in New York.[36]
Live Through This was a commercial and critical success,[101][102][103] hitting platinum RIAA certification in April 1995 and receiving numerous critical accolades.[71] The success of the record combined with Cobain's suicide resulted in a high level of publicity for Love, and she was featured on Barbara Walters' 10 Most Fascinating People in 1995.[104] At Hole's performance on August 26, 1994 at the Reading Festival— Love's first public performance following her husband's death— she appeared onstage with outstretched arms, mimicking crucifixion.[105][106] A MTV review of their performance referred to it as "by turns macabre, frightening and inspirational."[107]John Peel wrote in The Guardian that Love's disheveled appearance "would have drawn whistles of astonishment in Bedlam", and that her performance "verged on the heroic ... Love steered her band through a set which dared you to pity either her recent history or that of the band ... the band teetered on the edge of chaos, generating a tension which I cannot remember having felt before from any stage."[108]
The band performed a series of riotous concerts during the tour, with Love frequently appearing hysterical onstage, flashing crowds, stage diving, and getting into fights with audience members.[105][109] One journalist reported that at the band's show in Boston in December 1994, "Love interrupted the music and talked about her deceased husband Kurt Cobain, and also broke out into Tourette syndrome-like rants. The music was great, but the raving was vulgar and offensive, and prompted some of the audience to shout back at her."[110] In retrospect, Love said she "couldn't remember much" of the shows as she was using drugs heavily at the time.[83] On Valentine's Day 1995,[111] Hole performed a well-reviewed acoustic set on MTV Unplugged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,[112] and they continued to tour late into the year, concluding their world tour with an appearance at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards, where they were nominated for Best Alternative Video for "Doll Parts".[113]
1996–2000: Acting and mainstream success
I went for that part so hard because I felt a need for atonement for some cultural damage that had arisen out of me and things that I had done. By doing that role, I felt that, personally and creatively, I could exemplify why this was the most un-glorious, unglamorous, fucked-up thing. And then, bang!, I was done with all that. I could fuck off and do something else.
–Love on her role in The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)[114]
In late 1997, Hole released a compilation album, My Body, the Hand Grenade, featuring rare singles and B-sides, and an EP titled The First Session which consisted of the band's first recording session in 1990. In September 1998, Hole released their third studio album, Celebrity Skin, which marked something of a transformation for Love, featuring a stark power pop sound as opposed to the group's earlier punk rock influences.[126] Love divulged her ambition of making an album where "art meets commerce ... there are no compromises made, it has commercial appeal, and it sticks to [our] original vision."[126] She said she was influenced by Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, and My Bloody Valentine when writing the album.[126][127] The Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan helped co-write several songs on the album. Celebrity Skin was well received by critics; Rolling Stone called the album "accessible, fiery and intimate—often at the same time ... a basic guitar record that's anything but basic".[128]Celebrity Skin went multi-platinum, and topped "Best of Year" lists at Spin and The Village Voice.[71] The album garnered the band their only No. 1 hit single on the Modern Rock Tracks chart with the title track "Celebrity Skin".[129] The band promoted the album through MTV performances and at the 1998 Billboard Music Awards.[130]
Hole toured with Marilyn Manson on the Beautiful Monsters Tour in 1999, but dropped out of the tour nine dates in after a dispute over production costs between Love and Manson, in addition to the fact that Hole was forced the open for Manson under an agreement with Interscope Records.[131] Hole resumed touring with Imperial Teen.[132][133] Love would later make claims that an additional reason the band left the tour was due to Manson and Korn's (whom they also toured with in Australia) sexualized treatment of teenage female audience members.[134] Love told interviewers at 99X.FM in Atlanta: "What I really don't like—there are certain girls that like us, or like me, who are really messed up... and they do not need to be—they're very young—and they do not need to be taken and raped, or filmed having enema contests... going out into the audience and picking up fourteen and fifteen-year-old girls who obviously cut themselves, and then having to see them in the morning... it's just uncool."[131]
Before the release and promotion of Celebrity Skin, Love and Fender designed a low-priced Squier brand guitar, called Vista Venus.[135][136] The instrument featured a shape inspired by Mercury, a little-known independent guitar manufacturer,[137]Stratocaster, and Rickenbacker's solid body guitars and had a single-coil and a humbucker pickup, and was available in 6-string and 12-string versions.[137] In an early 1999 interview, Love said about the Venus: "I wanted a guitar that sounded really warm and pop, but which required just one box to go dirty ... And something that could also be your first band guitar. I didn't want it all teched out. I wanted it real simple, with just one pickup switch."[138] In 1999, Love was awarded an Orville H. Gibson award for Best Female Rock Guitarist.[139] During this time, she also starred opposite Jim Carrey as his longtime partner Lynne Margulies in the Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon (1999), which was followed with a role as William S. Burroughs's wife Joan Vollmer in Beat (2000) alongside Kiefer Sutherland.[140]
After touring for Celebrity Skin finished, Auf der Maur left the band to tour with The Smashing Pumpkins; Hole's touring drummer Samantha Maloney left soon after. Love and Erlandson released the single "Be A Man"—an outtake from the Celebrity Skin sessions—for the soundtrack of the Oliver Stone film Any Given Sunday (1999). The group became dormant in the following two years,[141][142] and Love starred in several more films, including in Julie Johnson (2001) as Lili Taylor's lesbian lover, for which she won an Outstanding Actress award at L.A.'s Outfest,[143] and in the thriller Trapped (2002), alongside Kevin Bacon and Charlize Theron.[144] In May 2002, Hole officially announced their breakup amid continuing litigation with Universal Music Group over their record contract.[145][146]
2001–2011: Solo work and Hole revival
With Hole in disarray, Love began a "punk rock femme supergroup" called Bastard during late 2001, enlisting Schemel, Veruca Salt co-frontwoman Louise Post, and bassist Gina Crosley. Though a demo was completed, the project never reached fruition.[147]
Love performing in London, 2007.
In 2002, Love began composing an album with songwriter Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes, titled America's Sweetheart, also reuniting with drummer Patty Schemel. Love signed with Virgin Records to release it, and began recording it in France in 2003.[3]America's Sweetheart was released in February 2004, and received mixed reviews from critics.[148] Charles Aaron of Spin called it a "jaw-dropping act of artistic will and a fiery, proper follow-up to 1994's Live Through This" and awarded it eight out of ten stars,[149] while The Village Voice said: "[Love is] willing to act out the dream of every teenage brat who ever wanted to have a glamorous, high-profile hissyfit, and she turns those egocentric nervous breakdowns into art. Sure, the art becomes less compelling when you've been pulling the same stunts for a decade. But, honestly, is there anybody out there who fucks up better?"[150] The album sold less than 100,000 copies.[71] Love has publicly expressed her regret over the record several times, reasoning that her drug issues at the time were to blame: "America's Sweetheart was my one true piece of shit. It has no cohesive thread. I just hate it", she said in a 2014 interview.[151] Shortly after the record was released, Love told Kurt Loder on TRL: "I cannot exist as a solo artist. It's a joke."[152]
Love also collaborated on a semi-autobiographical manga titled Princess Ai (Japanese: プリンセス·アイ物語), which she co-wrote with Stu Levy. The manga was illustrated by Misaho Kujiradou and Ai Yazawa, and was released in three volumes in both the United States and Japan between 2004 and 2006.[153][154]
In 2005, Love was ordered into lockdown rehab by a California judge after a series of legal issues and controlled substance charges.[37] After her release in 2006, she published a memoir, Dirty Blonde, and started recording what would become her second solo album, How Dirty Girls Get Clean,[37] collaborating again with Perry and Smashing Pumpkins vocalist/guitarist Billy Corgan in the writing and recording. Love had written several songs, including an anti-cocaine song titled "Loser Dust", during her time in rehab in 2005.[155] She told Billboard: "My hand-eye coordination was so bad [after the drug use], I didn't even know chords anymore. It was like my fingers were frozen. And I wasn't allowed to make noise [in rehab] ... I never thought I would work again."[156] Some tracks and demos from the album (initially planned for release in 2008) were leaked on the internet in 2006, and a documentary entitled The Return of Courtney Love, detailing the making of the album, aired on the British television network More4 in the fall of that year. A rough acoustic version of "Never Go Hungry Again", recorded during an interview for The Times in November, was also released. Incomplete audio clips of the song "Samantha", originating from an interview with NPR, were also distributed on the internet in 2007.[157]
In June 2009, NME published an article detailing Love's plan to reunite Hole and release a new album, Nobody's Daughter.[158] In response, former Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson stated in Spin magazine that contractually no reunion could take place without his involvement; therefore Nobody's Daughter would remain Love's solo record, as opposed to a "Hole" record.[159] Love responded to Erlandson's comments in a Twitter post, claiming "he's out of his mind, Hole is my band, my name, and my Trademark".[160]Nobody's Daughter was released worldwide as a Hole album on April 27, 2010. For the new line-up, Love recruited guitarist Micko Larkin, Shawn Dailey (bass guitar), and Stu Fisher (drums, percussion). Nobody's Daughter featured material written and recorded for Love's unfinished solo album, How Dirty Girls Get Clean, including "Pacific Coast Highway", "Letter to God", "Samantha", and "Never Go Hungry", although they were re-produced in the studio with Larkin and engineer Michael Beinhorn.[161] The album's subject matter was largely centered on Love's tumultuous life between 2003 and 2007, and featured a polished folk rock sound, and more acoustic guitar work than previous Hole albums.[162]
The first single from Nobody's Daughter was "Skinny Little Bitch", released in promotion of the album in March 2010.[163] The album received mixed reviews.[164] Robert Sheffield of Rolling Stone gave the album three out of five stars, saying that Love "worked hard on these songs, instead of just babbling a bunch of druggy bullshit and assuming people would buy it, the way she did on her 2004 flop, America's Sweetheart".[165] Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine also gave the album three out of five stars, saying, "It's Marianne Faithfull's substance-ravaged voice that comes to mind most often while listening to songs like 'Honey' and 'For Once in Your Life'. The latter track is, in fact, one of Love's most raw and vulnerable vocal performances to date ... the song offers a rare glimpse into the mind of a woman who, for the last 15 years, has been as famous for being a rock star as she's been for being a victim."[166] Love and the band toured internationally from 2010 into late 2012 promoting the record, after which she dropped the Hole name and returned to a solo career.[167]
In May 2012, Love debuted an art collection at Fred Torres Collaborations in New York titled "And She's Not Even Pretty",[168] which contained over forty drawings and paintings by Love composed in ink, colored pencil, pastels, and watercolors.[169][170] Later in the year, she collaborated with Michael Stipe on the track "Rio Grande" for Johnny Depp's sea shanty album Son of Rogues Gallery,[171] and in 2013, co-wrote and contributed vocals on "Rat A Tat" from Fall Out Boy's album Save Rock and Roll; she also appeared in the music video for the track.[172] After solo performances in December 2012 and January 2013,[173][174] Love appeared in advertisements for Yves Saint Laurent alongside Kim Gordon and Ariel Pink.[175] Love completed a solo tour of North America in mid-2013,[176][177][178] which was purported to be in promotion of an upcoming solo album; however, it was ultimately dubbed a "greatest hits" tour, and featured songs from Love's and Hole's back catalogue.[179] Love told Billboard at the time that she had recorded eight songs in the studio.[180] "[These songs] are not my usual (style)", Love said. "I don't have any Fleetwood Mac references on it. Usually I always have a Fleetwood Mac reference as well as having, like, Big Black references. These are very unique songs that sort of magically happened."[180]
Love performing at Dream Downtown in Chelsea, Manhattan, New York City, September 2013.
On April 22, 2014, Love debuted the song "You Know My Name" on BBC Radio 6 to promote her tour of the United Kingdom.[181] It was released as a double A-side single with the song "Wedding Day" on May 4, 2014, on her own label Cherry Forever Records via Kobalt Label Services.[182] The tracks were produced by Michael Beinhorn, and feature Tommy Lee on drums.[183] In an interview with the BBC, Love revealed that she and former Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson had reconciled, and had been rehearsing new material together, along with former bassist Melissa Auf der Maur and drummer Patty Schemel, though she did not confirm a reunion of the band.[184] On May 1, 2014, in an interview with Pitchfork, Love commented further on the possibility of Hole reuniting, saying:
"I'm not going to commit to it happening, because we want an element of surprise. There's a lot of is to be dotted and ts to be crossed."[185][186]
In 2013 and 2014, Love worked with rock journalist Anthony Bozza to co-write her memoir, to be titled Girl with the Most Cake. Bozza submitted Love a manuscript in 2014 that he was quite pleased with, later calling it "possibly the greatest thing I’ll ever do with anybody."[187] Love, however, disliked it, and said in an interview that the text made her sound like she was "jacked on coffee and sugar in a really bad mood."[188] Love refused to pay Bozza for the work he had done, and he sued her in 2015 for lack of payment.[187]
In 2014, Love was cast in several television series in supporting parts, including the FX series Sons of Anarchy,[189]Revenge,[190] and Lee Daniels' network series Empire in a recurring guest role as Elle Dallas.[191] The track "Walk Out on Me" featuring Love was included on the Empire: Original Soundtrack from Season 1 album, which debuted at number 1 on the Billboard 200.[192]Alexis Petridis of The Guardian praised the track, saying: "The idea of Courtney Love singing a ballad with a group of gospel singers seems faintly terrifying ... the reality is brilliant. Love's voice fits the careworn lyrics, effortlessly summoning the kind of ravaged darkness that Lana Del Rey nearly ruptures herself trying to conjure up."[193]
In addition to television acting, Love collaborated with theater producer Todd Almond, starring in Kansas City Choir Boy, a collaborative "pop opera" which showed at the Manhattan arts center Here during their annual Prototype festival in January 2015.[194] Charles Isherwood of The New York Times praised her performance, noting a "soft-edged and bewitching" stage presence, adding: "Her voice, never the most supple or rangy of instruments, retains the singular sound that made her an electrifying front woman for the band Hole: a single sustained noted can seem to simultaneously contain a plea, a wound and a threat."[195] The show toured later in the year, with performances in Boston and Los Angeles.[196] In early 2015, Love joined Lana Del Rey on her Endless Summer Tour, performing as an opener on the tour's eight West Coast shows.[197] During her tenure on Del Rey's tour, Love debuted a new single, "Miss Narcissist", released on Wavves' independent label Ghost Ramp.[198] She also was cast in a supporting role in James Franco's film The Long Home, based on William Gay's novel of the same name, marking her first film role in over ten years.[199]
Musically, Love's work with Hole and her solo efforts have been characterized as alternative rock;[215] Hole's early material, however, was described by critics as being stylistically closer to grindcore and aggressive punk rock.[216]Spin's October 1991 review of Hole's first album noted Love's layering of harsh and abrasive riffs buried more sophisticated musical arrangements.[217] In 1998, Love stated that Hole had "always been a pop band. We always had a subtext of pop. I always talked about it, if you go back ... what'll sound like some weird Sonic Youth tuning back then to you was sounding like the Raspberries to me, in my demented pop framework".[126]
Love, pictured playing a Fender Mustang in 2012, has often played both Fender and Rickenbacker guitars throughout her career.
Love's lyrical content is composed from a female's point of view, and her lyrics have been described as "literate and mordant"[218] and noted by scholars for "articulating a third-wave feminist consciousness".[219] According to a 2014 interview, lyrics have remained the most important component of songwriting for Love: "I want it to look just as good on the page as it would if it was in a poetry book".[220] A great deal of her songwriting has been diaristic in nature.[3][221] Common themes present in Love's songs during her early career included body image, rape, suicide, conformity, elitism, pregnancy, prostitution, and death. In a 1991 interview with Everett True, Love said: "I try to place [beautiful imagery] next to fucked up imagery, because that's how I view things ... I sometimes feel that no one's taken the time to write about certain things in rock, that there's a certain female point of view that's never been given space".[222]
Critics have noted that Love's later musical work is more lyrically introspective. Celebrity Skin and America's Sweetheart are lyrically centered on celebrity life, Hollywood, and drug addiction, while continuing Love's interest in vanity and body image. Nobody's Daughter was lyrically reflective of Love's past relationships and her struggle for sobriety, with the majority of its lyrics written while she was in rehab in 2006.[223]
Love possesses a contralto vocal range,[229][230] and her vocal style has been described as "raw and distinctive".[231] According to Love, she never wanted to be a singer, but rather aspired to be a skilled guitarist: "I'm such a lazy bastard though that I never did that", she said. "I was always the only person with the nerve to sing, and so I got stuck with it".[33] She has been regularly noted by critics for her husky vocals as well as her "banshee[-like]" screaming abilities.[232][233] Her vocals have been compared to those of Johnny Rotten,[234][235] and David Fricke of Rolling Stone described them as "lung-busting" and "a corrosive, lunatic wail".[234] Upon the release of Hole's 2010 album, Nobody's Daughter, Amanda Petrusich of Pitchfork compared Love's raspy, unpolished vocals to those of Bob Dylan.[236]
Love has played a variety of Fender guitars throughout her career, including a Jaguar and a vintage 1965 Jazzmaster; the latter was purchased by the Hard Rock Cafe and is on display in New York City.[237] Love is seen playing her Jazzmaster in the music video for "Miss World". Earlier in Hole's career, between 1989 and 1991, Love primarily played a Rickenbacker 425[238] because she "preferred the 3/4 neck",[138] but she destroyed the guitar onstage at a 1991 concert opening for The Smashing Pumpkins.[97] In the mid-1990s, she often played a guitar made by Mercury, an obscure company that manufactured custom guitars,[137] as well as a Univox Hi-Flier.[239] Fender's Vista Venus, designed by Love in 1998, was partially inspired by Rickenbacker guitars as well as her Mercury.[137] During her 2010 and more recent tours, Love has played a Rickenbacker 360 onstage.[240] She has referred to herself as "a shit guitar player", further commenting in a 2014 interview: "I can still write a song, but [the guitar playing] sounds like shit ... I used to be a good rhythm player but I am no longer dependable."[241] Love's setup has included Fender tube gear, Matchless, Ampeg, Silvertone and a solid-state 1976 Randall Commander.[138]
Live performances
Throughout her career, Love has garnered a reputation for unpredictable live shows.[109] In the 1990s, her performances with Hole were characterized by confrontational behavior, with Love stage diving, smashing guitars[97] or throwing them into the audience,[242] wandering into the crowd at the end of sets,[242] and engaging in rambling and sometimes incoherent rants.[110] She has also been noted by music critics and journalists for her comical, often stream-of-consciousness-like stage banter.[243][244] In a review of a live performance published in 2010, it was noted that Love's onstage "one-liners [were] worthy of the Comedy Store."[244]
Public image
Love's candidness concerning her struggles with drug addiction and legal issues has made her subject to significant media interest over the course of her career,[245][246] and Rolling Stone once referred to her as the "most controversial woman in the history of rock."[247] She has openly discussed the substance abuse problems she has had throughout her life.[248][249][247]
Journalist Neil Strauss, commenting on Love in 1995, noted that she had "acquired a strange distinction reserved for Presidents, major felons and celebrity widows: every word she said and wrote became newsworthy. Her postings on the computer bulletin board America Online were repeated word for word in magazines; her arrests, scandals and the drug overdose of the bassist in her band, Hole, made national headlines."[250] Many journalists have labeled her the "Yoko Ono" of Generation X, comparing her relationship to husband Kurt Cobain to that of John Lennon and Ono.[251][252][253]
1992 Vanity Fair profile
Love's first major media exposure was a 1992 profile of herself and husband Kurt Cobain for Vanity Fair by journalist Lynn Hirschberg, entitled "Strange Love."[254] After being asked to participate in a cover story for the magazine, Love was urged by her manager, Janet Billig, to accept the request.[255] In the year prior, Love had been addicted to heroin along with Cobain, and the profile, published in September 1992, painted the couple in an unflattering light and suggested that Love had been addicted to heroin during her pregnancy.[256] The article ultimately resulted in the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services investigating, and custody of Love and Cobain's newborn daughter, Frances, was temporarily awarded to Love's sister, Jaimee.[3][257]
Love claimed she was misquoted by Hirschberg, and asserted that she had immediately quit using heroin during her first trimester after she discovered she was pregnant.[258][259] Record executive Danny Goldberg, who was a friend of Love and Cobain's, defended her against the claims, and commented on her decision to be profiled in the piece: "Courtney had this yearning for mass-culture acceptability and just couldn't say no to something like that. I had a sense of foreboding about it, but I had no idea it as gonna be as bad as it was. [She's] done a lot of stupid, self-destructive things, but I don't believe she screwed around with her pregnancy. Those allegations were anonymous."[255] Love would later claim that the publication of the article had serious implications for her marriage as well as Cobain's mental state,[3][260][261] suggesting it was a factor in his suicide.[262]
It's not about the paragraph about the heroin... I did it within the first trimester, until I took a pregnancy test. After that, I did not do it again. It's that simple. I don't give a fuck, but the rest of it involves fucking my child, and fucking my husband. The tone of it was irresponsible, that tone was incorrect, and [it] emasculated [Kurt]. Read it. It fucking makes [him] look like a two-foot-tall, small-cocked beta male.
— Love on the effect the article had on herself and Cobain.[255]
Legal issues and media interest
Courtney has a reputation of not being a nice person. It depends on the situation, though. She's completely self-absorbed. And all that anger that she has is just one big cover-up, because, really, she's just kind of a scared person. I was not threatening to her. I'm not interested in her husband—I'm gay. I'm a drummer. I'm not going to wear the same dress she's wearing. We came from the same place musically. That's why we got along.
—Bandmate Patty Schemel on Love's reputation in the media[263]
Following Kurt Cobain's suicide in 1994, public and media interest in Love heightened, and her erratic onstage behavior and suspected drug problems during Hole's 1994–1995 world tour significantly exacerbated the media's critical observations of her.[250] On July 4, 1995, at the Lollapalooza Festival in George, Washington, she punched musician Kathleen Hanna in the face after alleging she had made a joke about her daughter.[264] Love was charged with assault, to which she pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to anger management classes.[265] In 1995, she was arrested in Melbourne for disrupting a Qantas Airways flight after getting into an argument with a stewardess.[266] In a retrospective interview, Love stated that she could "not remember much" from the band's 1994–1995 tour,[83] noting that she had been using both heroin and Rohypnol heavily at the time.[3]
In 1996, Love went through rehabilitation and quit using heroin at the insistence of director Miloš Forman, who cast her in a leading role in The People vs. Larry Flynt. She was ordered to take multiple urine tests under the supervision of Columbia Pictures while filming the movie, and passed all of them.[116][267] During this period, and after the release of Hole's Celebrity Skin, Love maintained a more polished public image, though she attracted public attention after punching Los Angeles Times journalist Belissa Cohen in the face at a party; the suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.[268]
In February 2003, Love was banned from Virgin Airlines by founder Richard Branson after being arrested at Heathrow Airport for disrupting a flight.[269] In October of that year, in the midst of what Love would later admit was a serious cocaine and prescription drug addiction,[270] she was arrested in Los Angeles after breaking several windows of her producer and then-boyfriend James Barber's home, and was charged with being under the influence of a controlled substance;[271] the ordeal resulted in her losing custody of her daughter.[272] On March 18, 2004, Love was arrested in New York City for allegedly striking a 24-year-old male fan with a microphone stand at a concert at the Bowery Ballroom.[273] Four days later, on March 22, Love called in multiple times to The Howard Stern Show, making various claims and speaking erratically; in broadcast conversations with Stern, she claimed that the incident with the fan had not occurred, and that actress Natasha Lyonne, who was at the concert, was told by the alleged victim that he had been paid $10,000 to file a false claim leading to Love's arrest.[274][275] She pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in October 2004.[276]
On July 9, 2004, Love's 40th birthday, she was arrested for failing to make a court appearance and taken to Bellevue Hospital, allegedly incoherent, where she was put on a 72-hour watch.[277] According to police, she was believed to be a potential "danger to herself", but was deemed mentally sound and released to a rehab facility two days later.[278][279] Amidst public criticism and press coverage, comedian Margaret Cho published an opinion piece on her official website in defense of Love, titled "Courtney [Love] Deserves Better from Feminists," arguing that negative associations of Love with her drug and personal problems (including from feminists) overshadowed discussion of her music and, more importantly, her personal well-being.[280]
In 2005 and 2006, after making several public appearances clearly intoxicated (on the Late Show with David Letterman and the Comedy Central Roast of Pamela Anderson)[c] and suffering drug-related arrests and probation violations,[283] Love was sentenced to six months in lockdown rehab due to struggles with prescription drugs and cocaine.[284][285] She has stated she has been sober since 2007, and cited her Buddhist practice as vital to her sobriety.[286] In a 2011 interview, she said: "I've been maligned as this drug freak for years, [but] that's not the way I live anymore."[287]
In 2009, fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir brought a libel suit against Love concerning a defamatory post Love made on her Twitter account, which was settled for $450,000.[288] Six years later, Simorangkir filed another lawsuit against Love for further defamatory Twitter posts, and Love paid a further $350,000 in recompense.[288] A similar suit was brought against Love by her former attorney Rhonda Holmes in 2014, who also accused Love of online defamation, seeking $8 million in damages.[289] It was the first case of alleged Twitter-based libel in U.S. history to make it to trial.[290] The jury, however, found in Love's favor.[289]
Personal life
Relationships
In 1989, Love married James Moreland (vocalist of The Leaving Trains) in Las Vegas, Nevada, but has said that Moreland was a transvestite and that their marriage was "a joke", ending in an annulment filed by Love several months later.[291][292] After forming Hole in 1989, Love and bandmate Eric Erlandson had a romantic relationship for over a year,[293] and she also briefly dated Billy Corgan in 1991, with whom she has maintained a volatile friendship over the years.[291][294]
Her most documented romantic relationship was with Kurt Cobain.[295] It is uncertain when they first met, and there are varying accounts of how they came to know one another.[d] Journalist Michael Azerrad states that the two met in 1989 at the Satyricon nightclub in Portland, Oregon, though Cobain biographer Charles Cross has claimed the date was actually February 12, 1990, and that Cobain playfully wrestled Love to the floor after she commented to him in passing that he looked like Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum.[297] According to Love, she first met him at a Dharma Bums show in Portland,[298][299] while Love's bandmate Eric Erlandson stated that both he and Love were formally introduced to Cobain in a parking lot after a Butthole Surfers concert at the Hollywood Palladium on May 17, 1991.[300][293] Sometime in late 1991, Love and Cobain became reacquainted through Jennifer Finch, one of Love's longtime friends and former bandmates.[301][302]
After dating for several months, Love and Cobain were married on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii on February 24, 1992. Love wore a satin and lace dress once owned by actress Frances Farmer, and Cobain wore plaid pajamas.[303] Six months later, on August 18, the couple's only child, a daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was born. In April 1994, Cobain died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in their Seattle home while Love was in rehab in Los Angeles.[3] During their marriage, and after Cobain's death, Love became something of a hate-figure among some of Cobain's fans.[258] In reflecting on their relationship, Love said: "I think that it looked like it was headed for doom, but it didn't feel like it was headed for doom on a daily basis. We went mountain biking; we would go camping. We were damn normal."[304] After his cremation, Love divided portions of Cobain's ashes; she kept some in a teddy bear and some in an urn.[305] Another portion of his ashes was taken by Love to the Namgyal Buddhist Monastery in Ithaca, New York in 1994, where they were ceremonially blessed by Buddhist monks and mixed into clay which was made into memorial sculptures.[305]
Love is a supporter of the Democratic Party,[314] and in 2016 she endorsed Hillary Clinton's campaign for the U.S. presidency.[315] In 2000, Love gave a speech at the Million Mom March to advocate stricter gun ownership policies in the United States, calling the country's gun laws "nihilistic and barbaric."[316] At the rally, she cited her husband's suicide via an unregistered gun as an example of a "life ending in a moment of desperation and chaos, because a gun was handy, or near."[316] Love has also consistently advocated for LGBT rights: In 1997, she used her award speech at the MTV Fashion Awards to advocate for acceptance of the LGBT community, stating that "keeping gay people in the closet with our attitudes and actions is cruel...tacky, and most of all, it's boring."[317] Love identifies as a feminist.[318][319][320]
In 2000, Love publicly advocated for reform of the record industry in a personal letter published by Salon.[321] In the letter, Love said: "It's not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster or Gnutella or Freenet or iMesh or beaming their CDs into a My.MP3.com or MyPlay.com music locker. It's piracy when those guys that run those companies make side deals with the cartel lawyers and label heads so that they can be 'the labels' friend', and not the artists".[321] In a subsequent interview with Carrie Fisher, Love said that she was interested in starting a union for recording artists,[10] and also discussed race relations in the music industry, advocating for record companies to "put money back into the black community [whom] white people have been stealing from for years."[322] She also cited Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst as an example of "a white guy [getting] to express a black man's rage with all the privileges of [being] a white guy".[322]
Philanthropy
In 1993, Love and husband Kurt Cobain performed an acoustic set together at the Rock Against Rape benefit in Los Angeles, which raised awareness and provided resources for victims of sexual abuse.[100] Love has also contributed to amfAR's AIDS research benefits and held live musical performances at their events.[323] In 2009, Love performed a benefit concert for the RED Campaign at Carnegie Hall alongside Laurie Anderson, Rufus Wainwright, and Scarlett Johansson, with proceeds going to AIDS research.[324] In May 2011, she attended Mariska Hargitay's Joyful Heart Foundation event for victims of child abuse, rape, and domestic violence, donating six of her husband Kurt Cobain's personal vinyl records for auction.[325]
Love has also participated with LGBT youth charities, specifically with the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, where she has taken part in performances at the center's "An Evening with Women" events.[326] The proceeds of the event help provide food and shelter for homeless youth; services for seniors; legal assistance; domestic violence services; health and mental health services, and cultural arts programs. Love participated with Linda Perry for the event again in 2012, and performed alongside Aimee Mann and comedian Wanda Sykes. Speaking on her collaboration on the event, Love said: "Seven thousand kids in Los Angeles a year go out on the street, and forty percent of those kids are gay, lesbian, or transgendered. They come out to their parents, and become homeless... for whatever reason, I don't really know why, but gay men have a lot of foundations—I've played many of them—but the lesbian side of it doesn't have as much money and/or donors, so we're excited that this has grown to cover women and women's affairs."[327]
Legacy
Love, pictured in 2010, with her leg supported on the monitor, noted by critics as one of her signature stage moves.[80][328]
Love has had a significant impact on female-fronted alternative acts and performers.[329] She has been cited as a particular influence on young female instrumentalists,[330] once infamously proclaiming: "I want every girl in the world to pick up a guitar and start screaming."[331] "I strap on that motherfucking guitar and you cannot fuck with me. That's my feeling," she said.[332] In The Electric Guitar: A History of an American Icon, it is noted:
[Love] truly lived up to Paul Westerberg's (The Replacements) assessment of pretty girls 'playing makeup/wearing guitar' ... She frequently stood on stage, microphone in hand and foot on monitor, and simply let her Fender guitar dangle around her neck. She truly embodied the empowerment that came with playing the electric guitar ... Love depended heavily upon her male lead guitar foil Eric Erlandson, but the rest of her band remained exclusively female throughout several lineup changes.[328]
Having sold over 3 million records in the United States alone,[333] Hole became one of the most successful rock bands of all time fronted by a woman.[330][334]VH1 ranked Love no. 69 in their list of The 100 Greatest Women in Music History in 2012.[335] In 2015, the Phoenix New Times declared Love the number one greatest female rock star of all time, writing: "To build a perfect rock star, there are several crucial ingredients: musical talent, physical attractiveness, tumultuous relationships, substance abuse, and public meltdowns, just to name a few. These days, Love seems to have rebounded from her epic tailspin and has leveled out in a slightly more normal manner, but there's no doubt that her life to date is the type of story people wouldn't believe in a novel or a movie."[336]
Among the alternative musicians who have cited Love as an influence are Scout Niblett;[337]Brody Dalle of The Distillers;[338] Dee Dee Penny of Dum Dum Girls;[339] and Nine Black Alps.[340] Contemporary female pop artists Lana Del Rey,[341]Avril Lavigne,[342]Tove Lo,[343] and Sky Ferreira have also cited Love as an influence.[344] Love has frequently been recognized as the most high-profile contributor of feminist music during the 1990s,[345] and for "subverting [the] mainstream expectations of how a woman should look, act, and sound."[346] According to music journalist Maria Raha, "Hole was the highest-profile female-fronted band of the '90s to openly and directly sing about feminism."[347]Patti Smith, a major influence of Love's, also praised her, saying: "I hate genderizing things ... [but] when I heard Hole, I was amazed to hear a girl sing like that. Janis Joplin was her own thing; she was into Big Mama Thornton and Bessie Smith. But what Courtney Love does, I'd never heard a girl do that."[348]
She has also been noted as a gay icon since the mid-1990s,[349] and has jokingly referred to her fanbase as consisting of "females, gay guys, and a few advanced, evolved heterosexual men."[242] Love's aesthetic image, particularly in the early 1990s, also became influential, and was dubbed "kinderwhore" by critics and media. The subversive fashion mainly consisted of vintage babydoll dresses accompanied by smeared makeup and red lipstick;[350]MTV reporter Kurt Loder described Love as looking like "a debauched rag doll" onstage.[351][352] Love later said she had been influenced by the fashion of Chrissy Amphlett of the Divinyls.[353]
Cultural depictions
Love has been depicted in popular culture across various mediums: Artist Barbara Kruger used one of Love's quotes on her New York City bus project,[354] and the indie pop punk band The Muffs named their second album Blonder and Blonder (1995) after a quote by Love,[355] while a recording of her talking about a stolen dress appears as the track "Love" on the band's 2000 compilation album Hamburger.[356] She was also the basis of the character "Courtney" in Michael Hornburg's 1995 novel Bongwater; the novel, set in Portland, Oregon, is based on Hornburg's teenage years living there, where he had known her.[357] The novel was adapted as the 1998 film Bongwater, in which the character was renamed "Serena", played by Alicia Witt.
^Some publications have noted that Love was born Love Michelle Harrison, ostensibly based on claims Love made early in her career that she had been born with the first name Love. However, according to the California Birth Index, she was born Courtney Michelle Harrison in San Francisco County.[2]
^There are several different versions in circulation of how Sugar Babydoll (and later, Pagan Babies) formed. The version told in the E! True Hollywood Story as told by Kat Bjelland fails to mention the alternate names of the group, though Love's 1998 biography by Poppy Z. Brite notes the shift in name from Sugar Babylon to Sugar Babydoll.[49]
^Between 2004 and 2006, Love would make several public appearances that resulted in the public questioning her on her sobriety, beginning with an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman on March 17, 2004.[281] She would later admit to having been dealing with a cocaine and prescription medication addiction during this time, which resulted in a court-mandated six-month rehabilitation program in 2006.[282]
^There are varying accounts of how Love and Cobain were introduced, though the most commonly-repeated location of their meeting is the Satyricon nightclub in Portland, Oregon. Love stated in a 2010 interview that she first met Cobain there while performing spoken word at a Dharma Bums show.[3] Journalist Michael Azerrad dates their meeting at the Satyricon in 1989, though Cobain biographer Charles Cross has claimed the date was actually February 12, 1990.[295] However, Mark Arm of Mudhoney, who toured with Hole, suggested that the story about Love and Cobain meeting at the Satyricon was apocryphal, and that she had inquired about Cobain while she and Arm were on tour together in the fall of 1991.[296] According to Eric Erlandson per his 2012 book Letters to Kurt, both he and Love were formally introduced to Cobain on May 17, 1991 at the Hollywood Palladium after a Butthole Surfers concert. Alternately, Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland claimed to have introduced the two at the 1991 Reading Festival during the filming of 1991: The Year Punk Broke.[296]
^Staff (February 23, 2008). "Girls on the rise". The Nelson Mail. Stuff. Retrieved March 12, 2016. One such incident was celebrity Courtney Love declaring that New Zealand's boarding school system had made her what she was. The troubled rock star, who spent one term at the preparatory school, later asked if she could speak to the college – months after having been accused of shooting up heroin while pregnant.
^Iley, Chrissy (October 22, 2006). "Courting disaster". The Times. London. Retrieved January 23, 2011. "'I talked one of my mother's gurus, of which she had many, into letting me live with him. He got $3,000 a month from my trust fund, which he'd spend on boys, and I went to the junior high, where my friends were teenage prostitutes. They were so glamorous, I just wanted to hang out with them. Melissa, Melinda and Melody. I ended up going through the juvenile system with them because I got arrested shoplifting a Kiss T-shirt'. She was 13".
^"Courtney posts: Archives". Marilyn's Shampoo Word Press. July 27, 1994. Archived from the original on May 3, 2016. Retrieved January 1, 2015. Hole sells a lot of records and I'm comfortable if not (compared to berry picking for Fuji Farms in Oregon or stripping at Jumbo's Clown Room) really well off from music
^ abKennedy, Dana (August 12, 1994). "The Power of Love". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on October 18, 2014. Retrieved October 20, 2010. ((cite web)): Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
^ abKrahn, Angelina (April 8, 2010). "Corruption of the damned: A conversation with George Kuchar". A.V. Club. Archived from the original on November 5, 2013. Retrieved October 31, 2013. Courtney Love and Devendra Banhart appeared in Kuchar's class pictures before they were famous.((cite web)): Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
^"It Came From Kuchar". A.V. Club. June 15, 2010. Archived from the original on November 4, 2013. Retrieved November 3, 2013. ((cite web)): Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
^Reilly, Phoebe (October 2005). "Courtney Love: Let the healing begin". Spin: 70–72. Look, you've got these highly intelligent imperious girls, but who told them it was their undeniable American right not to be offended? Being offended is part of being in the real world. I'm offended every time I see George Bush on TV! And, frankly, it wasn't very good music.
^Peel, John (August 30, 1994). "Hole at Reading". The Guardian. Courtney's first appearance backstage certainly caught the attention. Swaying wildly and with lipstick smeared on her face, hands and, I think, her back, as well as on the collar of her dress, the singer would have drawn whistles of astonishment in Bedlam. After a brief word with supporters at the foot of the stage, she reeled away, knocking over a wastebin, and disappeared. Minutes later she was onstage giving a performance which verged on the heroic ... Love steered her band through a set which dared you to pity either her recent history or that of the band ... the band teetered on the edge of chaos, generating a tension which I cannot remember having felt before from any stage.
^ abSmith, Ethan (July 28, 1995). "Love's Hate Fest". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on December 7, 2014. Retrieved August 15, 2014. ((cite web)): Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
^Weston, Colin (May 4, 2001). "Sort The 'Bastard' Out". Drowned in Sound. Archived from the original on October 6, 2008. Retrieved February 10, 2010. ((cite web)): Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
^Caldwell, Michael (June 12, 2010). "Nobody's Daughter". San Diego Reader. Archived from the original on June 2, 2016. Despite the heaviness in Beinhorn and Hole's respective pasts, most of the tracks here are singer-songwriterly, where acoustics provide the backbone. This provides an intimate vibe to the proceedings.((cite web)): Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
^Wuelfing, Howard (January 6, 1997). "Swans Song". Addicted To Noise. The group count the likes of Metallica's Kirk Hammet, Henry Rollins, Courtney Love and even Jeff Buckley among its admirers.
^Stern, Howard (May 30, 2013). "The Howard Stern Show" (Interview). Interviewed by Courtney Love. New York: Sirius XM Radio. The Stooges were a really big deal to me.((cite interview)): Unknown parameter |agency= ignored (help)
^Love, Courtney. MTV Interview, 1994: "If you read Vanity Fair, you probably think I swig Jack Daniel's first thing in the morning, after I smoke my crack and don't see my daughter for ten days."
^ abBarton, Laura (December 11, 2006). "Love me do". The Guardian. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved November 3, 2013.
^Sirota, Peggy (November 13, 1997). "Women of Rock: Courtney Love". Rolling Stone (773): 163.
^Smolowe, Jill (November 3, 2003). "When Love Isn't Enough". People. Archived from the original on March 21, 2016. ((cite web)): Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
^Love, Courtney (October 28, 1997). VH1 Fashion Awards. VH1. I think that great personal style is being true to yourself and speaking your mind, which, since I'm up here, I'm going to do. I feel that keeping gay people in the closet with our attitudes and our actions is cruel, and it's tacky, and most of all, it's boring.Video on YouTube
^Love, Courtney; Perry, Linda (May 10, 2012). "Courtney Love: 'I Tried Begging'". The Insider (Interview). Archived from the original on December 24, 2013. Retrieved December 23, 2012. ((cite interview)): Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
^Conner, Shawn (August 21, 2013). "Scout Niblett (Interview)". The Snipe News. I was 17 when I first heard it. I definitely think they had a huge role in that. For me, the thing that I loved about them and her was the anger, and aggressiveness, along with the tender side. That was something I hadn't seen before in a woman playing music. That was hugely influential and really inspiring. Women up 'til then were kind of one-dimensional, twee, sweet, ethereal, and that annoys the shit out of me.
^Moran, Rob (April 30, 2010). "DUM THINGS". Vice. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved July 21, 2014. I played out their cassette tapes in about 6th or 7th grade. But I definitely thank Courtney Love for existing because she was one of my formative inspirations and one of the reasons that I play in a band now.
^Griffiths, Daniel (September 8, 2009). "Quick & Dirty – Nine Black Alps". SoundProof Magazine: 1.
^Ferreira, Sky (April 2014). "Sky Ferreira for Interview Magazine". Interview (Interview). Interviewed by Diehl, Matt. There are a lot of artists that speak to me in the way [Fiona Apple] does. Elliott Smith is one. I also remember when I discovered Hole. I knew Nirvana, and obviously Kurt Cobain was an amazing lyricist, but I remember when I first heard Hole's Live Through This [1994]—like, really listened to it—I was like, "Oh, my god! They get me!"
Bogdanov, Vladimir; Erlewine, Stephen Thomas; Woodstra, Chris (2002). All Music Guide to Rock: The Definitive Guide to Rock, Pop, and Soul. Hal Leonard Corporation/Backbeat Books. ISBN978-0-87930-653-3. OCLC47823606.((cite book)): CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
Carson, Mina Julia; Lewis, Tisa; Shaw, Susan Maxine (2004). Girls Rock!: Fifty Years of Women Making Music. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN978-0-8131-2310-3. OCLC942869029.
Green, Joey (2003). How They Met: Fateful Encounters of Famous Lovebirds, Rivals, Partners in Crime. Black Dog Publishing. ISBN978-1-4223-6673-8. OCLC52621239. ((cite book)): Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Heywood, Leslie; Drake, Jennifer (1997). Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN0-8166-3005-4. OCLC750478670.
Ladd-Taylor, Molly; Umanski, Lauri (1998). Bad Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America. New York: NYU Press. ISBN978-0-8147-5120-6. OCLC37221150. ((cite book)): Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Rocco, John M.; Rocco, Brian, eds. (1999). Dead Reckonings: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead. New York: Schirmer. ISBN978-0-8256-7174-6. OCLC46333798.
Roshan, Maer (2012). Courtney Comes Clean: The High Life and Dark Depths of Music's Most Controversial Icon. A Quick Fix Book. New York: Sterling. ISBN978-1-4027-9791-0. OCLC793820211. ((cite book)): Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Schippers, Mimi A. (2002). Rockin' out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock. Rutgers University Press. ISBN978-0-8135-3075-8. ((cite book)): Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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