No Love For Love

I have never been ashamed to say that I have an unconditional love for Courtney Love. She's maybe not so relevant or interesting these days, but she has represented many important things to me, and I love much of her music. Lots of people hate her because the 90's alternative music scene was highly misogynist (the fans if not the artists--Eddie Vedder in particular is an awesome guy who might get a Feminist of the Week post soon). I was about to liken her to Hillary Clinton but probably that will sound ridiculous--basically, she was a woman married to a famous, talented man who dared to have a personality, who dared to be outspoken and have a career of her own. So, :P to you if you hate on the Love.

Lots of people point to her relationship with Cobain as the justification of this attitude, which only gets me thinking about the fact that we don't give a SHIT how male artists treated their lovers, but boy do we care how female artists treat theirs. I recently learned that William S. Burroughs shot and killed his second wife, and Norman Mailer stabbed his wife with a penknife, at a party. Novelists are different than rock stars, to be sure, but think--do you know or care how your rock idols treat women? Don't you ASSUME that most of them treat them pretty badly? We as a culture tend to romanticize this kind of behavior among male rock stars, or at most shrug it off and point to the quality of their music as more important. Live Through This was a (pardon the term) seminal album, if you don't, y'know, hate women. So don't tell me that's why. If you want to argue that she's less talented that Kurt Cobain, well--aren't most musicians? Is every artist we let off the hook as talented as Kurt Cobain was? Ha, yeah right.

And I'm sorry, she did not kill him. And she was hated before he died, anyway.