Courtney Love Ate My Pasta
If we need an example of someone who embodies strength and vulnerability as non-dual, Courtney Love rules. She will also eat your pasta and not give a fuck.
Seeing the chairs overturned on the tabletops, we start to turn away, but the owner of the Italian restaurant insists his place is open. We resist a little. He slaps the table: “Sit! Eat!”
Eight of us fill a small nook by the front window, and it fogs. Outside, New York City is cold and dark. We’ve walked from an event at which R.E.M. showcased short films they commissioned for their last album, and agreed along the way that the weather called for warming pasta and red wine.
Halfway through the meal, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe checks his phone. “Courtney’s on the way.” I look up as the woman sitting across from me does too. Our eyes met; It had to be Love.
“She’s not eating,” Michael adds. “Just coming by to say hi.”
I’m done eating. It is only after Courtney Love waltzes in and begins to stab at my cacio e pepe that I decide I’m not finished with my dinner, and I’m being robbed of my meal. Love points at me with my fork. “What’s your name, again?” One of my noodles dangles from my fork that she’s taken from me, clinging to a tine.
“Holly,” I say a little too loudly, assuming she wants to properly address the injured party in her forthcoming apology. I hold my attention on her, but she looks down and resumes eating. I guess Courtney Love just wants me to watch her get away with eating my dinner.
A few minutes later, she asks my name again, and then again. I don’t know why she wants to know my name so many times, but I realize I didn’t once ask hers.
Women Artists Serve It Up in Song
Courtney Love hadn’t settled on a name for one of her early songs, which I learned to play on a used acoustic guitar I purchased from Dirt Cheep. I’d never heard Hole’s original version of it, just the rendition taught to me by my friend Jenna; playing it soft and a little folky.
We performed this song multiple nights a week on my parents’ porch. In the mid-1990s, that porch was our unofficial dive bar. It was crowded with shaggy-haired musicians tipping back on the hind legs of mismatched chairs around a table congested with ashtrays, candles corked in empty Boone’s Farm bottles, and a green plastic bong named Susan.
I couldn’t find the song on any of Hole’s albums. Back then, the Internet was as rickety as a hand-cranked radio, but it eventually became useful a decade or so later when I was able to listen for the first time to the song I’d mastered. It was unsettling to hear Courtney Love perform it. One of us is playing it wrong.
Never an official release, Love debuted the song on Valentine’s Day, 1995, on MTV’s Unplugged. As a tech takes away the guitar she’s holding, she says, “This is a new song, and I wrote it for someone who knows who they are, and for my friend Michael.” A different guitar is lowered into her arms, and she adds, “Oh, and it’s called either ‘Sugar Coma’ or ‘I Slept With the Devil.’ No, it’s called ‘Sugar Coma.’”
Titled neither of those things, “Boys on the Radio” was officially released in 1998 as a track on Hole’s album Celebrity Skin. The poppy undertones present in “Boys on the Radio” are in stark contrast to the lyrics, no doubt an intentional juxtaposition. Beneath those undertones, the raw plea in “Sugar Coma” writhes like a bedsheet. The two songs, different incarnations of the same soul: some old devil still tap-dancing inside the bleached bones of the boy on the radio.
Courtney Love’s vocals are disparaged differently from, say, Bob Dylan’s. Those antagonized by Dylan’s voice must concede that his lyrics make his singing worth enduring. Dylan’s thin, nasally tone is extolled as twinning the authentic, vulnerable aesthetic of his storytelling lyrics. Fans describe Love’s voice as authentic in a different way: powerful, savage, raw. Her critics—particularly male critics—respond to her voice with venom, triggered by her audacity to be loud and unpretty when she opens her mouth.
Not that soft and pretty necessarily receives deserved praise. For example, despite her acclaim, Joni Mitchell’s massive talent still manages to be short-changed. In a 2021 interview with Howard Stern, David Crosby says of Mitchell, “She’s as good a poet as Bob [Dylan], and she’s ten times the musician and singer he is.”
Yet it’s Dylan who ranks #1 on every ‘Best Songwriters of All Time’ list and, until recently, when these lists considered reader input, “Like a Rolling Stone” had taken the top slot in best-ever songs for decades.
Rolling Stone magazine ranks Mitchell at #9 on their list of best guitarists, but it’s unlikely her name will be dropped in casual, social settings when the topic comes up. The same names are tossed out, and then an argument ensues over who’s better: Hendrix, Clapton, or Page, as if they’re quarterbacks. Until someone who’d stepped out for a hand-rolled cigarette returns and calls Jeff Beck into play.
When asked who’d influenced her alternate tuning and unique fingerpicking style, Joni Mitchell told Rolling Stone, “I never emulated anybody. I’m driven to innovate. Am I a god? I’m a godette. I never had a guitar god.”
Mitchell isn’t the highest-ranked female guitarist on the list, however. At #6 is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a Black American singer-songwriter who performed gospel music while playing electric guitar in the 1930s and ’40s. She is cited as a major influence by every single one of the men credited with the invention of rock ‘n’ roll: Chuck Berry, Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, et al. Yet many music fans have never heard of Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Innovation isn’t a competition of bettering the best, but a collaboration between what already exists and new ways of manipulating it. In technology or automobiles, this might involve improvement, but in art, innovation is the singular requirement of an artist. You can prefer Rothko to Van Gogh, but you don’t argue that this is because Rothko painted better squares. Lists that rank artists exist because hierarchy is the feast of men, and women historically haven’t been given a seat at the table.
Courtney Love Is Still Hungry
At the head of our table, Courtney Love pulls up a chair by Michael Stipe. She’s not speaking loudly. I’m eavesdropping: She recently purchased new curtains for her living room and is recommending a fabric store in the Lower East Side, which I happen to know is owned by a Real Housewife. I don’t know what I expect to overhear, but I’m surprised by her domesticity. This is a woman who, at age 11, auditioned for The Mickey Mouse Club by reading Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”, which is not the sweet tribute of a daughter, but a dark, controversial poem addressing patriarchal oppression.
Indeed, Courtney Love has historically warned of danger and bluntly criticized harmful industry norms before others speak a word. Remember her bold remark about the now convicted sex offender, Harvey Weinstein, during a red carpet interview in 2005? “If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a party at the Four Seasons, don’t go.”
We prefer to go no further than to wade into uncomfortable truths, followed by performative resistance; the shivering and shuddering we display before we’ve acclimated to the cold. Regardless of corruptions thwarted and victims spared, we’ll shame those who stayed silent only after we are done reprimanding the one who spoke up. There are rules.
“There are no rules — if you’re a boy,” Madonna said when she accepted Billboard’s award for Woman of the Year in 2016. “If you’re a girl, you have to play the game…You are allowed to be pretty and cute and sexy, but don’t act too smart. Don’t have an opinion that is out of line with the status quo.”
The 1980s provocateur was anything but compliant with the status quo. Madonna‘s role in 1980s’ pop was visual to the same degree as it was sonic. She portrayed her image in chameleon-like roles: virgin, girl next door, mother, whore. While her overt sexuality summoned the loudest outcry, she’d awoken a more dormant taboo that went fairly unverbalized: daring to embody all feminine archetypes interchangeably.
A woman like that must not know who she is. Containing multitudes is for Walt Whitman.
Of course, what Madonna’s femaleness provoked, her whiteness allowed. Like her or not, her iconicity is deserved, but she didn’t have to possess exceptional musicianship to earn it. Unlike Nina Simone, a classical pianist who attended Juilliard, whose contralto is unrepeatable in tone, and whose career was harmed by her Civil Rights activism. As told to Esquire in 1969, Simone hoped for a day when she could “sing more love songs, when the need is not quite so urgent to sing protest songs.” Simone’s image provoked controversy merely by being a Black woman who used her voice during racially-charged times.
The depiction of Martin de Porres, the patron saint of racial harmony, was initially misidentified as a Black Jesus in Madonna’s music video for “Like a Prayer”. While the source of the uproar was declared even by non-Catholics to be her distasteful use of religious imagery like burning crosses and stigmata, it was understood that the pearl-clutching was primarily over the interracial kiss between Black Jesus and Madonna.
When she refused to remove the offending scenes, Pepsi promptly pulled the commercial they’d paid her $5 million to film. Other than that, the video didn’t harm her career and ultimately garnered enduring attention. Thirty-four years later, Pepsi finally aired the ad during the MTV Video Music Awards. Times had changed to accept an interracial kiss, but not soon enough for Nina Simone to sing more love songs.
In 1995, Madonna’s interview with Kurt Loder was interrupted when a sailing makeup compact landed at her feet, followed by another. “Courtney Love is in dire need of attention,” said Madonna, rolling her eyes at the woman throwing mirrors at her.
Irony was also missed by Alanis Morissette, whose bemoaned “ten thousand spoons” in 1995’s “Ironic” served her shame for years. The phrase likely instructs teenagers about irony better than their English teachers ever can. Morissette eventually quelled public perception that she was literarily misinformed by churning out dozens of intelligently written songs, but jabs at her for “needing a knife” persisted.
Meanwhile, Bob Dylan gets off scot-free with “Lay Lady Lay”. Poetic license is granted to him, as it should be. Lie Lady Lie doesn’t have the same ring, but if we’re being sticklers, the transitive verb he chose applies only to objects, not women.
Yoko Ono first impressed John Lennon with an installation piece that engaged the audience to climb a ladder and use the magnifying glass chained from above to reveal the word “Yes” finely printed on a canvas. Ono had already established a significant presence as a conceptual artist in the avant-garde sphere prior to meeting Lennon, who was a member of a band so intensely beloved that their popularity induced literal mass hysteria.
Internally, however, the band was fraught with personal and artistic disagreements. One year after Yoko and John married, the Beatles broke up. Despite her continuing to persist as an innovator who fuses art with activism, Yoko Ono’s most infamous work is one falsely attributed to her. She is reviled for the assumed ruin of everyone’s favorite 1960s band.
In contrast to Beatlemania, early 1990s grunge fans initially eschewed bands with mainstream popularity. Reportedly against his will, Kurt Cobain was eventually referred to by both critics and fans as “The John Lennon of Gen X”, and Nirvana was enshrined as rock nobility.
The band’s untimely end came as a result of Cobain’s suicide in 1994, which spawned conspiracy theories still thriving to this day: That his wife contributed, passively or otherwise, to his death.
Courtney Love Skewers the Meat of the Message
Courtney Love’s music career has spanned four decades in one of the most commercially successful bands fronted by a woman. Her performance in Milos Forman’s 1996 Academy Award-nominated film The People vs. Larry Flynt received unanimous, gushing praise. Yet she endures the same burden as Yoko: Their success is tethered to the coattails of their husbands, and they are blamed for silencing men.
In her first public appearance after Cobain’s death, fans rallied around Courtney Love at The Reading Festival, but rubberneckers and hecklers also gathered to spew vitriol.
“Oh yeah, I’m so goddamn brave,” she told the crowd. “Let’s just pretend [that fans blaming her for Cobain’s suicide] didn’t happen…Is that what you’re doing, pretending it didn’t happen? Great. Well, I’m not.” She proceeded to deliver a tense, cathartic performance, messily raging through her songs.
If the lyrics weren’t retroactively haunting enough, Love chose to alter the final line of “Miss World”. The crowd quieted as she sang, “I’m the one who should have died.”
And then they cheered.
After Courtney Love’s performance at the event, journalist Cathi Unsworth said, “Everybody wants to know about her, but few would really want to know her.”
In this context, What’s your name again? no longer sounds like a mantra Courtney Love chanted as if to shrink me to insignificance, but the paradox of an unseen spectacle: Hers is a name everybody knows and attaches to either a hero or villain story. Which is she? Every peering eye will receive the same magnified answer: Yes.
From tarnished to polished, the progression of “Sugar Coma” to “Boys on the Radio” mirrors the course of Courtney Love’s public persona, which, at present, is something akin to matriarch. Yet there’s nothing soothing about her; she is a fierce guardian of a door she knows what’s behind. She’s no saint, but neither are those pearly gates behind which men like Weinstein demand women perform private acts to gain access to their dreams.
She also practices Buddhism and grows roses. That might sound pretty and quaint if you’re unfamiliar with the effort cultivating inner quiet and stillness actually takes.
The tightly woven, archaic construct in society that pulls strength and vulnerability to opposite ends of a spectrum is, I hope, becoming threadbare. However, if we need an example of someone who embodies strength and vulnerability as non-dual, Courtney Love rules.
She will also eat your pasta and not give a fuck.
When I return home from New York, I tell a friend about what Courtney Love did at the Italian restaurant. He is disappointed in me for missing the opportunity to give her a different name each time she asked, “Just to see what she would do.”
“But everyone else at the table knew me. I couldn’t lie!”
“It’s not a lie if it’s performance art. You should have collaborated with her.” He cracks open a beer. “By the way, what restaurant was it? I’ll be in New York next month.”
“Oh, I have no idea.”
He smiles smugly as he leans back in his chair. “So, you didn’t get a name—You just waltzed in and ate their pasta.”
I wonder how many more times we will criticize Courtney Love for serving up her truth before we finally come to realize what it is that we’re swallowing.