Photo by Marie Havens
Courtney Love covers "Creep"
Courtney Love covered Radiohead’s song “Creep,” and it made headlines in Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and SPIN Magazine.
What does this say about the current climate of media dissemination? Is it a newsworthy event, or were the Kardashians taking a nap that day? The answer is probably a little of both. Love, the femme fatale whose name is synonymous with smeared red lipstick, is a fascinating product of our musical and social landscape, and every note of her musical output and every word spoken in public warrants commentary.
Her alcohol and heroin-fueled rampages, her near-death experiences, and her incoherent rants are pure theatre. Throw in her multimillion-dollar estate left to her by a beloved and tortured rock star, and you have a Shakespearian tragedy waiting to happen. She was Nancy to Kurt Cobain’s Sid, a film, ironically she was in, a case of life imitating art of epic ironical proportions.
Her alcohol and heroin-fueled rampages, her near-death experiences, and her incoherent rants are pure theatre.
To the high school jocks, Love is the other-side-of-the-tracks bad girl; to the country club lounge lizards, she’s the interloper who won $50 million on a scratch-off ticket. Her drunken and debauched public antics seem to illustrate why it’s better to not give poor people money; they’ll just buy, a $4,000 pair of purple Ecuadoran tamandua-anteater boots and matching pants.
Love rarely gets credit for the rise in her life’s station. Tabloid front pages and lurid headlines overshadow her drive, intelligence, and ability to gauge and deliver popular art to the masses. “I froze Kurt Cobain’s sperm” shares headline space with “Aliens probed my anus” on the front page of the National Enquirer. It is the totality of Love’s output, both professionally and personally, that blasts seemingly inconsequential tidbits like a Radiohead cover into media orbit.
Say what you will; Love makes art, and like all good art, it screams loudly. People either love it or hate it, but they don’t ignore it.
