The life of Courtney Love through her 10 best lyrics
“I used to do drugs,“ Courtney Love joked in her memoir, Dirty Blonde, “But don’t tell anyone because it’ll ruin my image”. That image has never been precious in every which way. The grunge star has been lauded and lampooned in equal measure by both her peers and the press. Alas, the flipside that has never been lost on her is that she has always been talked about. She was still a teenager when that chatter first started, miles and miles from her home.
In 1981, the would-be musician became the benefactor of a small trust fund left to her by her grandparents. At the time, she was only 17 but lost and looking for her place in the world; she decided to use this money to travel to Dublin. Quite by chance, she ended up becoming friends with Julian Cope after watching a Teardrop Explodes concert, and soon Cope explained that he had an apartment going spare in Liverpool if she wanted to stay there while he was away touring.
Therein, she would mix with the hip scene. She had found her tribe, and her future as a musician began to become clear. She would later remark: “Before Liverpool, my life doesn’t count. Ian McCulloch and Julian Cope taught me a great deal. I owe them a lot. Liverpool had been a great school to become a rock star.” While her place in Liverpool was never set to be permanent, she found herself accepted and at home among the alternative music scene, soon returning to the US and asking Faith No More if she could join them as a singer.
The rest, as they say, is ancient history. Love, who went on to lead one of grunge’s most iconic bands, Hole, was a natural rocker, a phenom whose presence helped to define a generation with a penchant for ruggedness. However, this was merely the aesthetic of her output; beneath the surface was something decidedly more considered. This combination helped to create an icon, but as ever, icons become embroiled in myth. The noise surrounding Love, often stemming from the suicide of her husband, Kurt Cobain, has often subsumed her work and its potent intent.
However, it is a mark of her character as an artist that Love never lost sight of it—in fact, she just fed it into her work. So, when Love was fielding questions from her famous friends, the costume designer Arianne Phillips asked: “Looking back at your body of work, what do you think your greatest legacy is? Or what do you hope it will be?” Love replied: “I would hope that it’s a high bar for lyrics.”
Those lyrics might be inspired by the likes of Charles Baudelaire and the literary tomes of romanticism, but they are also decidedly her own. Love her or loathe her. It’s her words that truly define her. So, to mark her 60th birthday, we’re delving into the lines that live out her life in song.
Courtney Love’s 10 best lyrics:
10. ‘Gutless’
“I don’t really miss God/ But I sure miss Santa Claus”.
Love takes a rather juvenile hit at the riot grrrl movement with certain lines in ‘Gutless’. However, alongside her immature swipes at bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile with lines like “Revolution come and die,” Love makes a simple yet poignant declaration about childhood innocence. “I don’t really miss God/ But I sure miss Santa Claus,” she sings.
Love wants something to believe in, but she clearly hasn’t found salvation through religion. She disregards God – evidently, she’s been through enough pain to render believing in him useless – and instead reflects on a much sweeter time. She misses those days of childhood innocence, before all the pain and anguish when she was able to believe in a mythical man without a doubt.
9. ‘Doll Parts’
“I want to be the girl with the most cake/ Love him so much, it just turns to hate/Fake it so real, I am beyond fake/And someday you will ache like I ache”.
When Love first met Kurt Cobain, who would eventually become her husband, she began penning the words to this tender yet painful track. She was worried that she wouldn’t be enough for him, writing about feelings of jealousy and her lack of confidence. Yet, when she released the final version of the track, Cobain had died, giving the track a much more heart-wrenching quality.
She sings about the intensity of love and how such strong and overwhelming feelings can simply morph into a sense of hatred. The last line becomes even bleaker when considered in the context of her now losing Cobain forever, with Love suggesting that most people won’t experience the kind of pain she is facing until much later in life.
8. ‘Celebrity Skin’
“Oh, make me over / I’m all I wanna be / A walking study in demonology”.
It’s hard to imagine that famous people are like us because of how far removed their lives are from ours. The idea that they act the same, mourn, grieve, and feel envy and anger in the same way we do is often left untouched; however, it’s the truth. Many people use this disillusionment to justify acting vilely towards some celebrities, and Love found herself the punching bag for critique from apathetic media outlets for years as a result.
She often wrote about how many people perceived her, and one of the best examples of how she could tear apart the image that was portrayed of her was within her music. This can be heard in ‘Celebrity Skin’, when Love says, “Oh, make me over / I’m all I wanna be / A walking study in demonology.”
7. ‘Malibu’
“Get well soon, please don’t go any higher / How are you so burnt, when you’re barely on fire?”
Though much of Cobain and Love’s relationship revolved around drug use, it wasn’t the beginning and end of the life they had mapped out for each other. Love always dreamed of something more with him and saw Malibu as a healing city where a new chapter of their lives could begin. When asked about ‘Malibu’, she said it was an “empathy song”.
Love said, “I wanted the boy in the song to drive away from Hollywood and the drugs. When I was pregnant, Kurt and I always had this thing about getting out of the basement apartment we lived in with dealers next door and going to live in Malibu. It’s a very healing place.” She seems to ask the subject of the song to step away from drugs with these poignant lines.
6. ‘Asking For It’
“Every time that I sell myself to you / I feel a little bit cheaper than I need to/I will tear the petals off of you / Roses red, I will make you tell the truth”.
Love had an interesting life that didn’t just involve her work as a musician. The time she spent as a stripper will have no doubt helped her lyrics in the song ‘Asking For It’, which sees Love talk about the feeling of selling herself. This will likely refer to her body from when she was stripping but also to giving pieces of herself to her audience when she lays her vulnerability bare in music.
It also no doubt lends itself to the ugly objective nature of a lot of music fans, as Love admitted audience members would often try to abuse her when she stage-dived. “Every time that I sell myself to you / I feel a little bit cheaper than I need to,” she says in the track, “I will tear the petals off of you / Roses red, I will make you tell the truth.”
5. ‘Plump’
“I’m eating you/I’m overfed/Your milk’s in my mouth/It makes me sick”.
Love decided to pay homage to the poet Anne Sexton in ‘Plump’ from Live Through This. The American writer was renowned for her depictions of motherhood, which Love frequently explores on Hole’s second album. Referring to lines from ‘The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator’, (“They are eating each other/ They are overfed/ At night, alone, I marry the bed”) Love changes them to potentially provide us with the perspective of her baby.
From a baby’s point of view, Love is feeding them too much sour milk, which could perhaps allude to the fact that Love was accused of using heroin while pregnant. The meaning of the lines remains rather ambiguous, but the visceral language is bold and confrontational.
4. ‘Teenage Whore’
“When I was a teenage whore/ The rain came down like it never did before/I paid good money not to be ignored”.
On Hole’s first album, Pretty on the Inside, Love is as frank as ever; it seems as though she’s had the confidence to write confessional and brave lyrics since the beginning of her career. On ‘Teenage Whore’, she refers to her time as a stripper and the promiscuous behaviour that led her mother to ask her what exactly she was doing with her life.
There’s a double meaning in “the rain came down,” suggesting that not only was she showered with money from men as a stripper, but it also caused her to feel miserable, with the rain potentially alluding to tears. The honesty in the lines “I paid good money not to be ignored” is also impressive, with Love dissecting themes of low self-esteem and the pressures of appearing attractive and admired.
3. ‘Honey’
“Why wasn’t I good enough to save you from destruction? / And your end and my beginning, oh, they need no introduction“.
It can never be said that Love has hidden away from her feelings, whether on a personal or an artistic level. However, she has often struggled with properly understanding those feelings enough to have them arise during a period that makes sense. After breaking down in a photo shoot in 2010, Love found herself missing her husband, and ‘Honey’, one of her most open songs about the singer, was born.
The lyrics don’t try to hide their meaning; Love addresses her feelings head-on, and audiences are left with an open world of the gothic ballad, bleeding and forgotten. “Why wasn’t I good enough to save you from destruction? / And your end and my beginning, oh, they need no introduction”.
2. ‘Hold On To Me’
“Hey this life is never fair / The angels that we need are never there / But sometimes he comes to me / In the dead of winter, dead of night, he’s all that I can see”.
Love has had the ability to experience highs both derived from natural occurrences and those self-induced. She took plenty of drugs, but she also deeply loved Kurt Cobain and her daughter. The latter two form the basis for her solo track ‘Hold On To Me’, which was written after Cobain’s suicide as an ode to him and a song for her child.
She references Cobain in the opening lines, a homage to the fact that her love for him remains undying and constant. Love also goes on to speak to her daughter, saying that she will do her best to protect her from the negative aspects of her life, such as the rumours that surround her and Cobain, as well as the chatter about her drug use. “I’ll protect you from the truth, you won’t hear it at all,” she testifies to her child.
1. ‘Boys on the Radio’
“Do what you want/Cause I’ll do anything/ And I’ll take the blame/What’s mine is yours/You can have all of it/And I’ll learn to pay“.
Partly inspired by male musicians who don’t look after themselves, giving in to the pressures of fame and excess, ‘Boys on the Radio’ starts with some fantastic lyrics about desperation. Love expresses the kind of intense feelings that often define her songs, going as far as saying she’ll get herself in trouble and “do anything” for the person she wants to be with.
She is clearly in a position where she’d put someone else before herself, caring for them more than she perhaps should. These lyrics feel like quintessential Love, evoking feelings of pure passion, devotion and pain all in one, a common theme within Hole’s music.
