Did Courtney Love achieve the one “goal in life” she set for herself in 1991?
“One thing that we share is an incredible ambition and drive,” Michael Stipe said of his friend Courtney Love in a 1999 NME interview, “And growing up in the ’80s, those were things we’d think of as bad words”.
One thing Stipe and Love did not have in common, however, was the way their ambition was generally perceived by the press. While the REM frontman remained something of a noble indie hero even after his band jumped to the multi-million dollar major leagues with Warner Brothers, the frontwoman of Hole, an extremely successful DIY band in its own right, was nonetheless perceived by many as an opportunist and manipulator consumed with fame, and this was even before her marriage to Kurt Cobain or the dark days that followed.
“People see me as some kind of underground careerist; the ‘Madonna of the Underground’,” Love told the Courier Post in Camden, New Jersey, back in 1991, just as Hole were promoting their debut album Pretty on the Inside, noting, “Hey, I’m into being pushy to get what I want, but the reasons I want them are different from Madonna’s.”
Case in point, Love had managed to convince one of her heroes, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, to produce Pretty on the Inside by writing her a heartfelt letter along with a cassette of Hole’s demos and a Hello Kitty barrette. Today, this might be called “bold and fearless networking”, but Courtney rarely heard it that way.
Besides the usual, run-of-the-mill misogyny, a lot of the negative press aimed at Love was, of course, a direct result of her relationship with Cobain, not just after his tragic death, but throughout their time together, when many critics were quick to dismiss her talents as a musician and turn her into the Yoko Ono of the 1990s.
Up against that type of irrational but highly motivated opposition, it’s all the more remarkable that Love managed to turn the tide by the end of the decade, taking Hole to a level of mainstream commercial success that even she had never thought possible.
In 1991, still a few months away from her wedding and the heightened scrutiny that followed, a 27-year-old Love was actually setting a quite reasonable primary goal for herself as a recording artist. She would not be the ‘Madonna of the Underground’ or any other ground.
“I’d be too embarrassed to be that big,” Love said, “I don’t think you can intellectually justify being as big as Madonna if you have a brain in your head. Madonna has a brain in her head, and she wants lots of power. I just want to be big enough to get the point across, you know? I want to effect some kind of change.”
Despite the fact that she was already promoting Hole’s first album at the time, she also seemed healthily aware that Pretty on the Inside wasn’t a record filled with radio hits, even if it was the friendliest time in radio history for angry alternative artists. However, as a songwriter, she had greater hopes for future recordings to come. “My goal in life, at least it used to be, is to write ten brilliant pop songs before I die,” Love said, before adding, “At this point, I’d really be happy with one”.
It should go without saying that she has more than one “brilliant” song to her credit; she wrote one about a week after that interview, in fact, when she scribbled out the first draft of ‘Doll Parts’, but how about the original goal of ten?
Well, we’re inclined to give Courtney the Brownie badge for a mission accomplished here. All of these songs featured on Hole’s next two albums, and all of them still stand as showcases of her talent, as well as a loud middle finger to her haters.
10 “brilliant” pop songs by Courtney Love & Hole
- ‘Doll Parts’ (1994)
- ‘Violet’ (1994)
- ‘Miss World’ (1994)
- ‘Jennifer’s Body (1994)
- ‘Plump’ (1994)
- ‘Celebrity Skin’ (1998)
- ‘Awful’ (1998)
- ‘Malibu’ (1998)
- ‘Boys on the Radio’ (1998)
- ‘Petals’ (1998)
