Courtney Love

• Born: July 9, 1964
• Place of Birth: San Francisco, California

During the 1990s, Love achieved notoriety as a rock musician. Much of her success as a musician, however, was overshadowed by her lifestyle and her status as the wife, and later widow, of Kurt Cobain.

Courtney Love spent much of her childhood living in communes with her mother. As a teenager, she developed an appreciation for punk rock music and, in 1989, formed the band Hole in Los Angeles. Shortly after forming her band, Love met her future husband, Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain, at a club in Portland, Oregon. The two began a courtship that would last the next couple of years. During this time, Hole’s first album, Pretty on the Inside, was released in 1991 to favorable reviews by many underground music critics. Love and Cobain made their relationship official with a wedding on Waikiki Beach, Hawaii, on February 24, 1992. Less than six months later, on August 18, Love gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.

Prior to the birth of their daughter, Love and Cobain already had reputations as partying, drug-using rock stars, identities they did little to discourage. However, Love’s negative public image increased as a result of a 1992 article in Vanity Fair that revealed that Love had used heroin during her pregnancy. Over the next several years, Love and Cobain struggled with parenthood, superstardom, and drug addiction, all under the watchful and ever-present eye of the mainstream media. As a result of his inability to deal with many of his problems, Cobain committed suicide on April 5, 1994. Shortly after his body was found, Love read Cobain’s suicide note to fans at a memorial service in Seattle.

Love’s musical career would continue despite Cobain’s death. Only four days after Cobain’s body was discovered, Hole’s breakthrough second album, Live Through This, was released. The album was such a commercial and critical success that Rolling Stone magazine declared it the best album of the year. In 1996, Love starred in the film The People vs. Larry Flynt, a performance that earned her a Golden Globe nomination. Her career successes continued with the release of Hole’s third and final album, Celebrity Skin, which also received wide critical acclaim, in 1998.

In 1999, Hole appeared with Jim Carrey and Danny DeVito in Miloš Forman's film Man on the Moon about comedian Andy Kaufman; in 2002, she appeared in Trapped, a film about a girl's abduction. In 2004, Love released her first solo album, America's Sweetheart. Her music career was put on hold by a series of legal and drug addiction issues and in 2005 she was sentenced to mandatory drug rehabilitation in one of four criminal cases against her. She released her second solo album, Nobody's Daughter, in 2010, with her former band Hole, but without any of Hole's previous band members. She returned to acting during 2014, appearing in the television crime drama series Sons of Anarchy, and, in 2015, she appeared in the musical drama series Empire, where she had a recurring role. The track "Walk Out on Me", which featured Love, was included on the Season 1 original soundtrack for the series. Love starred in a 2017 movie aired on the Lifetime cable network called Menendez: Blood Brothers, about Lyle and Erik Menendez, brothers who murdered their parents in 1989. She also appeared in another Lifetime movie, A Midsummer's Nightmare, that year.

In the mid-2010s, Love, who had been known for her "grunge" fashions of the 1990s, was repeatedly featured in international fashion publications that were revisiting 1990s fashion icons. In 2016, she collaborated with Sophia Amoruso of the Nasty Gal clothing line, to release an eighteen-piece collection called "Love, Courtney."

Love wrote the book Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love, which was published in 2006 and included journal entries, personal poetry and lyrics, and collages. She also collaborated with Tokyopop founder Stuart Levy and illustrators Ai Yazawa and Misaho Kujiradou on a manga series entitled Princess Ai.

Impact

Despite Courtney Love’s many career milestones, her public image never fully recovered following Cobain’s death. In the latter part of the 1990s, Love found herself the subject of many tabloid photographs, appearing drunk or stoned onstage, or passed out in various venues. In addition, she had a reputation for being sexually promiscuous and found herself arrested several times for disorderly conduct and drug use. She was also the subject of conspiracy theories surrounding Cobain's death, including that she was allegedly responsible for it. These theories were explored in such documentary films as Kurt & Courtney (1998). Despite her flawed public image, Love continued to release new music into the 2020s. In 2023, Love was ranked 130 on Rolling Stone's list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.

Bibliography

Brite, Poppy Z. Courtney Love: The Real Story. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Coates, Norma. “Moms Don’t Rock: The Popular Demonization of Courtney Love.” In “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America, edited by Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Hirschberg, Lynn. "Strange Love: The Story of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love." Vanity Fair, Sept. 1992, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/03/love-story-of-kurt-cobain-courtney-love. Accessed 22 May 2024.

Love, Courtney. Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love. Faber & Faber, 2006.