Courtney Love, Better Than Ever
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The ‘90s Courtney Love never seemed much more than a failed attempt to channel Nancy Spungen. Failed because Nancy’s boyfriend, Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious, allegedly killed her prior to overdosing on heroin. But Courtney’s husband, Nirvana’s Curt Cobain, limited himself to committing suicide. Both Nancy and Courtney were drug-addled and not particularly attractive mental health cases, though Courtney had the good sense to be in a band.
I never cared much for Love’s band Hole. I never cared much for her late husband’s band either, to be sure, but I found something especially pathetic about the out-of-control young women selling their volatility to the masses. There are women like Siouxsie Sioux, Debbie Harry and Kim Gordon who bent Punk rock to their will, but Courtney? She just seemed too sad. Most importantly I never thought much of her musicianship.
Love was always a feminist and a loud champion of female creativity. “I want every girl in the world to pick up a guitar,” she said, “and start screaming.” And “I’m not a woman. I’m a force of nature.” Fair enough, but I can think of better role models for my daughter.
Maybe I underestimated her, maybe I never gave her a fair chance, or maybe she matured well beyond her rock-n-roll persona because last week Courtney Love Cobain proved to be the lone voice of reason in celebrity feminism. The grunge songtress got involved in a Twitter altercation with Palestinian American Sharia activist Linda Sarsour. After Sarsour crowdfunded an obviously fake anti-Muslim hate crime victim, Love unleashed on her for being a con artist:
When Sarsour launched her crowdfund for Warsame, Courtney Love Cobain spoke out on Twitter to condemn her for creating a fake situation.
“You’re a vile disgrace to women and all mankind, @lsarsour,” wrote Cobain, “I’m on the side of all human equality rights, spreading knowledge and encouraging peace and understanding. I feel you have the opposite agenda.”
Declaring Sarsour’s crowdfund to be a publicity stunt, Cobain added, “I worked my ass off my entire life to defend women, I didn’t create fake stories and lie about them nor rip people off financially.”
This is precisely the kind of bit of street smarts the women’s movement desperately needs today. Sarsour’s motives are pretty transparent; we just somebody with common sense to call her on it.
Cobain’s tweets were nothing like the shallow reactivity we see so much of on Twitter. Her tweets seem well-thought out, logical, and knowledgeable — not to mention brave and consistent. It’s as if the feminism she professed to champion two decades ago really means something to her. She came across as a woman concerned with its current direction:
Cobain had equally harsh words for the Women’s March. “Unfollowed. I won’t follow anything that’s being led by an anti-Semitic terrorist that’s using feminism as a tool to promote her radicalism,” she said.
That’s pretty much all that needs to be said about the organization in 140 characters.
Continuing with the themes of anti-Semitism and fraud, Cobain retweeted a National Review article that discusses Sarsour cynically exploiting the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries. Wait, what? National Review?
And check out Love’s entry a few days prior to the Sarsour post:
This is a very nice thing to say, especially considering that she really didn’t have to say anything. She might just be a sincere patriot.
We need to take a deep breath before we make an idol out of the lady, though. She remained an A-list scandalist well after her music stardom faded away. One of the scandals happen to revolve around anti-Semitism. The singer-actress grabbed headlines in 2009 when in the interview with Heeb magazine, the then 44-year-old said:
Every time you buy a Nirvana record, part of that money is not going to Kurt’s child, or to me, it’s going to a handful of Jew loan officers, Jew private banks, it’s going to lawyers who are also bankers, it’s going to sixty PAs.
That created quite a stir, and Heeb quickly warned that she was taken out of context, that she was “explor[ing] her Jewish heritage” and “This is how Jews talk to Jews.” That this is how Jews talk to Jews is a news to me, but I’m ready to accept that this is how Jews talk to Heeb.
Courtney Love Cobain is first and foremost an entertainer, and entertainers tend to be flakes and freaks. Still, eight years had passed since her Heeb interview, for instance, which is plenty of time to change. The woman I saw on Twitter a few days ago is not the moribund vamp of the 1990s. I’m looking forward to reading her forthcoming autobiography to find out more.
