What drives Courtney Love? She made headlines this week, after storming off the stage at a festival in Brazil. Criticizing Ms. Love is like shooting fish in a barrel, but this time I felt her outburst deserved just a moment of my time, at least enough time for me to give my opinion.
If you believe what you read about Ms. Love’s childhood, she didn’t have the best upbringing. She brought a lot of her troubles upon herself by making terrible choices in her teen years. The opportunities to do the right thing were there, and the money was there via a trust fund, yet she chose to live on the edge. I lived with people like her. At each crossroads, they chose the pleasure route. Those people struggle to this day just like Ms. Love, albeit without tens of millions of dollars in the bank.
Without the success of Nirvana, Hole might have expected to achieve local or regional success, but no more than that. Did she take the opportunity to promote her band and capitalize on the death of her husband? I would suggest that you consider the release date of “Live Through This” coming just one week after Mr. Cobain died as your answer to that question. Speaking anecdotally, the last thing that I would have been able to do was back up an album release just days after my brother died. Why did she allow for the album to drop just days after her husband killed himself? Was profit a motivating factor? What was the rush? As the album is now considered to be her best work musically, I suppose that it proved to be worthy of some praise, but the exposure would not have come if it weren’t due to the timing of the release.
It would take four years for Love to release another album, which was more pop flavored than anything else. That album was most successful financially, and deserves to be recognized as a good example of pop music.
Now fast forward to her meltdown in Brazil. I suppose that people have every right to be uptight about musicians that expose themselves on stage. Love used to be a stripper, so is anyone surprised at her actions? She did the same thing on Letterman years ago. What bothered me (and many others,) is the homophobic rant that one of her hired guns used to entice Love back out on stage.
Finally, the backstage interview with Love after the show might have revealed what’s truly bothering her now. She will not admit that Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters was in Nirvana, and he has all the legal right in the world to profit from that success, no matter how much money he makes in his current band. Her argument that “Dave makes five million dollars a show in Foo Fighters” so he should give up his share of Nirvana makes no sense. Let’s put aside the fact that it’s unlikely that he grosses five million per show. Let's just focus on the facts.
Love was not in Nirvana, and the rant about her in-laws being in financial trouble has nothing to do with Dave Grohl. If her backstage rant is true, she could certainly take care of that problem if she were to consider shelling out a tiny portion of the 50 million dollars she received when she sold off 25% of her rights to Nirvana back in 2006. As of 2010, she mentioned that she was “done supporting Kurt’s family.” It seems that Ms. Love wants it both ways. She cuts off the Cobain family in 2010, and then rants about their financial problems when trying to drive home a point about Dave Grohl not deserving his share of Nirvana royalties. I have no sympathy for a millionaire who complains that she’s not getting enough money from her husband’s hard work.
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