So for this weeks blog I’m interested in doing something a little different which is talk about Courtney Love, one of the most famous celebrities from the grunge era. The reason I want to talk about her is because when I was doing research for my paradigm shift essay I ended up reading a long Vanity Fair article about her and her life during September of 1992 and I thought it was very interesting. The way the journalists in several of the articles I read about her describe her is generally derogatory and judgmental, it’s almost as if they forgot they were interviewing a Seattle rock musician in the early 90’s (a group of people known for their antics and controversial behavior), not an Upper East Side society hostess.
So my thesis after these articles is that there was lot of judgment towards Courtney from the journalists for acting this way because she was a woman. I mean Sid Vicious wore a swastika T shirt, pretty f*cked up yet he was admired by many for testing people’s limits, and he was a punk musician, making people mad and challenging society was his motive operandi. The members of Sublime laughed in a documentary I watched once at the fact they let their dog poop in the office of a major producer. The grunge attitude has a massive influence from the Godless punk era (though composition wise has more in common with metal music) and Courtney was just that: a young punk living a wild and indulgent lifestyle like the rest of the Seattle musicians were at the time. But she wasn’t a man, so maybe it just wasn’t considered as cool and edgy for her to be a walking disaster.
The Courtney I’m talking about here isn’t the modern day one, the woman who suffered through 30 years of slander and bad plastic surgery, but the outspoken and intelligent Riot Grrrl of the early 90’s. My favorite part of the article was about Courtney’s fued with musician Kat Bjelland, the lead singer of another Seattle gunge bang, Babes in Toyland.
Kat had apparently stolen one of Courtney’s velvet dresses, among other things. Courtney’s style during that time is called kinderwhore which holds ripped up vintage doll dresses as it’s centerpiece.
“Kat has stolen a lot from me,” she says, hitting on one of her very favorite themes. “Dresses. Lyrics. Riffs. Guitars. Shoes. She even went after Kurt. That was the last straw. Because I put up with the lyric stealing. And I put up with her going to England first in a dress that I loaned her. Now I can’t wear those fucking dresses in England anymore.”
OH yeah forgot to add, many people speculated Courtney Love was just a gold digger, but she already had money, from her affluent family and from record sales from her band Hole, which was pretty popular in it’s time.
This doesn’t even surprise me. Men have always gotten away with way more than women do, simply because of their gender. Two people could be exactly the same and do the same things but the man will be praised and the woman will be ripped apart. (I’m being a little dramatic here, but you know what I mean)
I’m surprised at how influential Courtney Love is to the Grunge/Punk scene. I never really knew much about her outside of Kurt Cobain and the rumor that she was the one to kill him instead of him committing suicide. Either way, its a shame what the media has done to her, but I’m really not surprised considering how our society depicts and shows women, especially before the current movements of empowering women.
I absolutely despise that double standard–but we see it time and time again. It’s horrifying that Sid Vicious wore something as awful as a swastika T-shirt and was still accepted because there are some social boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed, and that was certainly one of them.