What Happened to Courtney Love in the 2000s?

The girl with the most cake in the era of the Entenmann's Lite Bites.

Down here at America’s Best and Only Free Newsletter Devoted to Illegal Copyrighted Photos of Von Dutch Hats, we answer a lot of pressing questions. Like: what’s up with vajazzling? Is Fred Durst hot now since he got a porno mustache and a good haircut? What makes rich scuzzy teenagers so fascinating? Why did Anthony Kiedis at one point kind of dress like Avril Lavigne? Was Fred Durst always hot, and do I have to go spend the rest of my life in a cloistered nunnery in order to deal with that information? Etc.

But there’s only one question about the 2000s that I really want answered. A question whose answer may finally allow us all to fully grasp the heart of the decade, the soul of the decade, the infected belly button piercing of the decade: what the fuck happened with Courtney Love in the 2000s?

I don’t mean what happened in her personal life (who knows, who cares) or her musical life (every great artist has a crap run that is about 460 times longer than their genius run). What I mean is, how did she go from being represented in the media as this:

ok, but can anyone tell me what happened with cat, the deadly new street drug?

to this:

convince me no one has a pic of you from 2004 where you look like this, though

I know that tons of artists get taken down by scandal — especially in the early 2000s, when the cycle from being heralded as a ground-breaking genius to having Perez Hilton draw jizz on your head was roughly two weeks.

But with Courtney Love, I think there’s more. Love wasn’t held up as a paragon of wholesomely fuckable American womanhood and then consumed by the tabloid press for crimes like “is too tan” or “ate a burrito while tight pants once.” She was scandal. From the day she popped up in the American consciousness, Love was both a deep thinker and a purveyor of terrible behavior — Mick and Keith rolled into one, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Throw A Makeup Compact at Madonna during the 1995 VMAs. That dichotomy was part of what placed her squarely on top in the ‘90s. But I believe it’s also what drowned her in the 2000s.

This is a bit of a personal one for me (I know, gross! How Obama era of me), so if that’s not your bag, skip this…I’m sure I’ll be back with, like, “How From Justin to Kelly Predicted Our Forever War” or whatever soon.

But if you’re still on board: join us, won’t you, as we explore what happens when you get what you want and you never want it again…2000s style.

First, to fully show my hand here: I don’t know what would have happened to me if I’d never discovered Live Through This. The dramatic answer is that I’d be dead; the realistic answer is I’d probably be living in Hartford, Connecticut, getting bad employee evals at my insurance job and wondering why nothing felt good. Hole’s second album — which was released 30 years ago today, god/ Kat Bjelland help me — was the first piece of art that ever explained me to myself, and I think I’d feel that way even if Love were not one of the most magnetic and unusual celebrities of her generation.

Even before she was a major rock star in her own right, Courtney was kind of already living in 2000s tabloid culture, like the world’s unluckiest time traveler. She was essentially introduced to the public through a 1992 Vanity Fair profile focused on allegations that she used heroin during her pregnancy, and the subsequent custody battle over her and Kurt Cobain’s daughter, Frances. She became a household name when, after Cobain’s suicide, she went public with her messy, untameable grief, reading his suicide letter aloud to mourners and personally engaging with the lost kids who showed up in Seattle trying to make sense of his death. Most people at the time had never heard her music, and only knew her as a mouthy woman who seemed to have either a knack for bad choices, or some of the shittiest luck on earth.

Interviews conducted in the months leading up to the release of Live Through This, like this SPIN cover story written by Dennis Cooper, show Love trying to rebrand herself as a calm, even-handed grunge intellectual. The same impulse is at play in this 1993 BTS footage, recorded for an early 1994 MTV News special, that paints Love as a focused bandleader, soberly considering her sonic options in the recording studio.

But the fact that the album was released days after the discovery of Cobain’s body inevitably changed all that. Simultaneous exposure to Love’s polished creative masterwork and naturally messy grief created a sense that she was a human contradiction. She was simultaneously mourning her husband with the grimy public outside their house in Seattle, and pondering big questions of womanhood and trauma in her songs. She was screaming in rage on her record and falling apart on the evening news. Even her famous public reading of Cobain’s suicide note is almost a two character play, with Love’s editorializing comments alternating between regret and anger. “Just tell him he’s a fucker, okay?” she commanded the crowd. “Just say ‘Fucker. You’re a fucker.’ And that you love him.”

Long after Love decided she was well enough to get back to work and began touring with Hole (I saw them at Toad’s Place, October 8 1994, my first concert that didn’t involve Debbie Gibson), the dichotomy energy stayed. It was how the constant allegations of bad behavior — getting in trouble with the law, physically attacking Kathleen Hanna at Lollapalooza, hilariously getting banned from AOL, and threatening to beat up that Vanity Fair writer (with Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar, no less) — never seemed to hurt her. Yes, she was the woman who acted up, but she was also a fierce performer, the rock star most likely to say something genuinely provocative and interesting in an interview, and, honestly, pretty fucking funny:

As Courtney’s star continued to rise, her deft way of being two things at once allowed her expansions into taboo, sell-out terrain to feel more complex than the standard celebrity. It’s certainly how she got away with headlining the “Molson Polar Beach Party” with Metallica in 1995 and still maintaining musical credibility.

It’s also how she pivoted to acting, following in the footsteps of, yes, punk legend Debbie Harry, but also Cher, Cyndi Lauper, and her one-time nemesis, Madonna Ciccone. Love’s new identity as someone who wore beige, starred in major motion pictures and dated that Ichabod Crane-looking motherfucker Edward Norton — while still maintaining her old identity as a fairly edgy rock star— was just another set of contradictions, and not even the messiest set she’d dealt with.

A 1992 LA Times article about Love asked, “Is the public going to be fascinated by this outspoken young rebel, or repulsed?” The answer was both. She did more than live with contradictions — she seemed to thrive off the balancing act, to the point that the title track of 1998’s Celebrity Skin seemed to be about pulling off said series of impossible contradictions to become a glam honeysuckle full of poison. In the accompanying video, she scurries around in a crop top and CGI glitter, and seems to be having a way better time than she ever did back when she had to scowl to be taken seriously.

So she should have been a natural in the campy, whimsical 2000s, right?

That’s obviously not what happened. And now, I will put on my Grunge Detective (TM) hat and explain why I think what did happen happened.

First, there’s the sad rock ‘n’ roll fact that basically no one can be cool for two decades straight. Bowie couldn’t do it, Madonna couldn’t do it, and neither could any icons of ‘90s hipness, from Trent Reznor to Stephen Malkmus. The only rock/ pop star I can think of who really cleanly transitioned between the ‘90s and ‘00s was Gwen Stefani, and that’s probably because Gwen was many things, but “achingly cool” was never one of them. So just given that alone, Love was likely due for a rough ride.

Layer on top of this that Love’s first solo album, 2004’s America’s Sweetheart, was beset by delays, Love’s escalating drug and legal problems, and a weird boyfriend/ manager/ producer situation — things that might have not mattered if it was a good album, which it wasn’t. I mean, don’t take my word for it: Love called it “one of my life’s great shames…Just the period, sloppiness, men, money, drugs, nightmare.”

Between these factors alone, you already have a recipe for declining cultural relevance in any era. But another 2000s-specific issue was that suddenly, everyone was Courtney Love. In the ‘90s, Courtney’s bad behavior had been engrossingly shocking because she was the only one in her community doing it. Alternative rockers may have been caught up in the occasional drug scandal, but overall, they seemed to at least publicly present as quiet and polite; you never saw Lou Barlow get arrested for cussing out a flight attendant.

But in the 2000s, were you really anyone if you DIDN’T cuss out a flight attendant? The 2000s were the Era of the Flip-Out, for everyone. Whether you were a reality star flipping out in front of Hyde in L.A. or just a regular person ringing an ex-boyfriend’s apartment buzzer at 2 a.m. (guilty as charged!), having a flamboyantly hard time in public with little regard for the consequences was simply in the air in the 2000s. Courtney hadn’t invented bad public behavior, but for years, she had been its chief practitioner; at the dawn of the 2000s, however, she was just one cokey anger management case out of many.

(I should note here that she also basically invented being on a celebrity on Twitter, getting incredibly involved in the Hole AOL fan forum as early as 1994.)

Not only was Love no longer the only one behaving badly; she was also 39 the next time she got arrested for harassing a flight attendant in 2003. By March 2004, she hit a fan in the head with a mic stand and then shuffled semi-topless through the Wendy’s at Broadway and Bleecker, looking like a sad underwear ghost.

Now, to be fair, I can say from personal experience that if you had a substance abuse problem in New York City in the early 2000s, you probably have at least one shameful memory from the Wendy’s at Broadway and Bleecker (it was open really late!).

But Love’s age and history made her behavior seem like the actions of a troubled, struggling person who needed help, not a dynamic young rebel bursting out of the stifling straitjacket of modern womanhood (of course, it turned out that everyone getting in trouble in the 2000s was a troubled, struggling person who needed help and not a dynamic young rebel, but, you know, how would admitting that ever sell ad space).

Maybe all of this together was enough to bring Love down from her ‘90s heights, no matter what. But I think there’s one more factor at play here.

I think that in the ‘90s, we could accept the contradictions that powered Love because, well, we were just in a more stable place as a culture, and we could handle more gray area. And that doesn’t just apply to Courtney Love — I mean, have you seen Welcome to the Doll House?? If you think Walter White is a complex anti-hero, try Dawn Wiener. As a country, we were in between pointless needless international wars; AIDS activism had led to prevention programs and the creation of effective HIV drugs; the economy had yet to be fully destroyed; a lot of people thought the Christian right was a passing fad. Basically, things in our culture were chill enough that we had the bandwidth for something that was two things at once. And Live Through This was about how you could be everything at once — vulnerable AND deranged with neediness AND angry, sad and funny, a best friend and a worst enemy.

The early 2000s were just too fucking unstable for that kind of gray area shit. Between 9/11 and the War on Terror and the economic problems that just seem to be on loop forever now, there was no room for nuance. We needed heroes and villains and clowns and victims; no one was supposed to be all of those things at once.

I was reminded of this watching clips from 24 Hours of Love, an MTV2 special from 2002 when Love was supposed to have an entire day of programming for the channel. I didn’t watch it when it aired — I was 20 and thought I was done with her, that she had changed and was fake and meant nothing anymore. I imagined something airbrushed and completely hollow.

But within minutes of her opening spiel, she makes a “Nine Inch Nails” dick joke and takes out her tit. She says inappropriate things about a fan outside, gossips about Fred Durst, and randomly apologizes to Cameron Crowe about having been mean to him in the early ‘90s. She has obviously recently had the living shit bleached out of her teeth, but she’s still the funny, fucked-up weirdo who convinced me that life was worth living even if you would never make the cheerleading squad — that maybe life was worth living because you didn’t make the cheerleading squad.

Supposedly, the actual airing of 24 Hours of Love was beset by MTV2 overriding almost all of her video selections — Courtney would introduce a video she had selected, it would play for a few seconds, then be replaced by, like, a new U2 song. Maybe I’m reading too much into MTV just being, you know, MTV. But it feels like the perfect metaphor for Courtney Love in the early ‘00s. We didn’t do Courtney dirty the exact same way we did, say, Britney or Pam, because Courtney actually did get up to a lot of fucked-up shit. She wasn’t an innocent victim; she was something messier and more complex. But American culture could no longer deal with something complex. And attempts to distill her down to something simpler, well, that just left you with mess.