i made my bed, i'll die in it: a tribute to hole's 'live through this' at 30.
some thoughts on the music writing landscape as it stands and my favorite album of all time.
So, I’m going to begin this with a rant. Courtney would approve, I think.
In 2022, American photographer Justine Kurland released a book of collage art created by cutting up and reconfiguring photo books by male artists, which she titled SCUMB Manifesto, in tribute to Valerie Solanas’ landmark 1967 radical feminist pamphlet S.C.U.M. (Society For Cutting Up Men) Manifesto. If you’re regularly reading my writing, I’m assuming you’re already familiar with the latter work.
For the front cover of her book, stylized in all caps in orange lettering over collaged images of naked female bodies, Kurland wrote the following:
“I, Justine Kurland, am SCUMB. I thrive in the stagnant waste of your self-congratulatory[,] boring photography. I bubble up, a raw life force, multiplying from the useless excrement of your misogynistic books. I worm in the fleshy folds of your fetid library, laying larvae to feed on your crumbling quid pro quo circle-jerk ideology. Your time is over[,] officer history. I call for the end of the graphic representation of the male canon, its daddy worship and its monopoly on meaning and value. The canon is every dick shoved against some woman’s back on a crowded train. I see you there in your fat tenure chair, ogling freshman girls with a rapey smile. I’m coming for you with a blade.”
You could write one of these manifestos for pretty much any artistic medium, I think. At this point in my life more than any other, I meditate a lot on the phony, self-congratulatory liberalism men in music are allowed to get away with. I really do. Anyone deemed “other” is certainly allowed to exist — as a co-worker, as a writer they commission — and your “perspective” is certainly welcome, because they know you’ve always been underestimated and they want to feel like the good guy by giving you a shot, but even when it’s well-intentioned, it doesn’t fix anything. It means they get to throw a “you’re so brave” in our direction (a condescending favorite, like they’re speaking to a dog), and move on with their uninspired writing about the same indie rock albums everyone else who writes about music loves.
Tons of women writers love this music too, don't get me wrong. Plenty of women make this music, and that’s fine. Everyone should enjoy what they feel speaks to them. But there’s a sensibility to the homogenous nature of it all that lands primarily in their court — it’s their jokes, their modes of writing, their modes of posting, their common language that I don’t share. It’s the way they speak and the things they speak about. It’s the shows they’re all at and the nondescript clothes they all wear. It’s a media persona built around a lack of originality or study or point of view — bolstered and coveted because their audience is the same as them, comes from the same place (or lack thereof). I hear no voice in their writing. I read blocks of text completely devoid of personality about their gods and feel my senses deadened, like someone has to shock me awake.
The vast majority of the early Pitchfork indie rock canon has nothing to do with me. I dig back further in history, to the outer fringes, and there is not remotely the same type of enthusiasm or curiosity about these foundational works. For every kind word one of them shares about something I wrote, I feel a roiling black hole at the pit of my stomach. I harbor guilt over that, but that can’t keep me from feeling the pit because they will never understand, and therefore never move to actually structurally shift anything and rarely give up whatever clout they have or pass any onto me (and why would the men who follow them care about me or what I write about anyway?). Most of my “peers” that I have deep fondness for are women around my age — many of whom are excellent at working in the men’s language and demanding their respect, a quality I envy sometimes. And it’s not like there are a ton of those women getting major opportunities either, so they’re softening their incisive, well-listened edges for nothing. Most times, I don’t even want respect anymore. Even if I were to completely enter their court, I would have to temper myself. I would have to explain everything.
When I see your gods — the men you built the whole of your personalities around — exposed and stripped down, very little changes. No real reflection is required. You can hope that people are reassessing their role in certain situations and actions behind the scenes (which is probably the right thing to do, rather than going off about it on socials) — but I got to witness recently, in real time, the silence and questioning that grew up around an imperfect victim the second her abuser opened his mouth. Here was a person who was actually exhibiting bravery — an action that is supposed to make people uncomfortable, as stakes and change are what make the action brave — but how many people will the same horrible shit still happen to? How many men in music, the “nice guy”, “dudes rock” evangelists of the boring power pop world, will exert their word as law for the rest of DIY’s existence? How many will be exposed with their disbelieving DMs they sent behind the scenes before posting their PR-approved notes app statement? Every instinct ingrained in us is predicated on the space we are supposed to hold for your feelings and discomfort. My empathy is supposed to be a seeping wound your keep shoving your hollow ignorance into. All of these incidents are just rehashing a scene I’ll never forget — before I stopped shaving for good, there was one day in middle school where hair had begun to visibly grow back in under my arms, and my father asked, “Elise, do you like boys? Because boys don’t like that.” Everything I write is an attempt to erase that as the dictum my life revolved around against my will for so long.
When it was first announced that Pitchfork was moving under the GQ umbrella at Condé Nast, I wrote the following, relatively sanitized rant on my Instagram stories in a controlled moment of rage semi-inspired by Ms. Kurland’s cover:
i do not care about publications (broadly) geared towards men, i do not care about what 90% of men think about music, i do not care about 99% of men who make music, most men have proven not to value me or my opinions, much of the work i care about is consistently ignored or called "brave" or (worse) "badass" to appear kosher and then shoved aside, and i do not want to write in this industry climate, corporations do not know anything about music or music history or culture or insightful critique or righteous anger and they do not care about us and they love fucking us over and it is no mistake that the most expansive and "non-pitchfork" (you know what i mean) masthead this publication has ever had is the one they're folding
I spit on your unimaginative indie blog canon and the tiny walls you build around it to prevent you from exploring anything outside of its purview. I spit on the climate in which a certain type of flavorless voice from any gender thrives amid the crumbling music journalism ecosystem. I spit all over your half-assed admission that “the whole system is broken” so that you don’t have to explicitly and boldly express your support for women in your field and can lump us into the death of media at large, allowing you to take the coward’s way out. I hope you are so overwhelmed by said cowardice that it eats you alive. I’m coming for you with a blade.
(Ever since I first saw the cover of that book in the window of an austere, heavily curated art book shop in the East Village, I’ve started saying that to myself like it’s my mantra, my most tender prayer and omen that good times will come even if they come slow: I’m coming for you with a blade. I’m coming for you with a blade.)
I don’t know when I first became aware of how often I think about being a woman, but I know I’ve always resented the fact that it’s become so central to who I am. I’ve written at length about the “girlhood” nonsense that pervades social media now, but its centrality to my personality felt like the branches springing from a root of resentment, of internalized misogyny. There was a period when I was young when I resented being a girl and, I think, secretly resented other girls for being the same, only reacting to them as I saw the men in the world do.
Girls hate being girls because everything that happens to girls is either funny or excessive or disgusting or frivolous to everyone else. You don’t know feminist theorists as a child, but you know you’re afraid of older brothers, of your brother’s friends, of what you should or shouldn’t tell your dad. There are harrowing moments that shaped me as a person which everyone else in the room remembers as a joke — if they remember it at all. I wish I could remember more: the way I was touched or spoken to by people who had no right because my brain registered that it had to happen, that no one would take my side or said I was being sensitive. Maybe I’m glad I’ve blocked so much out sometimes, because I fear it would come off as hunting for something to hold against them, bringing up things that happened decades ago. How cruel of me to want answers, to want to understand why.
About a year ago, the person I cowered in front of but tried to emulate the second he wasn’t there — speaking as if our word is law, withdrawing trust or empathy the second our law is not affirmed — said, “Elise, everything makes you uncomfortable, and that shit’s gotta stop.” I tried to face the person I’ve lied to most in my life, withheld my deepest sorrows and my greatest passions from, the person I’ve created the most space in my life for because he had no understanding of my internal world, the person who called me nasty and acted betrayed the second I spit everything they’d spit at me for years back at them, and simply didn’t know what to say. Anything I would’ve come back with would’ve been regarded as my delusional false truth — nothing worth making room for.
My mother doesn’t think nearly as much about being a woman as I do, and I think it might be a generational thing — this idea of surface level “girl power” that revolves around existing in their world, taking their jokes on the chin, carrying yourself with all the grace and dignity you can muster while they get to be the scum of the earth. Respect isn’t required or expected. If it is won, you’re separate from other women in their mind — a “woman” being the “other”, something alien. Lots of women of the punk generation seemed to think this way too — “don’t call me a feminist,” they said, because the second they’re labeled or othered, they’re kicked out of the boys’ game. They’re no longer on equal footing then. They can’t just be a musician making music. Yet, they never seemed to realize that the boys regarded them as “other” anyway. It makes me sad for the trailblazers I put so much stock into, that they throw themself at the feet of these men who barely know their worth. And it’s difficult, because no one statement would change the world, and the whole system is so much bigger than them that it’s nearly impossible to come up with a practical plan for change. It’s a lose-lose situation.
My mom still doesn’t believe Courtney Love — the woman who was crucified for my sins, the closest thing I have to Christ sometimes — wrote the songs on Live Through This. It’s difficult for me even now, because a part of me wants to investigate how we both experienced growing up within the same gendered confines, but how one of us can’t register that only a woman could have written these songs.
I don’t have the space here to unpack why people hated and continue to hate Courtney Love with the venom they do, but with the 30th anniversary of her husband’s tragic death by suicide came proclamations calling him “the last great rock star” — a blatant lie — and all of this bubbled up in me. It’s excruciating to see the ways in which Kurt’s message and beliefs have been bastardized by his not being here to speak on his own behalf, and it’s a deep shame, because he would’ve been the first person to tell you you’re wrong: his wife is our last great rock star, and she would’ve earned that title with or without him on her arm.
I want to share two quotes about Courtney Love with you now. The first is from her daughter, Frances Bean, during her guest stint on RuPaul and Michelle Visage’s now-defunct podcast What’s the Tea? (bet you never thought I’d be invoking that as a source here, huh). A lot of their questions seem to be digging at how Frances ended up so well-adjusted considering, well, everything — she credits a lot of this to her mother putting her in therapy immediately after the defining incident of their family lives, letting her ease into the practice of articulating her toddler feelings for an entire year before they begin the process of explaining to four-year-old Frances why she can’t see her dad anymore.
They ask how her relationship with her mom is now, and she says the following: “The thing with somebody who’s as smart as she is is she doesn’t know how to sit with herself, because she’s so deeply empathetic and so intelligent that when she has to just sit inside her skin, she doesn’t know how to handle that. So she’s highly self-destructive as a result of not knowing what to do with all that information and feeling. I am somebody who only wants to provide the role for her as somebody who loves her and supports her and has a non-judgmental understanding of empathy and compassion that maybe nobody else in her life has.”
The second quote is from her newly-minted podcasting partner, Rob Harvilla, who had yet to meet or befriend Courtney when he wrote the following for the episode of his podcast 60 Songs That Explain the 90s about “Doll Parts”: “Seriously, don’t believe the hype of his rejection of the hype: Kurt Cobain wanted to be a rock star no matter how furiously he insisted otherwise. But one of the biggest reasons people are still throwing stones at the cardboard cutout of Courtney Love is that she always wanted to be a rock star way more than he did. And she was — and is — way better at it.”
It makes me think of a scene in the 1982 cult film Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains where Diane Lane’s character’s all-girl band (featuring Laura Dern playing Paul Simonon’s bass, they did that for me) has surpassed the English punk band they were initially opening for in popularity, meaning they’re the headliners now. That other band’s John Lydon/Joe Strummer hybrid of a lead singer, played by Ray Winstone, storms into the room, ready to give Lane’s character Corrine a piece of his mind about how much he thinks she’s sold out. “You are so jealous of me,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I’m everything you ever wanted to be.”
“A cunt!” he yells in response.
Her expression grows deliciously smug: “Exactly.”
One last quote, but one of Courtney’s choice this time. On the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” episode of Rob’s podcast, which Courtney guested on, she fills us in on her obsession with women playing Hamlet — specifically with British actor Cush Jumbo’s turn in the role at the 2021 Young Vic production in London, which Courtney attended several performances of. She paraphrases something she’d heard Jumbo say about the power you wield when playing such a part: “You can declare war, you can declare peace and you can wrestle with the big themes — and no one calls you crazy.”
And with that, enough quoting everyone else. Let’s dive into the big themes: no album has shaped my life the way Live Through This has. It’s pretty easily my favorite album of all time — no concessions, no “what about XYZ album that same year”. It’s the all-timer. It changed my life. I don’t know who I would be without it. We live in this fraught and awful universe where Courtney Love not only lost her husband, but had her masterwork completely colored by the tragedy of his death when he ended his life the week before its release. That certainly matters to me, but it doesn’t play a role in the way it has shaped me as a person. I withstand years of boys parroting myths which swirl in the ether — all speculation, no evidence — and I pretend to believe them just to not draw myself out to be a further target of their ire. Yet, in my heart of hearts, my life changed the second I saw my first Hole video — maybe the first time I was allowed to see Courtney, not the wicked, warped lens through which everyone else insisted I viewed her. I can never not love her. The second I see her for her, I become myself.
And by the time Courtney Love is slinging her guitar around and diving into crowds of extras in those videos, she has lived through everything — an unstable childhood during which her father occasionally doses her with acid, stints in foster care before being emancipated, befriending Julian Cope and the guys from Echo and the Bunnymen while initially looking for her biological father in Ireland, working as a stripper on both coasts and in several other countries, staying with Joe Strummer’s family as she acts in Alex Cox’s movies, appearing in a Ramones video, catching Warhol’s eye, starting a band, meeting her husband, having a baby, having her baby taken away from her, losing her husband, being ridiculed and accused of murder while going through the most painful, traumatic event of her life.
You want her to die and you don’t believe her, I know it. And she doesn't give a fuck. She refuses to play Ophelia, wilting and drowning — a respectable, mourning woman. Her career is helped by her proximity to her famous partner, but she is not dependent upon him. She had lived multiple lives before Kurt had even entered her orbit. She mourns with the crowds of his fans, reading out his suicide note and adding her own furious interjections, and then tries to go on living — raising her daughter with the heavy help of Kurt’s mother Wendy (who adored Courtney, by all accounts), touring extensively, refusing to be a victim. She cackles at people who boo her. She is frightening and heroic, Hamlet pacing around the empty palace and flooding the room with his own musings, she is difficult. She’s a cunt, and she can only smirk and respond, “exactly”.
On the ‘95 Lollapalooza tour, she has her arm in a cast (allegedly after hitting Kathleen Hanna — there are conflicting stories about this) and she screams at her band like a wounded animal to start the songs, cursing at the crowd about how she hates not having a guitar. There’s one performance in Vancouver where a photographer shoots her from below, cigarette between pouted red lips, standing in a black slip and looking like god — having studied her rock forebearers and knowing she was called to pass their torch. A deity isn’t beamed down to Earth just to reflect quietly. It’s not there to be respectable. It’s there to radiate light and for you to either shut the fuck up or bow in its presence, bearing witness to your own shift in perspective because you’ve been rinsed in its repulsive, unfettered glow. I want to be glamorous in the way I rupture, delight in the squeamish reaction. Sometimes you can hear the way Courtney’s mouth is barely able to keep up with her brain and how fast it’s moving, trying to connect the dots between the million ideas she’ll have in a minute’s time. It’s a miracle.
Courtney Love thinks about being a woman a lot too. Live Through This — a perfect album — is 11 songs (and one cover) about being an unacceptable woman, which means being any kind of woman. Every (male) music writer at the time is dubbing any girl with a guitar a “Riot Grrrl” act, leading plenty of women to denounce the overt, militant feminist ideology of those Pacific Northwest bands, if only to get away from being labeled as a “woman artist” rather than just an “artist”. They claim they don’t think abut being a woman, even when their work clearly struggles with or makes fun of gendered expectations. They claim they’ve never been discriminated against as a woman in the music industry even as we read interviews where they’re asked the most patronizing questions, talked about in the most dehumanizing way. It’s like they’re trying to leave their bodies to rot and hover above them, hoping we’ll get the hint and do the detaching ourselves.
Courtney never denounces the label “feminist”. She voices that she understands why her contemporaries sidestep the descriptor, because her male counterparts will hold it against them — she knows firsthand. Courtney loves herself and hates herself and loves women and is overwhelming and messy in her womanhood and shows it so that they don’t have to take the knife wounds decorating her spine by the time 1994 rolls around. Joe Strummer supposedly told her to “Do it for the kids, Court”, and she knows the kids — the girls — need to see her. She needs to survive in a space where they’re forced to look, bleed into buckets they can feed from, operate at an accessible level they can hear and immediately understand. She transcends being a “woman artist” by pushing aside the shame inherent to being a woman in a social context. Shame is maybe the most prevalent emotion in these songs, but that doesn’t counteract how she’ll try to defy it in a following breath, sink teeth into it come next chorus.
I think my favorite moment on Live Through This actually comes in the middle of the second side, with “I Think That I Would Die” — harrowing in its retelling of Courtney fighting Los Angeles child services for the right to be her daughter’s legal guardian, disputing the Vanity Fair claims that she’d been taking heroin while pregnant. Some days, I don’t think there's a better wink of an opening line than, “He’s stupid, I’m smarting”. But the key fully slips into the lock come the bridge, inspired by a Julia Roberts interview where she — falling prey to that dirty label, quickly spit out like it’s a curse — disputes a nasty rumor that’s been flying around: “I am not a feminist”. Courtney claims she laughed out loud reading it for the first time, cutting the page out of the magazine. In a very-of-its-decade quiet bridge, Courtney takes on the guise of the world after teasingly quoting Roberts — “It’s…not…yours…” — followed by the most guttural, perfect “FUCK! YOUUUUUU!!!!” ever committed to tape. She only rivals herself in the competition for singing this word, coming close with the delivery of the lyric “It’s fucking wonderful” on “Playing Your Song”, which arrives on the following Hole record. But no, “I Think I Would Die” takes the cake.
If we are going to force girlhood and its existence dictated by that which oppresses it — that which categorizes it as something lesser — into a sound, it’s that “FUCK! YOUUUUUU!!!!” It’s standing in a parking lot sobbing as he tries to take back when he called you disgusting, or rather, pretend he never said it at all. “It’s not you I think is disgusting, it’s just, um—” Everything on you, everything you choose to be, the monster you make yourself, your version of you.
Pregnancy is depicted as body horror, following our narrator as she devours limbs and spitefully grows fatter by the minute through the tale of “Plump”’s grotesque debauchery. “Asking For It” and “Jennifer’s Body” watch helplessly and furiously as the systemic rape and murder of women ravage cities-worth, states-worth of people, swallow them up in a fetid, preordained rot that they feed off, whether they realize it or not. At the time I’m writing this, OJ Simpson just died the day before this album’s anniversary — and I couldn’t read about Nicole and the abuse she suffered without thinking about this pair of songs I’d knew I’d have to write about today. You read about her husband hugging all of her family and not even acknowledging her at an event right before he killed her, and you have to imagine how alone she was in her living hell — no one to trust, no one who would believe her, everyone who picked him over her. Her murderer became a laughing stock, but at least he was allowed to exit the circumstances with his life. “With a bullet / Number one / Kill the family / Save the son.”
It might be about her sisterly rivalry with Babes in Toyland’s Kat Bjelland, but I can’t help but hear the bond forged through necessary gossip, passing on information about who you don’t want to be stuck in a room alone with, fused together by this shared knowledge that shouldn’t have to be shared at all in a futile hope to exist where and when you want to in “Hold you close like we both died / My ever-pressing suicide / My stupid fuck, my blushing bride / Oh, tear my heart out, tear my heart out.” I think about the woman who gave birth to me, one of the women I’m closest to and will always adore, and I want to burst into tears hearing the opening lines of “Softer, Softest” — transcribing secrets I let slip in a language only we can understand to keep them from the man one of us chose and the other one of us didn't. All frivolous, hard-candy-colored bitching in their eyes — which, in reality, is the only place to be fully ourselves. I resent any closeness derived from fear, even if I’m grateful I have that layer of protection. I rebuke all fear and the way they’ve done nothing to dispel it. Empty, empty.
And yes, those three music videos for the first three singles on Live Through This changed my life too. I think I see the video for “Violet” in my dreams sometimes, watching Courtney’s old stripper friends from her time working at Jumbo’s Clown Room in L.A. under the degrading gaze of the sepia-toned, all-male audience — cut together with rows of young girls picking at their teeth, tiaras affixed. Few images define my teenage years like Courtney corseted and powdered to work slapping herself in the face — then, covering it with her hand like she’s in physical pain, nails digging, the second the music ends and shame envelops her again. I dream of her intro to the song on Jools Holland, giving Billy Corgan the greatest shoutout he’d probably ever received with, “This song is about a jerk. I hexed him, and now he's losing his hair." Another phrase I repeat to myself like my own lord’s prayer.
And the appeal of this song and this video should be obvious — I keep typing and deleting the word “rage” because it doesn’t hold the full weight of what this song contains. I think we can point to a lot of people who Courtney inspired, but none of their kiss-off breakup songs contain a quarter of what she unleashes here. And maybe that’s because she was 29 when Live Through This came out, a decade older than most major female pop musicians are at the time of their commercial breakthrough — her fury isn’t just aimed at a boy with more power than her pissing her off, but at a world that wants her dead long before unfathomable tragedy strikes. It says, you won’t have to look at me forever, but I will. How am I supposed to deal with my own reflection for a lifetime? I think about the shot we see right when she sings “And I’m the one with no soul” a lot too — how it seems more unfocused all of a sudden, how her eyes are almost cut out. It’s like she’s appearing as you see her: barely even a full face, hardly a full person. Just an easy target to loosely aim at. She crowd surfs like she’s pliable, letting filthy hands tear at the tulle of her dress, hoping they hear flesh rip with it.
Of course, “Doll Parts” contains more obvious ghosts — a fact the video makes glaringly clear with its casting of a small blonde boy to hold up the rotting doll props before leaving Courtney in the bedroom set alone. But even if “Doll Parts” is, at its core, a song about Courtney’s gnawing fear around the time she realized she likes Kurt and also realized he might not like her back, it’s really a dagger turned back inward to Courtney’s chest, not toward his. It’s a song she alleges she wrote the lyrics to in Sharpie on her arm in a music exec’s bathroom, a scene of her marking herself with her own soul-crushing desire for that which she can’t have, her acknowledgment that she wants too much and too severely.
“The girl with the most cake” gets to stuff her face in a gluttonous frenzy, but is never really content, and I think Courtney knows that even as she’s writing the words down. It’s the album’s earlier assertion that “You’re hungry, but I’m starving.” It’s a rally cry for revenge that you don’t know how to justify or direct. It’s a prophetic plea for gut-level empathy. It’s the song about her husband which she was forced to sing every night the second she was pulled back up onto a stage. It is a song about wishing everything was different. It’s fairy dust thrown haphazardly, a blind swipe with no pushback. You’re just left with your big aching nothing and a boy who probably doesn’t want you — unless he secretly does, if you’re Courtney at the time she’s writing it. The rest of us will just have to push at the void.
Then, there’s the album’s lead single, and the only video directed by a woman — Sophie Muller, whose music video CV will floor you if you go look it up right now — pulling from the album cover’s pretty overt Carrie homage to convey…what? A commentary on Courtney’s newfound prominence as a tabloid media figure, ridiculed as much as she’s watched, jokingly imagining herself crowned queen of the it-girl rock stars? A callout of the absurd, vacuous notion that pageant trophies are any real indication of accomplishment or proof of feminine superiority? A partially-earnest, self-congratulatory moment celebrating that she’s made it this far, that she’s survived against all odds, even if the audience jeers at the crowning? I think it’s all of those things to me now. I know “Miss World” and its video are the perfect distillation of these contradictory truths — aspirations of rock stardom soured by constant scrutiny, and the decision to buckle down on that aspiration no matter how much it tests your resolve, how much it makes you question wanting to keep going.
Bassist Kristen Pfaff, who died of drug-related causes two months after the album’s release, came up with that “I made my bed, I’ll lie in it” refrain, and I’m convinced now more than I’ve ever been before that it’s what makes the song. Not necessarily for its resignation, but for its chant-along stubbornness, its bratty nursery-rhyme stickiness. It’s antagonistic to its listener or its subject, but it’s an affirmation for Courtney too. Though it was recorded in late 1993, it’s the unimaginable horror of Courtney reading the love of her life’s last message to her on live television, telling her she needs to be strong. It’s her boxer’s creed, a catchphrase she would yell to camera if she’d been allowed to step up as a prize fighter. It’s her promise that you will not hold her down or shut her up, no matter how much pressure you apply when you hold the knife to her throat.
It’s Courtney telling Jessica Hopper, “I’m not quite sure why Live Through This is so iconic. I think it’s because girls don’t make angry records as much. I’ve always thought [PJ Harvey’s] Rid of Me was a far superior record than Live Through This, but that’s good — it just keeps my ego in check.”
It’s my fury at having to click a link for a music outlet published by a man who defended Jann Wenner’s claim that women musicians can’t be “masters” the way male musicians can. It’s my fury at Wenner still being regarded as god even though his time is up, his relevance as a cultural figure waning with each day I have and cherish and burn on this earth.
It’s 15-year-old Diane Lane with dyed hair, wearing fishnet tights and a shock of pink eye makeup, in character and yelling “SUCKERS!” at the women swooning over the rotten-to-the-core rock stars following her band: “These guys laugh at you! They’ve got such big plans for the world, but they don’t include us. So what does that make you? Just another girl lining up to die.”
It’s the glow I take on standing under Courtney’s light, holding my own flowers with mascara streaming down my face because I get to walk her path, get to carve out my own. It’s me jumping around to this music two decades removed from having heard it the first time, three decades removed from the moment it rattled everyone and everything. It’s all the discomfort I distill in you now. It’s your continued cowardice eating you alive.
It’s Courtney as Valerie Solanas, as every member of Fleetwood Mac, as every man she’s been attached to and compared unfavorably to, as prom queen, as the devil incarnate, as our true last great rock star. She’s everything I want to embody in this world. She’s coming for you with a blade.