Courtney Love's Rage

I saw this video of Courtney Love this morning.

Then I put “Violet” on; the opening track of Live Through This. Hole’s second album. It came out before Gracie Abrams was an embryo. In 1994. Everything was amazing in 1994. The PlayStation came out in 1994. The Eurostar opened in 1994. Schindler’s List won seven Oscars in 1994. Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump and The Lion King all came out in 1994. Frickin Apartheid - the REAL one - ended in 1994. And in 1994, grunge was at the peak of its existence. And that’s probably why the reticent emperor of grunge Kurt Cobain took his own life in April of that year. A week after, Courtney Love’s band released Live Through This; a seering magnum opus about Love’s survival through her worst tribulations. A week after. Courtney Love was left a widow on the cusp of turning 30. Frances Bean Cobain, their daughter, wasn’t yet two-years-old.

The disheveled princess of the scene, the avenging punk rock angel, was blamed for Cobain’s suicide. Did she shoot him? Did Courtney Love murder her own husband? Did Cobain actually write all of Live Through This, hence why it was so good? (Absolutely not, but that was how misogynist the music press was in the ‘90s).

Love told Rolling Stone in December of that year:

“I lived with someone who said every day that he was going to kill himself… and that resulted in a lot of hysteria on my part. I started to feel like my purpose in life was noble – to take care of these two human beings, my husband and child, and make sure that they lived. And it was a fine purpose.”

In the interview, the journalist David Fricke narrates how she stays in the room talking through her distress, crying.

“He killed himself in this coat,” she says, almost choking on her sobs as she points to a heavy brown jacket lying next to her on the sofa–coat that she has been wearing for the last couple of days to fend off the autumn chill. “I washed the blood off it. It’s not even sentimental. I just washed one of my other coats, too.”

It’s a brilliant interview. One more.

“My goal keeps me alive,” Love says firmly. “And no personal issue is going to interfere with that. If people try to put me in the crazy box–’crazy fucking Courtney’–go ahead. But if you think you’re going to stop me from where I’m going, you’re not going to do it. I work my ass off. I deliver the goddamn goods. And I will deliver them again.”

Courtney Love and I followed one another for years. When I worked at the NME, she used to email in. She emailed quite a few of the staff. She was one of those rare music industry legends who saw no barrier between artists and press. We were all part of the same ecosystem. A gang of reprobates, weirdos and rejects. She always sent email in Comic Sans font, in pastel colors. When you’re Courtney Love you can be that ridiculous. You can do whatever the hell you want. A writing mentor of mine when I was in my early 20s once told me that she was so unsure of who to be when she walked into big rooms for interviews or opportunities, that she asked herself - what would Courtney Love do? And behaved like she thought Courtney Love would behave. If you don’t yet know who you are, be Courtney Love. Maybe that’s not the best advice.

“Violet” was a song that existed long before it made its way to open Live Through This. I struggle to think of another album opener that kicks the door down immediately, screaming and yelling in as conquering a manner as this. In 1994, Love had anger and didn’t care about being labelled the “enraged female”, because females feel rage and that doesn’t make us any less attractive. She was vulnerable and courageous, in a world that cast her as so tough nothing could hurt her, even though everyone was throwing rocks at her non-stop. In the second half of the music video for “Violet”, Love is a stripper (she was once a stripper at Jumbo’s Clown Room in real life). She juxtaposes that with the first half in which there are shots of child ballerinas in a theater. Girls performing their roles according to age bracket. Girls being looked at by people who like looking at girls. Girls at different phases of girlhood.

The song is all power chords, gentler verses, and hard-as-fuck choruses. It’s allegedly about her relationship with Smashing Pumpkins’ frontman Billy Corgan. Here she is introducing it on the Jools Holland show: “This is a song about a jerk. I hexed him and now he’s losing his hair.”

Love’s voice roars like Janis Joplin and she annihilates her target just as viciously. The song sees love as a war, and men must be destroyed and left without the capacity to own her. In the opening gambit she makes a mockery of how society talks to female victims: “You should learn when to go/You should learn how to say no”. As if women have a choice in the matter. The song is about being violated. Will the pain last a day or will it “live forever”? Even though, Love mocks the perpetrators of sexual violence, her voice shrieks with defiant revenge, as though goading him to finish the job of destroying her soul:

“Go on take everything, take everything, I want you to.”

Violet is the color of the bruises on her that will eventually fade. But he will never get away from the sound of the woman he tried to make his victim as she screams through the radio at him.

"Violet" is more than rage – it’s reclamation. It’s the voice of a woman who’s been devoured and discarded by the very thing she once romanticized, rising with fury and sorrow to take back the stage. Courtney Love doesn’t just scream – she unveils. It’s a howl from the gut of someone who knows what it means to be worshipped, then punished for her power. And still she dares to want, to seduce, to destroy the shame. The softness is a trap; the violence is truth. For a woman torn between wanting to disappear and needing to be seen, “Violet” is the fire that says: I’m still here – and I know exactly who I am.

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I’ve made a decision. I need to get through this moment in my life. So for the next 30 days, I am going to write about music every day. I’m not writing about anything else. Not Jews. Not Israel. Not the mental rot of a generation. Not the sheer hypocrisy of progressives or the injustice of them winning everything. No. I’m just going to write about music, because music is the first love of my life. I’m sure other stuff will come through because I’m an id.