Gossip Galore, But Where’s the Love?:
The Girl With The Most Hype
Book feature for The Stranger, 4/17/96
I don’t really want to blame Melissa “Babs Babylon” Rossi for the disappointing content of her book, Courtney Love: Queen of Noise, A Most Unauthorized Biography (Pocket Books). I’m certain she was just following orders. You don’t have to read between too many lines to realize Pocket wanted this type of book, and dutiful magazine stringer Rossi complied. The type of book I’m talking about was best expressed in an old New York Rocker review of a Keith Moon biography: “All sex and drugs and no rock and roll.”
You get maybe 1,000 words at most about Courtney Love the singer, the musician, the songwriter, the still-aspiring actress. That’s scattered among some 85,000 words about Courtney Love the problem child, the reform school dropout, the stripper, the small-time groupie, the big-time groupie, the wife, the mom, the widow, the riot-grrrl hater, the force of nature, and most of all the Celebrity. Rossi’s book is a chronological compilation of my-god-what’s-she-done-now stories, divided into three sections of roughly equal length (before, during, and since her marriage). The cover photo might show an artfully cropped shot of Love in mid-guitar strum, but the inside teaser brings us not to a concert but to Love’s barging in on Madonna at the MTV Awards preview show. In the priorities of Rossi’s editors, the incident marks Love’s ascendancy to Madonna’s former title of #1 Rock Bad Girl–not because Love, unlike Madonna, writes her own material and plays an instrument onstage, but because Love’s unpredictably wild antics were more outrageous than Madonna’s calculated publicity schemes could ever be. Pocket doesn’t care who’s got the better tuneage, just who’s got the most hype.
(Indeed, at one point Rossi mentions trying to sell publishers on a Love book four years ago; the NY big boys decreed Love, fascinating a character as she might be, was not A Star and hence unworthy of mainstream publishing’s attention.)
On one level, this might be the way Love prefers to be known. More than anyone else in the Northwest “alternative” music universe (at least more than anyone else who succeeded), Love wanted to be a glittering light in the firmament of celebrity and fame. As Rossi thoroughly documents, this lifelong ambition for the spotlight has caused her, and continues to cause her, no end of conflict with music people in Portland, Seattle, and particularly Olympia who believe the punk ethic that music ought to be a creative endeavor and a personal statement, not an industry. Rossi also shows how Love’s ongoing quest to be (in)famous has endeared her to the NY/LA entertainment and gossip businesses. Five years into the “alternative” revolution Love’s late husband helped instigate, Vanity Fairand Entertainment Tonight (and Pocket Books) would still rather talk about Rock Stars than about rock. Love may appear out of control in dozens of the book’s episodes–drinking, drugging, harassing ex-boyfriends, sleeping around, encouraging her husband’s descent into heroin (or so Rossi alleges) then desperately failing to bring him back out. But she also clearly knows how to get and keep her name in the headlines, even when they aren’t always the headlines she wants.
Yet Love is more than just tabloid fodder. She’s succeeded by the pure-art standards she’s sometimes claimed to disdain. The first Hole album, Pretty on the Inside, is an experienced of focused anguish and vengeance, one of the finest American pure-punk records ever. Live Through This is a poppier, more rounded, more “accessible” work effortlessly careening between moments of beauty and ugliness. Love has spoken in recent months of wanting to be known primarily for her work, and also of wanting to be something at least closer to a positive role model (as in her backstage quip to a KOMO reporter about wanting “to prove girls can be the doctors, not just the nurses”).
Ultimately, it’s Love’s work that makes her life worth reading about, not her infamy that makes her records worth listening to. It’s these two contrasting aspects of her story that combine to make her such a fascinating figure.
Thus, by instructing Rossi to write almost exclusively about Love’s life as a succession of notorious (even by punk rock standards) incidents, Pocket loses out on a chance to fully explore Love’s story. Instead, we get a punkified version of The Rose with all the songs cut out.
One place where Rossi’s writing is allowed to shine is in her description of the old Portland music scene. Rossi and Love were both hangers-on in it, though they didn’t know one another. Rossi’s boast that Portland’s early-’80s punk world was livelier and more creative than Seattle’s is certainly a boast I could question; but Rossi makes a stong case for her allegation with Portland’s one great unsung band (the Wipers) and its many darn good bands ( Napalm Beach, Dead Moon, the Dharma Bums, the all-female Neo Boys). That the only mainstream star from that scene is Love, who’d only been a groupie in Portland and started her career in Minnesota and California, is indeed the minor tragedy Rossi makes it out to be. Of course, those other Portland bands didn’t try to be Stars above all other priorities; they tried to make great music, and under the financially-impossible conditions of indie rock at the time they succeeded at their goal.
If I had more space here, I could borrow a few clichés from the middle-aged scholars at our nation’s universities in the field ofAdvanced Madonna Studies, and write interminable ramblings about whether Love’s perceived interest in celebrity above accomplishment, along with her use of fashion-as-uniform and her cosmetic surgeries, somehow represent her identification with a notion of feminine being as contrasted to masculine doing. But I don’t so I won’t.
