Books
Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love
by Courtney Love (Faber and Faber, Inc.)
Like her fellow icon Madonna, who then-paramour Warren Beatty once declared wouldn't want to live, much less speak, off camera, Courtney Love's hunger for attention is a force of nature on par with her talent. Cultivating a brash public persona over the years and engaging in tabloid-friendly antics that have come to overshadow her music, she offers both the shame and the thrill of wildly inappropriate behavior as well as the raw honesty of an artist battling both herself and her reputation. That she would put her private thoughts on display for fans and foes to pick apart hardly comes as a surprise.
Among the endless lists, sketches, photos and journal entries on display in Dirty Blonde, two observations stand out from all the others. The first - "I Love being famous...because I get off on it." The second - "I Love playing music...because it affords me the power to feel that I am worth something. In order to DO IT RIGHT i would renounce just about anything." The intersection of these impulses comprises the bulk of what is found within.
Accused at times of not writing her own songs, this collection of ephemera reveals Love to be very much her own creation, a lifelong writer, performer and celebrity watchdog. Her precocious teenage scribblings include sometimes corny but smart-for-her-age lyrics and show that even then she was conscious of the nuances of pop stardom. One early note reads in part, "I think I'll be a rockstar. Get an Oscar too, and be best friends with Elton John." (Later on she includes a snap of herself with Elton, Elizabeth Taylor and Donatella Versace.) Her experiences in boarding school and juvenile hall are well represented; amid progress reports and official documents are shrewd assessments of human nature ("all cool girls are competitive cunts...just don't pretend its otherwise! Celebrate the reality!"). This stuff would fascinate even if its author were unknown.
Once freed of school obligations, Love plunged headfirst into the rock world that she so craved, making obsessive love/hate lists and crafting advice to pass along to her future children ("get enough sleep...be glamorous...Earn your own fame"). We glimpse letters that she wrote to 4AD and John Peel touting Hole, as well as signature doodles that appeared in various forms on that band's album art. As Love's life changes, so do its artifacts - notes to Kurt Cobain ("lets be mountain junkies and breed satanic mall rats"), intimate family photos and acknowledgement from various public figures (David Geffen, Marc Jacobs and others) that reflect her position as one of their peers but also seem to have been preserved as a sort of self-validation.
While fragmented, this material recasts Love outside the caricature of herself that tends to make the papers. She emerges as a fiercely intelligent and curious individual who lives under extraordinary circumstances, but who also has the vulnerability to write of her daughter, "Someday I hope to make her so proud and so happy." Love has been working on an album with Billy Corgan and Linda Perry that's due for release this winter. Some lyrics from the project (tentatively called How Dirty Girls Get Clean) round out the book, along with her thoughts about the present: "I feel ready for a brand new life now." Whatever Love's future holds, it seems certain that it'll be at least as stimulating as her journey thus far - no ghostwriter necessary.
- Amanda Langston
by Courtney Love (Faber and Faber, Inc.)
Like her fellow icon Madonna, who then-paramour Warren Beatty once declared wouldn't want to live, much less speak, off camera, Courtney Love's hunger for attention is a force of nature on par with her talent. Cultivating a brash public persona over the years and engaging in tabloid-friendly antics that have come to overshadow her music, she offers both the shame and the thrill of wildly inappropriate behavior as well as the raw honesty of an artist battling both herself and her reputation. That she would put her private thoughts on display for fans and foes to pick apart hardly comes as a surprise.
Among the endless lists, sketches, photos and journal entries on display in Dirty Blonde, two observations stand out from all the others. The first - "I Love being famous...because I get off on it." The second - "I Love playing music...because it affords me the power to feel that I am worth something. In order to DO IT RIGHT i would renounce just about anything." The intersection of these impulses comprises the bulk of what is found within.
Accused at times of not writing her own songs, this collection of ephemera reveals Love to be very much her own creation, a lifelong writer, performer and celebrity watchdog. Her precocious teenage scribblings include sometimes corny but smart-for-her-age lyrics and show that even then she was conscious of the nuances of pop stardom. One early note reads in part, "I think I'll be a rockstar. Get an Oscar too, and be best friends with Elton John." (Later on she includes a snap of herself with Elton, Elizabeth Taylor and Donatella Versace.) Her experiences in boarding school and juvenile hall are well represented; amid progress reports and official documents are shrewd assessments of human nature ("all cool girls are competitive cunts...just don't pretend its otherwise! Celebrate the reality!"). This stuff would fascinate even if its author were unknown.
Once freed of school obligations, Love plunged headfirst into the rock world that she so craved, making obsessive love/hate lists and crafting advice to pass along to her future children ("get enough sleep...be glamorous...Earn your own fame"). We glimpse letters that she wrote to 4AD and John Peel touting Hole, as well as signature doodles that appeared in various forms on that band's album art. As Love's life changes, so do its artifacts - notes to Kurt Cobain ("lets be mountain junkies and breed satanic mall rats"), intimate family photos and acknowledgement from various public figures (David Geffen, Marc Jacobs and others) that reflect her position as one of their peers but also seem to have been preserved as a sort of self-validation.
While fragmented, this material recasts Love outside the caricature of herself that tends to make the papers. She emerges as a fiercely intelligent and curious individual who lives under extraordinary circumstances, but who also has the vulnerability to write of her daughter, "Someday I hope to make her so proud and so happy." Love has been working on an album with Billy Corgan and Linda Perry that's due for release this winter. Some lyrics from the project (tentatively called How Dirty Girls Get Clean) round out the book, along with her thoughts about the present: "I feel ready for a brand new life now." Whatever Love's future holds, it seems certain that it'll be at least as stimulating as her journey thus far - no ghostwriter necessary.
- Amanda Langston