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Underground > Radio & Music >

Courtney Love - America's Sweetheart

  
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
12:48 / 26.02.04
This is so much better than even I was expecting. I've been very ambivalent about her in the past, but I'm really leaning heavily towards "Courtney Love RULES" right now. The angry, defiant bits ('Mono' especially) have helped lift me out of a grumpy slump, while the bits openly influenced by the soft rock of yore are a revelation ('Hold On To Me', 'Uncool'). Is Courtney's opinion of The Darkness on record? I suspect she might like 'em.

I'm not the first person to make this point, but one of the things I really like about this album is that on one level it works the way certain rap albums do: a distillation of the artist's public persona which captures the things which are great about them, the things which aren't so great, and the things they've been castigated for by the media (including both the previous categories and also simple media fictions) - and this is then thrown back at the listener, taunting her critics. She does this easily as well as Eminem or Jay-Z. And it's just as thrilling. On tracks like 'But Julian, I'm A Little Older Than You', 'I'll Do Anything' and 'Hello', she plays to perfection the part of the older, richer, badly-behaved woman... sexually voracious, with a weakness for beautiful boys and popping pills, and a tendency towards stalking and violence, one minute slashing the tires of seedy corrupt old rock gods, the next minute emulating their decadence... In other words, just as much of a threatening anathema to Middle America as the figure of the gangsta rapper.

Haterz, step off: Courtney Love is a motherfucking P.I.M.P.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
13:15 / 26.02.04
I'm just starting to listen to it now, and getting into it. A lot of it is very good, and there's nothing on it I don't like.

I noticed that she prominently sings the phrase "shut up" on exactly half of the songs.
 
 
Jack Fear
14:52 / 26.02.04
Write what you know, I guess.

I have plenty of time for Courtney, and the video for "Mono" makes me laugh, but her new post-plastic-surgery face kinds creeps me out.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
14:57 / 26.02.04
Haven't heard the record yet, but apparently the lyrics on the promo were different than the lyrics on the release in substantial ways. Village Voice has the run-down.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
16:18 / 26.02.04
What run-down? Josh "Jane Dark" Clover and Amy "Jack White is white!" Phillips review both versions, but give little to no indication of how they differ because they are both too busy babbling in their respective, highly annoying styles.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
16:22 / 26.02.04
Oh, very sorry - here it is.

Sometimes I'm just so eager to dis Clover and Phillips that the impulse blinds me to links hiding in plain sight!
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
07:30 / 27.02.04
(I can't believe Amy Phillips has written another piece about how when she was a teenager, she used to love band/artist X... Clover's just openly misogynistic though, innit?)

Todd, I'm confused because the version I have was bought from a shop and doesn't say it's a promo anywhere on it, and yet it has the lyrics which supposedly are only on the promo of 'Sunset Strip'. Then again, the lyrics to Mono as printed on the sleeve are different to what's on record... Chaos.
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
13:53 / 27.02.04
As annoying as Amy's "when I was a teenager back in the 90s, I love this, but as a hipster in the 00s, I hate it" shtick is, I dislike her abstract for her formal panel at the 2004 Experience Music Project conferance much, much more:


White Blood Sells: Race and the White Stripes' Moment in the Sun

In a pop music climate dominated commercially by hip-hop, Jack and Meg offer a lily-white alternative, their pale, pancake-makeup-covered faces and raw, stripped-down sound contrast sharply with dark-skinned rappers and their complex digitized rhythms. The media have embraced the Stripes as symbols of anti-rap, as rock’s Great White Hope in the face of dwindling record sales and increasing artistic irrelevance. And although I do not believe that the Whites are racists—their love for African-American-derived musical forms such as the blues and garage rock is too great, for one—I also do not think that they are entirely innocent in the matter.

Ugh. These are her Pazz & Jop comments on the topic of the White Stripes:

Don't the White Stripes seem a little too white for their own good? And I'm not just talking about their complexions. Like, would it kill them to get out in the street and mingle with some brown people once in a while? I mean brown people that aren't dead or really old bluesmen, or Mick Collins? Or that scary slave, er, bodyguard they had with them on Conan O'Brien.

Just make her stop!
  
 
Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!
14:17 / 27.02.04
Wow, she really is vile, isn't she?

I've increasingly wanted to check out Courtney's new album. I must say - I've never really listened to anything by her, and only now am I curious. My attempted downloads were met with frustration, though.
 
 
rizla mission
14:21 / 27.02.04
Well that Amy Phillips sure has some funny notions..
 
 
I'm Rick Jones, bitch
14:25 / 27.02.04
Courtney should suicide right, or 'fess up to killing Kurt- just anything to keep her away from a mic!

She's fucking dried up, full of shit and cliches ("They say rock and roll is dead, and they're probably right" - oh Courtney! How profound!) and one of the worst possible influences on teenage girls I can think of - you know the type, the borderline psychos who want to be just like Courtney. Fuck her and fuck her venom-filled brood!

I feel very strongly about this.
 
 
Jack Fear
15:22 / 27.02.04
Dude, do you actually know any teenaged girls?
 
 
Murray Hamhandler
17:10 / 27.02.04
I must say: I'm impressed. My expectations weren't really very high for her new album (possibly due to the nearly unanimous negative reviews that I've read), but Courtney has delivered. What's more, she may have delivered (arguably) the best album of her career. And that's coming from someone who holds Live Through This in very high esteem. I'm still digesting it at the moment, but I'm totally into it.

One thing: I'm detecting a very specific, old-school influence (or possibly multiple influences) that I'm familiar with on the general sound of the album, but I can't place it. Something post-punk or new wave, maybe. Any ideas?
 
 
I'm Rick Jones, bitch
18:23 / 27.02.04
I know many teenaged girls (being all of a year or so out of the teen-ages myself), one of whom SCREAMED "SHE WOULDN'T KILL KURT! SHE HAD FRANCIS BEAN TO TAKE CARE OF!!!!" repeatedly in my face when I jokingly suggested that yeah, she probably did off hubby.
 
 
YNH
20:41 / 27.02.04
I might do that.

Thanks, Flyboy. I wasn't paying attention.

And welcome home.
 
 
The Falcon
02:28 / 04.03.04
Ah, but those girls grow up into super human beings, Radiator. I'm older than you, and I know.
 
 
The Falcon
02:29 / 04.03.04
Not, however, 'superhuman beings' like in Watchmen or that.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
11:58 / 04.03.04
I think Sunset Strip is a pretty bitchin' song. The promo version, though, not the sweetened up official release. I'm obligated to think that.
 
 
I'm Rick Jones, bitch
13:18 / 04.03.04
None the less, fuck Courtney Love sideways. She looks like a fucking inflatable sex doll, with slightly less singing and instrumental ability.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
14:56 / 04.03.04
(I'm not even gonna bother, people. Some things are just self-evident, and the replies just write themselves.)

Deric, I'm inclined to agree with you. I think this is my favourite album of the year so far, and I think it's at least as good as any album she's been involved with to date. I'll have to go back and listen to Live Through This again for a current assessment of that, but the ratio of great songs to forgettable ones on this record definitely trumps Celebrity Skin (could it be because that album was sort of a half-way house, almost going in a direction wherein rock credibility ceased to be a concern, but not quite all the way). The only track on America's Sweetheart that bores me a little is 'All The Drugs', and that ain't bad exactly, just a little too familiar in terms of post-grunge riff-heavy stoner rock.

I think the real surprises on this album are how well she does the straightahead upbeat punk-pop thing and the straigtahead ballad thing - darker stuff like 'Life Despite God' is good too, but there's a kind of... competence?... to the potential singles and late-night weepy love songs that is quite at odds with the popular perception of Love (I don't just mean the kneejerk misogynist stuff, I mean the persona which she herself has been complicit or even the driving force in creating). To make another rap analogy: it's like if ODB suddenly made Birth Of A Prince - you expected Nigga Please from the guy, and it's great on its own terms, but how much more psyched would you be if he suddenly broke out the wisdom?

There's these neat little instances of clever commenatry too, and not just in the lyrics. Like the way the verses of 'But Julian...' sound just that little bit like The Strokes, or the way 'Uncool' sounds like uncool soft rock and is about the lack of credibility there is in being in love and writing heartfelt love stories... The specific influence there seems to be 'November Rain', and if it were a single (God, here's hoping), it would need a video in which Courtney plays a grand piano in a church and then either she or Linda Perry stands on the piano to play the guitar solo. Other points of reference: 'Never Gonna Be The Same' is obviously the Stones when they were doing smack-tastic country, but it even more closely resembles Drugstore (maybe even one specific track); the guitar when the chorus kicks in on 'Hold On To Me' is very Pixies...
 
  
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