This postmortem view of an artist's work is often distorting. After his suicide, critics began to view Jackson Pollock's paintings through a more personal lens, seeing Pollock's chaotic designs as representations of his tortured soul. Years after John Gardner's fatal motorcycle crash, it was suggested by a few that the accident was no accident at all; critics began to pore through his last works for signs of depression or despair.
Of course, any fool knows that if you approach a work with some sort of predisposition, you will likely find what you are looking for. Peering into the artistic remains for a hidden suicide note, one will very likely reinterpret (often wrongly) the items under examination.
Still, after the suicide of Kurt Cobain in 1993, it was terribly difficult to view Nirvana's MTV Unplugged performance (especially the song "Pennyroyal Tea") without thinking that the musician was trying to tell us something. The black candles, dour expression and dark humor all pointed to a man whose mind was occupied by death. Music critics and fans pored through the lyrics of In Utero, looking for some message they had not seen before. Several were found.
Courtney Love was in Los Angeles at the time of her husband's suicide, putting the final touches on what was to be a remarkable second-album from her band, Hole. Two months after Cobain's death, Hole bassist and vocalist Kristin Pfaff suffered a fatal heroin overdose. The band eventually recruited a new member, then hit the road on their own tour (coupled with numerous appearances at Lollapalooza) and drove their wagon straight into super-stardom.
Of course, it is Courtney who has enjoyed the majority of this fame. There are fan clubs, a Usenet newsgroup, Web pages, zines, magazine covers (including a revealing Vanity Fair photo spread) -- even local public access cable shows devoted to the "punk Madonna." In just a few short years, Courtney has gone from the "junkie mom" described in the infamous Vanity Fair article to a woman admired, respected and even worshipped.
Through it all, she has survived. From the day Cobain's suicide was announced, when she visited mourning fans in Seattle, to the recent media blitz surrounding her life, Courtney has behaved with dignity, honesty and maturity. Those who have referred to her as the "punk Madonna" are not far off target; Courtney has quickly attained the respect and authority once accorded the pop diva (before the aching days of Sex and self-parody). More than one Nirvana fan who once dismissed Courtney as a neo-Yoko Ono now listens to her music daily.
Part of this is that Courtney quickly filled the space left by Cobain's death. The gifted Nirvana front-man had become a sort of icon and role model for millions, a fact that only added to his own grief and contributed to his suicide. While comparisons to John Lennon have become nauseating, there is some similarity. Lennon's murder shocked his fans and was at least in part a contributing factor to the 1980s explosion of disillusionment and materialism among the so-called 60's generation. In their attempt to replace Lennon as cultural icon, fans first turned to his eldest son, Julian. While the resemblance -- both vocally and in physically -- might have been uncanny, all similarity stopped there: Julian turned out to be a one-hit wonder, who has rightfully joined Milli Vanilli in the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Shame. There were other poor substitutes for the fallen Beatle, but none of them fit the Nehru jacket.
Enter Kurt Cobain and "the year that punk broke." Nirvana was well-known among punk fans and even some metal enthusiasts for their first album, Bleach. The unbelievable popularity of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" made music history and catapulted the band into the eyes and ears of millions of MTV viewers. The song was hailed as a generational anthem (whatever the hell that means); record stores could not keep the CD on their shelves; would-be debutantes from Texas were leaping enthusiastically into the mosh pits at Nirvana concerts. As he observed in one interview, the same types of guys who used to beat up the frail Cobain back home in Aberdeen were up front at the band's shows, shouting "We love you, Kurt!" It didn't take long for the dull monolith of the mega-media to quickly label Nirvana with such epithets as "the biggest pop sensation since the Beatles." Nobody argued, even though the same people had once said the same thing about New Kids On the Block.
Logically, if you ignored Public Enemy and believed the hype anyway, Kurt Cobain was the new John Lennon. No less than David Fricke, that Tolstoy of rock journalism, said so in Rolling Stone. The magazine had previously virtually ignored the punk scene, preferring to report on the excesses of Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten rather than examine the culture itself. Now Jann Wenner's rag fancied itself the hippest of the hip, as punk as any mimeo'd zine; David Fricke was, of course, a prophet without equal. As the music media obsequiously placed the final nail in Cobain's coffin and raised a hammer into the air, the band went to work on their third album.
There can be no argument to the fact that fans and critics are a fickle bunch; the only argument is to which group is more fickle. Before In Utero hit the shelves, it was being dismissed as "not as good as Nevermind." Cobain was not insensitive to this stupid criticism; he worried that he was becoming a parody of himself, that he was cheating his fans and not giving music his full attention. In addition to this self-imposed guilt, he was also experiencing a desire to venture into creative areas not possible within the structure of the band. He planned a project with Michael Stipe and wanted to do more work with William S. Burroughs. Yet more conflicting emotions came in his desire to be a family man, stay home with his daughter and not tour the world. All of this is spelled out clearly in the published portions of Cobain's suicide note, which Courtney valiantly read to fans the day of her husband's death.
Among the survivors of suicide -- those left behind in its devastating wake -- the most pervasive emotion is perhaps guilt. Those closest to the deceased will blame themselves, sometimes constructing a convoluted system of logic in order to justify this guilt. Second, perhaps equal to this is anger, usually manifested by blaming the one who pulled the trigger or swallowed the pills. The anger is the killer, since it often results in more guilt. But after journeying through the classic five stages of grief, the survivor realizes a sense of wholeness, where the suicide is incorporated into the survivor's experience and existence in a synthesis of sorts. The measure of a person's strength is how quickly she manages this process. Some survivor's never complete it, while some manage it with a deftness that astounds observers.
Courtney Love-Cobain falls into the latter category. The symbols of her grief -- a black 'K' tattooed on her abdomen, the urn holding Kurt's ashes enshrined at home, frequent performances of unreleased Cobain-tunes -- reveal her deeply romantic nature (and the surprising romanticism of "Goth," one of her primary influences). The suicide of her husband and subsequent death of one of her best friends must have caused Courtney to do a great deal of introspection; in a televised interview with MTV's Kurt Loder, Courtney speaks out against the romanticizing of drugs and testifies to the fact that several of her friends and lovers are dead as a result of drugs.
It is tempting to examine the lyrics of Live Through This as they relate to the events that surrounded the completion of the album, viewing them as some sort of cathartic confessional. This would not only be logically flawed (the lyrics were written long before the deaths of Cobain and Pfaff), it would also be unfair. The strength of Courtney's lyrics lies in their raw emotive power. Perhaps some of this effect comes from the dark irony of Cobain's suicide. Just as The Crow was made more powerful a film by the death of Brandon Lee (and all its eerie coincidences), Live Through This is given a deeper resonance through the deaths of Cobain and Pfaff.
But the majority of the effect comes from Courtney's use of language. There is more poetry here than in many contemporary releases, and more eloquence about women than in most feminist tracts. Almost every song on the album deals with some dilemma faced by women. The pervasive emotions at first seem to be anger and alienation, but a deeper examination -- and repeated listenings -- show this is only the thin, outer layer of a complex work. Courtney uses irony like a sharp knife and she is not afraid to plunge it deeper into the heart of something... And then give the blade a wicked little twist.
Like Nirvana's record-breaking Nevermind, Hole's second album will occupy its own place in music history. But beyond all this hype, there is Courtney herself, who has -- like it or not -- received the mantle of "generation-spokesperson." She will no doubt continue to battle the superficial tide of the megamedia, proving that she is much more than simply a rock star: she is a survivor.
