‘Taylor? Not important. Madonna? I don’t like her’: Courtney Love hits out
COURTNEY LOVE says too many female musicians are “all the same” and accused them of making clichéd music as she took aim at stars including Taylor Swift, Madonna and Beyoncé.
The controversial musician, who shot to fame fronting the alternative rockers Hole, is presenting a BBC Radio series on women in music which she says is an attempt to “redeem some of the women who have been treated so badly by the record industry”.
In an interview with Evening Standard editor-in-chief Dylan Jones for ES Magazine, she said: “It’s great that there are so many successful women in the music industry, but lots of them are becoming a cliché.
“Now, every successful woman is cloned, so there is just too much music. They’re all the same. If you play something on Spotify, you get bombarded with a lot of stuff that’s exactly the same. I mean, I like the idea of Beyoncé doing a country record because it’s about black women going into spaces where previously only white women have been allowed, not that I like it much. As a concept, I love it. I just don’t like her music.”
She said of Swift: “Taylor is not important. She might be a safe space for girls, and she’s
I like the idea of Beyoncé doing a country record, I just don’t like her music
probably the Madonna of now, but she’s not interesting as an artist.”
She also advised Lana Del Rey to “take seven years off”, and said of Madonna: “I don’t like her and she doesn’t like me.”
Love, who was married to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain until his suicide in 1994, described herself as “completely disagreeable”, adding: “I always wanted to be known as a bitch.”
She said: “Being liked was never my thing. Kurt wanted to be liked but not me. He was able to hide behind me, but then I got hated. Then Kurt died, and the hatred towards me reached a completely new level.”
Love was kinder about some of her favourite female performers with US rocker Patti Smith, jazz singer Nina Simone and singer-songwriters Joni Mitchell and PJ Harvey all getting the seal of approval, as well as Blondie’s Debbie Harry.
She also paid tribute to some of the pioneering women who helped establish the sound of blues, jazz and early soul music and tipped her hat to Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards for his influence.
She said: “Whenever I read interviews with Keith Richards, I would always go and buy records by the people he’d been talking about, whether it was Bessie Smith, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Ma Rainey or Billie Holiday. “But it was mainly the women. That became the music that interested me, the early blues and soul records. The women owned those roadhouses, the places that were half brothel, half music venue. It’s time they had some respect. These women invented it all. Sure, they might have needed good guitarists, but so what? It was all about the women.”
Love, who grew up in San Francisco and moved to London in 2019 from Los Angeles, said life in the capital had made “an English lady” out of her, adding: “I’m an Anglophile. I love London, it’s my favourite city and is the best place I’ve ever lived. I’m left alone, there are laws here that protect me when I’m being outspoken, I like the friends I’ve made here.”
Love has also worked as an actress with early bit parts followed by criticallyacclaimed starring roles in Hollywood films such as The People vs Larry Flynt, where she played the wife of the infamous pornographer, and opposite Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon. She and Cobain had a daughter, Frances Bean, who now works as a model and artist.