Love Parts: A Tabloid Fantasy...

I can’t for the life of me remember what we were watching on television, but I can remember what we talking about…which is pretty weird if you think about it. Anyhow, sometime after the Thanksgiving feast, I informed my parents that one of my childhood friends was going through a divorce. It happens. In fact, it seems to be the thing to do these days. I wouldn’t exactly know. I’m not married. Never have been. Probably never will be.

          Of course, my mother and brother offered platitudes, but I wondered whether my father had even heard me. He seemed entirely occupied with channel surfing until, all of a sudden, he decided to offer his two cents…as he is wont to do….

          “I never liked that guy.” Funny, I hadn’t realized he’d ever met my friend’s estranged husband. “He though he was real hot shit.” He did? I met the guy once…I think. The only impression I ever had of him was that he didn’t make much of an impression. He was like some white dude with some hair. And he had eyes and clothes and stuff. Oh, and he ate…I definitely remember him eating. But never mind all of that.
          The old man was on a roll. He proceeded to sketch out a quite fascinating character. The old man presumed knew to know this type, the type that starts of nice then slowly devolves into mental abuse soon to be followed by “a little smacking around.” It reminded me of something out of Dostoyevsky. Boy. You woulda thought this guy woulda made more of an impression on me. Of course, he was most certainly “fucking around,” probably even “spending a lot of jack on some young girlfriend,” maybe even "in hock" over it. Okay. That's enough. This has gone too far. Someone has to say something. ...Hey! I’m someone! [continued after the jump]

          “You don’t know him. You don’t know a damn thing about their marriage. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” Okay. Maybe that phrasing was impolitic.

          “Why do you always have to contradict me? Ever since you were a teenager…” Oh, boy. Here we go again. Suffice to say that the whole thing ends with my father brooding in solitude, salvaging his self-respect by occasionally shooting me a dirty look while repeatedly muttering something like “I know. Trust me. I know….” In defense of the poor old guy, his fantasy of insight into the private lives of others is nothing unique in our society. Why’d I have to chastise him? What good did it do? Oh well…

          When I return from break, we’re finishing up Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire in my Horror Fiction course. It’s not the most literary text, but there’s more there than you’d think. Besides, at this point in the term I have to schedule a less ambitious curriculum if I want to avoid alienating every last student on the roster. In fact today I’m going to cut the discussion short and just show a few clips from Neil Jordan’s film adaptation. What? Anne Rice wrote the screenplay.  It’s justifiable…kinda.… Besides, the kids’ll thank me.

"What the F did you say about me?!"

          “Oh, god. I hate Brad Pitt.” This is said by Morgan. She’s an odd duck. She has a back row attitude, and yet, for some reason, she sits in the front row and insists on participating in class discussion. (Note to self: I need to quit giving them class credit for that.)

          “Really?” There’s like a 3 to 1 female to male ratio in all of my lit classes. I thought girls liked Brad Pitt. Maybe he’s getting into that old “creeper” category. He is nearly 50...nearly. Yes. The big five-oh. While I'm not even near the big five-oh, I’m constantly worried that everything I know is too old for my students. I’m just too old. That must be it. “What? Is he too old now?”

          “No!” She’s disgusted with me. I don’t understand. I'm too old. “He cheated on Jennifer!”

          Now, I want to say something like are you fucking kidding me?!...but I can’t say that. And before I can formulate any appropriate response I notice that just about every student in the class—the guys too—are nodding in agreement. Isn’t this old news? I’ve been cheated on more recently and I’m over it. It’s not that I don’t love Jennifer Aniston. I do. There are three women I would trample my own grandmother to sleep with: Alyssa Milano, Claire Danes, and Jennifer Aniston. (Jennifer, call me.) But I really don’t care about her personal life, past or present. You mean rich and famous actors have trouble maintaining long term relationship?! Shocking. I’m shocked. Can't you tell?...

          The next day I have to run by the grocery store after work. It’s a weekday, which means that I’ll have to cart my daughter along with me. I try to avoid that, but I need get my blood pressure medication refilled. Even though I don’t smoke and run like a thousand miles a week, I have high blood pressure. Shocking, isn’t it?

Yeah. I'd pay for that.

          In the checkout lane I peruse the covers of magazines. They range from shameless tabloids in the vein of The National Enquirer to the purportedly reasonable People. These are the ancient vampires of our increasingly vampiric journalism. I prefer the shameless tabloids: at least they don’t insult my intelligence by pretending to care about the celebrities they feed on.  There’s a star that’s anorexic for every one that has "let herself go." They have the photos to prove it. There are plenty of crotch shots and cheaters. There are pictures of Disney stars stumbling out of night clubs. I can honestly say that I’ve never been interested in this stuff. But someone is. There’s a whole industry right here in the checkout lane. I guess the people who aren’t obsessed with sports or politics (like I am) have to be obsessed with something. We all need a guilty pleasure. Who am I to judge? But why would I stop now?...

          Later in the week I’m on facebook. I’m friends with a number of my former high school students. One of them has just posted a status update. It reads: “Every time i see the name ‘Courtney love’ i just want to vomit” [sic]. At first I was all like, "Hey, she's talented," but then I couldn’t figure out why any of my students would even know who Courtney Love is…then I remember that she was Kurt Cobain’s wife. Duh.

          Now, only a very few of the popular bands from my youth maintain relevance to today's youth. We call them Millennials. You’d be surprised to learn who has and has not made the Millennial cut. Apparently, even though you can still add “palooza” as a suffix in place of “fest” (and even though Dave Navarro can always get a reality television show), not very many of my students have never heard of Jane’s Addiction. Primus? Ha! Beck? Forget it. They know (and love) the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Rage Against the Machine? Yes. (Remember how Paul Ryan cited liking their music (but not their ‘lyrics’) as a way to seem hip and youthful?) But only Nirvana garners the sort of godlike status from Millennials that Gen Xers lavished upon Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Are these kids still blaming Courtney Love for Cobain’s suicide? My student claims that that’s not the case, but I sure remember trying to blame her myself. She didn’t seem genuinely sad enough in that interview she gave to MTV. She failed to appease my grief. I had tickets to Nirvana at Lollapalooza...you fucking bitch.

          Yeah, I know: lame. Totally lame. Hey, I was 19. I got over it…and in short order. Why? Because just a few days after Cobain’s suicide in April 1994, Love’s band—Hole—released their second album, Live Through This. It’s a really good album. Just about every song rocks you down to your ovaries. Seriously. Love has voice that has both the gravel of Joan Jett and the more conventional aesthetics common to numerous female vocalists. In her slurred modulation from angel to gravel to scream, Love’s voice is the grunge incarnation of gender issues.

          

  

          A few months later (it musta been the following fall), Hole gave a performance at a local club called Soma. A bunch of us from—and I mean a bunch, like at least half a dozen—went to seem them. 

CT was there. Hal B was there, weren’t you Hal? And Hal B’s chick, Susan. Oh, and Darr was there. Can’t forget Darr. Were you there, GMoney? I was there. We sat around drinking Mickery's big mouths before hand and I'm pretty sure Hal had like two or three doobers tucked in among his Parliaments. Anyhow, that night Courtney Love wasn’t a girl rockstar. She was a rockstar. She was legit. She was a hot mess. She was kinda hot…kinda. And she was also kinda gross, which made it even better. She like plants her left foot on a monitor and you can see up her dress all the way to her crotch and she really doesn't give a fuck. At one point she even crowd surfed. Seriously, like when does that happen? She passed right over us and I think Darr's face got stuck between her ass cheeks. He was so proud of himself. As Hal B recently recalled, “She was a massive trainwreck, but also really captivating.” That’s about right. I've been to many, many forgettable shows and that was NOT one of them. Great show.

Is this the nice girl you want? Guess again...

          But for some reason she’s just not well liked. Beyond blaming her for Cobain’s death (which is idiotic), people complain that she’s greedy in trying to claim Nirvana’s royalties. Or they say that she’s a bad parent. Or they ridicule her drug use. Or they simply say that she’s “nasty”…that word seems to come up a lot.  Hello? She’s a rockstar. Look at these complaints. Oh, you say you're upset that this rockstar is a sexually promiscuous spendthrift that uses drugs and doesn’t really focus on parenting? Shocking. I’m shocked. Can’t you tell? I trust that you also have ethical issues with John Lennon, right?  

          So what I am shocked (or maybe merely outraged) by is how we’ve judged her by the very double standard that her persona symbolizes a rebellion against. That’s what rock ‘n’ roll does: it rebels. If you give any currency to the above complaints then you are missing the whole point that her “nastiness” is a resistance to gendered expectations of appropriate behavior, a critique of social norms surrounding women. Her band is called Hole after all. Doll Parts...Pretty on the Inside...get it? Maybe you'd prefer Katy Perry. Or Avril Lavigne. Or Miley Cyrus. Or Pink. Booor-iiing. And the reason they are so boring is that they are a product of music industry calculations. As a result of these calculations--they know that you will judge women in mass culture by a double standard--female "rock"stars are too often saccharine simulacra of the their male counterparts. And as a proud parent of a daughter, that makes me want to vomit.

          Oh, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in 1996. So there. So, if that doesn’t quite square with your fantasy of insight into the private turmoil of her life, well, then deal with it. Rock n’ roll.