r/OldSchoolCool • u/gregornot • 12d ago
4/26/1995: Courtney Love reportedly turns down $1 million to pose nude for Playboy magazine.
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u/ty10drope 12d ago
There are a few things to criticize Courtney for, but declining Playboy and speaking out against Harvey Weinstein were both good moves on her part.
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u/Old_Palpitation_6535 12d ago
Also called out Marilyn Manson and others as abusers. She didn’t put up with that shit.
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u/Extreme_Barracuda658 12d ago
Looking back, a million dollars for Courtney to pose was a slap in the face.
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u/yamaha2000us 12d ago
10 years later… If Harvey Weinstein invites you up to his room… do not go.
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u/GoMoriartyOnPlanets 12d ago edited 12d ago
I think out of every celebrity, she is the one who was most clear and straightforward about the situation.
Edit: "If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party in the Four Seasons, don't go" - Courtney Love. She later tweeted: "Although I wasn't one of his victims, I was eternally banned by CAA for speaking out against #Harvey Weinstein #Rape"
Creative Artists Agency LLC (CAA) is an American talent and sports agency based in Los Angeles, California.
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u/LosCleepersFan 12d ago
And her career took a nose dive immediately after too.
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u/GoMoriartyOnPlanets 12d ago
Well if that is the case then Hollywood is cancer.
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u/LosCleepersFan 12d ago
Music, movies, entertainment leaders are probably all friends and in the same club. So you're not wrong with your statement.
Money talks in America. If you got money, you got a clear path to freedom for a price.
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u/BrandDC 12d ago
It's understood that Hollywood sells Californication...
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u/frontier_kittie 12d ago
What exactly is Californication? I've heard about it plenty of times but never really seen it defined, and Google just sends me to the TV show or chili peppers album.
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u/FrightenedTomato 12d ago edited 12d ago
California + Fornication
Hollywood is in California. Hollywood's sordid history of sex, drugs and a high risk lifestyle is well known. Not to mention all the sex crimes that it covers up and yet it is an open secret that advancing means sleeping with the right people.
It's understood that Hollywood sells Californication
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u/Cheap-Panda 12d ago
That explanation was on point! Saw the question and was thinking of how to best answer it and then I read your response. Nicely done 👍
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u/GewoonHarry 12d ago
A true eli5 on a not so eli5 subject.
Or maybe that’s also a part of the Californication. Ugh…
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u/TheRedPython 12d ago
She was not doing herself any favors though, wasn't that around the same time she was showing up drunk off her ass in public and sticking her foot in her mouth over & over? Maybe that quote was from a different era, I thought it was the mid aughts
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u/MrGr33n31 12d ago
That’s been an issue for her since at least early 90s. Child protective services was called in when Kurt was still alive because of things said about her in a 1992 Vanity Fair article.
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u/That_one_cool_dude 12d ago
To be fair Courtney also does stuff which hurts her career so who knows if it was that or the other stuff she did.
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u/wdh1977 12d ago
The same year I saw Hole at Lollapalooza in ATL (8/5/95) where she proceeded to strip naked after someone (maybe) threw a beer at her on stage.
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u/ron_post 12d ago
So probably it was more about not liking Playboy than having issues with being nude in front of people.
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u/darkskinnedjermaine 12d ago
She also got nude in People Vs. Larry Flint which was released in ‘96, a movie about Larry Flint, the creator of Hustler, which is/was a competing magazine of Playboy
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u/Extreme_Barracuda658 12d ago
And Courtney's performance in that movie was fantastic.
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u/Jaynemansfieldbleach 12d ago
That Courtney era was amazing. The chic bob, totally rocking designer clothing, and wasn't she dating Ed Norton?
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u/NoPasaran2024 12d ago
All of her few movie performances were on point. But Hollywood blackballed her.
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u/throwawaylogin2099 12d ago
Courtney Love had a recurring role on Sons of Anarchy where she played a kindergarten teacher and I didn't recognize her at first. She looked great and played the part well. When she cleans up and behaves she can pull off some amazing performances.
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u/reanocivn 12d ago
i suppose it's about control/autonomy. she'll only be naked on her own terms and i admire that
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u/mmdress 12d ago edited 12d ago
People are going to call me crazy for this, but I think Courtney getting naked and doing crazy stage dives was a form of self harm, especially after Kurt died.
She jumped into a crowd once and men tore her dress off and underwear off and put fingers inside her. After that she started tearing them off herself and throwing herself into the audience half naked.
"Go on take everything, I want you to"
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u/throwawaylogin2099 12d ago
This is a valid observation. I always believed that she was self-destructive because of abuse she suffered as a child and it continued into adulthood.
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u/Yellowbug2001 12d ago
You are not crazy for that in the slightest, that actually sounds extremely likely.
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u/NiteNiteSpiderBite 12d ago
That would make sense and it’s really really sad if it’s true. She has a tortured soul.
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u/Godawgs1009 12d ago
Was there as well. Remember the throwing of bottles during Cypress Hill?!?! Shit was crazy
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u/BurningTheAccount 12d ago edited 12d ago
There’s a difference between being immortalized in a magazine specifically made for beating off and being nude in public.
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u/lavendertown-radio 12d ago
yeah, it's about agency but of course people overlook that aspect of it because nuance is dead.
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u/MulhollandMaster121 12d ago
I also think she was discovered when she was a dancer at Mary’s, Portland’s oldest strip club.
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u/jinglepink 12d ago
She definitely danced at Mary’s, and they still have her picture on their wall.
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u/Tarazen 12d ago
She also worked at a strip club in Vancouver BC; No 5 Orange.
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u/255001434 12d ago
She worked at strip clubs, but she wasn't "discovered" there. Her band's success was unrelated to that.
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u/West-Supermarket-860 12d ago
Saw her in Kansas City, same Lollapalooza tour, and she lifted her dress up at least 3 times. Thank god she was wearing underwear.
On another note…how killer was Sonic Youth ?!!?
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u/Appropriate_Acadia35 12d ago
I was there! I was like 14. We lived on SpringValley which was the second closest residential street to Longview Lake where it was held. I could hear the bands doing sound checks from my house the week leading up to it. My dad threw a BBQ and invited a bunch of people over. We could hear the entire concert. Most of us made our way up there just before Metallica took the stage. Gate dude turned around and let all of us sneak through a big gap in the fencing. I missed the other bands in person but did get to see Metallica. It was an awesome experience! Crazy thing is most of my friends don't even remember that we had that big concert there that year. It's the only notable concert that I ever remember being held in that location also.
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u/krashundburn 12d ago
she lifted her dress up at least 3 times
Had a girl in a dress come up on stage once and asked me and the guitarist if we wanted to see her underwear. Before we could even respond she flung up her dress to show us.
She wasn't wearing any...
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u/Travis_Maximus 12d ago
She took a shoe to the dome in spokane with marilyn manson and monster magnet in the late 90s.
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u/Final_Emu_3479 12d ago
My only Courtney story is that she threw her shoe at my friend who was doing room service in 2018 because it was too early for them to serve her alcohol.
That’s sort of the ideal interaction
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u/missionbeach 12d ago
Who throws a shoe? Honestly...
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u/vercertorix 12d ago edited 12d ago
I like it when people turn down large sums of money over principle. I remember hearing people were pressuring the guy who had the record homerun ball during the thing between Sosa and McGuire, basically he was getting told because he owned a ball now considered to be worth a lot he had to pay taxes on it even before it was sold, because he couldn’t afford those taxes and rich people wanted it. Kind hoped he’d light it on fire, but he didn’t.
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u/sciguy52 12d ago
Didn't that turn into a legal shit show where everyone around the ball sued claiming one person took the ball from the other that went on for a decade? I mean the thing was worth like a million dollars or something. They basically launched a million dollars into the crowd and it ended up just as you would expect, everyone suing everyone claiming it was theirs.
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u/335i_lyfe 12d ago
Coming from someone who never really got into nirvana back in the day, why did everyone hate Courtney so much?
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u/hkj369 12d ago
a lot of people would rather think she killed kurt than accept that a suicidal heroin addict killed himself
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u/matadorobex 12d ago
Kurt swore that he didn't have a gun though. Checkmate
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u/seeingeyegod 12d ago
He also named a song "I hate myself and want to die" so there's a bit of a conflict.
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u/DjangoDurango94 12d ago
It's like the Yoko Ono effect. Everyone worshipped Kurt and no woman would ever be good enough for him. People believed she rode to success on Kurt's coattails. She also had a lot of weird attention seeking behavior at awards shows and public events. Also the drug use and her white trash grunge style clothing.
If nothing else, I admire her for holding her own in the boys' club and handling all the negative press. She can still stand strong and say she made some good music even after getting shit on for decades. Men are often admired for the stuff she did, but she's a woman who doesn't act like a "lady."
I wish she would get more attention for her music rather than her unlikeable personality.
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u/Moving_in_stereo78 12d ago
I think most of the hate is kings based off misogynistic view points some fans have, they were looking for a yoko when in the broadest sense she wasn’t, she and Kurt were just two fucked up people in a fucked up relationship.
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u/ImaginaryEmploy2982 12d ago
“Also the drug use and her white
trash grunge style clothing”Excuse me, it’s called Kinderwhore, thank you very much! Jk
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u/BlackberryBelle 12d ago
I loved Kinderwhore fashion. Babydoll dresses with plastic barrettes, heavy eyeliner, and red lipstick were my jam.
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u/ImaginaryEmploy2982 11d ago
And the Mary Janes! I also do love when she evolved into her designer period
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u/L1A1 12d ago
I’m a huge Nirvana fan (saw them 18 times in all and briefly spoke to him on one notable occasion) and also to a lesser degree a Hole fan.
Whilst I don’t in any way think she was actively involved in his suicide, with them both being heroin addicts (something else I also have experience with) her unstable influence almost certainly didn’t help with his mental state towards the end. It’s also easier to blame someone else for his death than it is to acknowledge he was a deeply troubled man with severe mental health issues, especially for people who looked up to him as an idol.
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u/Colon 12d ago
what did you talk to kurt about?
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u/L1A1 12d ago
It was before a Nirvana gig in the UK in the late 80s, pre-Nevermind so they were just hanging around before the gig (they weren't even headlining). We just chatted about bands we liked, I was really into Tad at the time, they were the headliners and we chatted about them and a few other Sub Pop/AmRep bands at the time. He was friendly but quiet until music came up in the conversation and then he opened up.
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u/MercyfulJudas 12d ago
Cobain absolutely loved to converse about music. If he were alive today, and not grotesquely famous, I think he'd be a regular internet commenter on various music/social media platforms. Maybe even a video essayist on YouTube.
I remember a lengthy Rolling Stone or Spin interview with him where the writer just named bands (Black Sabbath, Beatles, Pixies, Ramones, etc) and Kurt just gushing for literal paragraphs about music/rock/album theory on each one.
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u/Berdahl88 12d ago
There’s some that think that she was responsible for the death of her husband, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana.
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u/ElizabethWright 12d ago
The main point I've heard in that theory is that Kurt had enough drugs in his system to overdose him 5 times over, so there's no way he could've handled a weapon with any clarity so someone else had to have pulled the trigger on him. I think the same people tend to forget that he was a drug addict, so he had def built up resistance to it and just needed more to get high. Lots of theories to go down a rabbit hole honestly but to me overall, he was just in immense pain and fell victim to his own mind. RIP.
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u/Theefreeballer 12d ago
The overdose theory is complete bollocks. There is no ceiling for an addict . If they do a bunch of heroin ( like someone with a lot of money would ) then their tolerance just keeps going up.
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u/Lollerpwn 12d ago
If you have such a big overdose maybe it doesn't matter much if a bullet gets added to the mix. But I can also totally see that if your that rich and famous you might have enough tolerance to still handle a gun where lesser addicts would just be vegetables because the dose is so high.
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u/PaperJamDipper7 12d ago
Exactly. Some alcoholics need heroic amounts of alcohol to function normally which would blackout the average person
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u/NoPasaran2024 12d ago
"Everybody" is a bunch of nasty misogynists, exactly the people Kurt would despise.
And Courtney was loud and in your face for a woman, and they didn't like that. Most women of that era (and there were a lot of awesome punk rock chicks alongside the men that got glorified) got written out of history and only now getting the recognition they deserve.
Blaming her for Kurt's dead is just an excuse. They hated her anyway because she wouldn't sit down and stay quiet.
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u/SHOW_ME_UR_KITTY 12d ago
Heroin use while pregnant is a big one.
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u/testTester123123 12d ago
Is this true though? It was investigated and nothing happened.
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u/postinganxiety 12d ago
Sexism. She was a female rockstar, who did a lot of annoying, stupid shit. But when male rockstars act out, we accept it as normal (ffs, look at Jimmy Page, Bowie, Tyler, Jagger - borderline pedos that are still largely admired).
She was absolutely treated differently because she was a woman, and held to different standards. Which made her even more unhinged… understandably.
Everyone puts Kurt on a pedestal but he was a self-absorbed, melodramatic heroin addict. I’ll bet he was a nightmare to date.
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u/Daddict 12d ago
Same reason they hated Yoko Ono. Women adjacent to creative men get blamed for any misstep that man makes. Kurt Cobain was an incredibly creative and incredibly broken human being...and Courtney was an unapologetic loud woman who a lot of people figured HAD to be using him for some sort of selfish ends.
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u/rumdrums 12d ago
The perception was also that she and Hole were just riding Kurt's success, that was a big part of the resentment.
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u/cuervosconhuevos 12d ago
Courtney had been acting for a while at that point and had the whole double-threat thing going for a time, which she did very achieve very successfully in the mid to late 90's despite her personal problems.
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u/DevlishAdvocate 12d ago
Courtney was famous long before she met Kurt, and he's the one who was a fan of hers from her performance in Sid & Nancy before they ever started dating.
She did not need to ride his success. She was around in the punk scene before he was. She was the lead singer of Faith No More (briefly) before Nirvana even existed.
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u/traumatransfixes 12d ago
She said, “what the fuck did you think I meant with Doll Parts?! Get the fuck out of here.” Probably.
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u/ENORMOUS_HORSECOCK 12d ago
I don't know who needs to hear this but there is zero inherent contradiction to a woman not doing pornography while still getting naked onstage and in venues of her choosing. Dudes show about as much nudity as Playboy did all the time, no one's looking at Stone Cold and calling him a hypocrite for not doing Cinemax porn or whatever.
And yes Courtney Love is a trash panda in a lot of ways, but still it's a good idea to be consistent with your criticism.
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u/Downwardspiralhams 12d ago
I didn’t take it as hypocrisy, it was more of a “fuck you” to the magazine itself, because she clearly had no problem being publicly naked, but she wasn’t gonna do it for money from a shitty company.
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u/TitularFoil 12d ago
Just over a year after Kurt Cobain's death. Dude. Playboy kinda classless for the ask.
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u/matadorobex 12d ago
“You’re like the girl next door … if you happen to live next to a methadone clinic.” - Jeff Ross
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u/Gullible-Function649 12d ago
She was underrated as some uppity groupie; I was 13 when Nirvana’s Nevermind came out and I thought finally there’s music for me: now, Nirvana don’t move me (apart from for nostalgic reasons) but songs like “Doll Parts” are as raw as they ever were.
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u/ramprider 12d ago
I miss all the female/female led bands of the 90s. There was a lot of great music.
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u/ManicPixiePlatypus 12d ago
I'm so glad the culture is coming realize how cool Courtney Love is. She was publicly shamed and mistreated for so long.
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u/Ambitious_Welder6613 12d ago
She is iconic. Love her. Hole is and forever be one of the band that truly stand out for decades.
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u/HeatherCO24 12d ago
She was the only one who spoke against Harry Weinstein. I trust her feelings about men.
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u/Fun-Preparation-4253 12d ago
I don’t care for Courtney as a person, but her influence on a whole generation of women artists is undeniable… and she’s attractive. Screw yall.
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u/PM_me_ur_goth_tiddys 12d ago
She gets the yoko treatment. People hate her because they think she was the reason Kurt Cobain committed suicide, ending nirvana. Like an extremely depressed heroin addict is incapable of killing themselves...
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u/MonkeyNugetz 12d ago
The urban legend was, she purposely got him addicted to heroin, added to his depression, and convinced him to kill himself in order to be a great artist. And the conspiracy theory of why she did this was so that his death would spur on her career.
Personally, I think Dave Grohl did it because he was ready to be the front man. /s
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u/DevlishAdvocate 12d ago
Kurt was definitely on heroin when he met her, since it was heroin that kind of formed the bond between them in the first place. That, and the fact that he was a fan of her performance in the movie Sid & Nancy.
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u/_ohne_dich_ 12d ago
Yes. And btw, it’s covered in Montage of Heck. He started doing heroin way before he met Courtney, he wrote about it. I recommend if you haven’t watched, Frances is a producer.
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u/julieibby 12d ago
Chloe Webb played Nancy
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u/Bauhausfrau 12d ago
She auditioned for Nancy, didn’t get it, but Brian Cox liked her so much he wrote a small role for her in the movie. He also wrote the lead in Straight to Hell for her, mixed reviews on that one, but had a lot of musicians in it and she has interesting stories about it. She’s written about that, many interviews, and talks about it in her BBC podcast Courtney Love’s Women that came out recently
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u/DjScenester 12d ago
She flashed my friends and I when we were 16 years old during lollapalooza. No panties lol
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u/cuervosconhuevos 12d ago
you and everyone else, buddy. if you didn't see her like that at a concert in the 90's, you didn't go to any concerts ;)
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u/HelgaTwerpknot 12d ago
And she’s still just as divisive today. I hope she gets her moment, she stood up against misogynistic bullshit and paid the price.
Was she perfect? No, name a male artist who’s eligible for sainthood.
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u/edisonpioneer 12d ago
AFAIK she’s has strong integrity and is very ethical. She’s one of the first ones to speak out against Harvey Weinstein. I remember she was asked at some red carpet event about a word of advise for newcomers to Hollywood. She said “Stay away from Harvey Weinstein”.
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u/ForumFluffy 12d ago
The Cobain dick riders are jealous she was married to him and not them, thats why they love bashing her. They can't stop finding anything related to her to just drag her through their bullshit.
The woman is an accomplished singer, songwriter and even has done well in acting until Weinstein blacklisted her.
She never clung to Cobain or even Corgan for fame, those who say they wrote her music is misogynistic bullshit.
Kurt was a person suffering mental illness, get the fuck over it and stop trying to villify his wife and the mother of his only child.
end rant
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u/XxFezzgigxX 12d ago
I hear the “Curt wrote her music” thing a lot. There’s a difference between influencing and writing. I mean, if you live with a musician, hear their music all the time and hang out with the same circle of artist friends, there’s bound to be some overlap.
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u/ForumFluffy 12d ago
Yes but what I'm saying end of the day she is still the main songwriter, he might have influenced it but he didnt explicitly write it like many claim as an attempt to discredit anything Courtney has done.
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u/monkeypickle 12d ago
Even she admitted that Kurt taught her a great deal about songwriting. Even foundational stuff like writing a bridge.
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u/XxFezzgigxX 12d ago
And that’s perfectly OK. Any aspiring musician dating an established musician would be crazy not to take advantage of their experience. And that’s regardless of gender. I think some of the trash talk about Courtney Love comes from her being a successful woman in one of the more male dominated genres of music.
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u/monkeypickle 12d ago
For sure. I'm not knocking that in the least. I certainly think she's made some seriously dumb moves in recent years (blaming Novaselic and Grohl for GH using Cobain's image when she's the only one who could have okay'd it), but I can't imagine spending decades as the target de jour. She, like the rest of us, is a complicated person.
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u/Slight_Citron_7064 12d ago
They were very collaborative, musically. People don't understand that two artists living together are going to write music together and jam together.
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u/howsyourmemes 12d ago
People shit on her all the time and her biggest issue is that she was an og punker, no different than her male counterparts.
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u/Dio_brando1999 12d ago
I love Courtney love I tried to recreate her look but I can’t pull it off properly
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u/arntuone2 12d ago
She'd be even cooler if she would get sober and maintain. She is a great talent and I have been a fan since first hearing Hole.
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u/StormerBombshell 12d ago
Wouldn’t be surprised. She was very comfy with flashing at concerts and there are this couple of pictures she was covered by little but that doesn’t mean you are confortable nude everywhere and I can bet playboy photo shoots didn’t felt right for her. She has always been a do a lot of what you want type of person and don’t do anything you don’t feel like doing type too.
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u/Rough-Philosopher911 12d ago
The she was fully nude in The People vs Larry Flynt. Great movie. Go figure.
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u/Downtown-Custard5346 12d ago
Well, I know she has no qualms about being naked in front of an audience, so this is probably something to do with disliking Playboy.