Courtney Love at the Wellmont (2010) | Rufus / CC BY 2.0
When Courtney Love popped up in my Taylor Swift–heavy Instagram explore page, I rolled my eyes. Like almost everyone on the internet, I’ve been inundated with posts on Swift’s love life, feuds, and new releases. It turned out that, in an interview with the Standard, Courtney Love had declared, “Taylor Swift is not important. She might be a safe space for girls … but she’s not interesting as an artist.” At first, I rolled my eyes—even Courtney Love had been dragged into the clickbait cycle; while Swift dominates the pop charts, her Eras tour breaking records by earning over $1 billion in 2023, Love hasn’t released music in years.
Then I remembered what Courtney Love is like—and I realized how much I wanted to hear what she had to say.
I was 10 years old when the music video for Swift’s “Teardrops On My Guitar” aired on MTV. I loved the 16-year-old Swift’s blonde curly hair, the way she lay on her bed in a teal prom dress holding an acoustic guitar, and how the video perfectly matched the lyrics, which told the story of the longing mixed with giddy excitement in an unrequited crush. The song telegraphed a vulnerable girlishness I both related to and felt ashamed of. My favorite artists were Avril Lavigne and Britney Spears, and even back when they were teenage pop stars like Swift, they seemed more complicated. When Lavigne sang about a crush, she wailed with frustration. Her look was tomboyish—and had attitude, too. I was drawn to that frustration and that attitude, especially coming from a young girl. Then, on my eleventh birthday, a classmate gave me Led Zeppelin IV. A whole new world of rock and roll opened up to me.
Even though I immersed myself in rock music for the next 10 years, it took me a while to discover my love for Hole, the rock band Courtney Love cofounded in 1989. Before I listened to her music, I knew Love’s name in connection to marriage to Kurt Cobain, as well as her reputation as an addict who was mocked for her public appearances on TV. She was usually strung out, wearing disheveled clothing and talking a mile a minute, usually over the other people on screen with her. Later, in college, I read Sara Marcus’s Riot Grrrl history, Girls to the Front, which alleges that Love punched Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna backstage at a festival for no real reason. This just seemed to confirm my impression that the singer and guitarist was a mess who happened to be at the scene of key moments in rock history.
I don’t remember what convinced me to finally listen to Hole’s Live Through This (1994), but I do remember thinking, This is really good. I fell in love with the way Love wails on “Violet” and her delivery of the line “I want to be the girl with the most cake” on “Doll Parts”. The album contains songs about being a new mother afraid to lose her baby to Child Services because of her addiction, a song about hating the Olympia Riot Grrrl scene for being too conformist, and a song about the murder of a young girl and the danger of being in a relationship with a person who can overpower you physically. These were topics that you didn’t hear about on pop radio—or in rock, for that matter. In Hole, I heard my own love life and my fraught relationship with my own mother, who struggled with depression and anxiety throughout my childhood, echoed back at me in art.
Early Hole songs are a cacophony of sound—heavy drums, crashing guitar. Love’s scratchy, uncouth vocals can sound more like yelling than singing. Each successive album refined their sound toward a more pop-leaning sensibility with catchier hooks and cleaner production, without losing the loud, noisy instrumentation. The unabashed loudness is one of the qualities of Hole, and Love herself, that I admire. She signals an unwillingness to make herself small or quiet for the comfort or pleasure of anyone else in her life, both to her benefit and disadvantage.
So why does it matter what Courtney Love thinks of Taylor Swift? I think the answer lies in Love’s second remark: that Swift’s music offers a safe space for “girls.”
I believe that both artists are deeply interested in what Judith Butler calls the “performative accomplishment” of gender—and how it plays out in their own lives as well as in the music industry. Swift, the ultra-feminine, clean-cut pop artist, presents what Butler calls the “socially sanction[ed]” route and makes tons of money doing it. Love, the messy, punk-inspired rocker, uses gender taboos interlaced with subversions of femininity to call into question appropriate behavior for a girl and what kind of music a girl should make. She doesn’t look down on femininity or girlishness; she plays with what “girlishness” means, or could mean, when she embraces the taboos that surround it.
Over the years, I’ve never truly gotten into Swift’s full discography, primarily listening only to the singles with music videos from her first four albums. Her subsequent albums never touched me in the same way, having lost that vulnerable girlishness and replaced it with canned, uplifting “girl boss” lyrics and rehashes of heartbreak and drama. “Welcome to New York,” the first track of 1989, makes me irrationally angry, probably because it played in yellow cabs the whole summer of 2015 on loop. The song felt strange coming from an artist who had only recently moved to Tribeca herself, and was clearly made to promote tourism to the city. I suddenly saw Swift not as an artist intent on finding emotional connection in music but as a savvy businesswoman.
In Public Seminar’s “The Mysteries of Taylor Swift” symposium, Jack Condie writes, “My interest is in the way in which Swift’s persona is insanely projected upon, she’s either deified or treated like the worst evil in the world.” Condie’s statement could just as easily be applied to Love, a woman whose achievements have been credited to her famous husband and whose willingness to be openly unlikable continues to feed outlandish conspiracy theories that she murdered him. (While Swift hasn’t been accused of having her songs written for her, she does get heat for how many partners she’s had.) In a 1998 interview with the BBC, Love explains the large differences in tone and subject between Hole’s albums: “Once you’ve gone onstage and bleeded [sic] your diary from when you were a schoolgirl, how can you keep doing that until you’re in your 30s? … It’s a bore. I’d rather go home and just buy some Jill Sander.” Rather than moving away from diary writing, Swift has perfected it into a signature style that she doesn’t deviate from. Her albums thematically don’t make those leaps and bounds away from the preceding albums, beyond moving away from country into pop and folk sounds.
The question of being liked feels inextricable from the social norms surrounding womanhood, and it feels liberating to see a woman so openly willing to throw that away. I’m with Yasi Salek, host of the music interview podcast 24 Question Party People, who summed up her 12-year-old self’s impression Love:: “A very famous, extremely chaotic, messy person that was a woman that was allowed to exist in that way instead of like an antiseptic perfect pop woman.” In its way, Hole was music for girls, too.
Perhaps it’s not so strange that it has been through Courtney Love that I found a new way to connect to the girlishness I once craved when listening to Taylor Swift.
Wow, so insightful. Great article! I now see Love in a totally new light