What Courtney doesn’t know about life in the Hollywood fast lane (rehab, drugs charges, child custody battles) simply isn’t worth knowing. In her own words, her somewhat ironically-titled opus America’s Sweetheart contains ‘a lot of God and a lot of sex’. She forgot to mention the plentiful references to Kurt Cobain, which at this stage reeks of a pathetic attempt to still cash in on his fame. On the forthcoming single ‘Mono’, she yelps the very telling “Hey God, you owe me one more song/So I can prove to you/That I’m so much better than him”. Like any celebrity worth her salt, she has decided to keep us guessing on that one.
Drafted in for performing duties are Pixies’ Kim Deal, MC5’s Wayne Kramer, and Girls Against Boys’ Scott McCloud. Which just goes to show you that not even an impressive supporting cast can polish a turd. Pink collaborator Linda Perry is on board as co-writer, and as such the calorie-counted rock comparisons to Pink are inevitable. The one song that Love does pen on her own, ‘Sunset Strip’ is a three-chord disaster, which throws into doubt the claims that she single-handedly wrote the masterful ‘Live Through This’. Anyone else notice how ‘I’ll Do Anything’ smells like Nirvana?
The most striking thing about America’s Sweethearts is the whole ‘car-crash celebrity’ aspect to it. Just as Courtney’s persona is a carefully contrived blend of haplessness, glamour, chaos, audacity and sleaze, her album is ragged, unsteady, and brassy in a very processed and crafted way. Whether or not her vocals are really that cacked up or designed to sound that way to add to her ‘little-psycho-lost’ persona remains to be seen.
Rebirth, stagnation, death, hope – ultimately, the stuff of which great albums are made. In this case, they’re merely the tent pegs that – just about - hold aloft Courtney Love’s celebrity-obsessed circus.