Anwen Crawford

This is another exhibit in the "The best 33 1/3 books are excellent pieces of sociology half-disguised as music criticism" show.

However, there are a couple of issues in this one that I'm less sanguine about, than in, for example, the Carl Wilson book that sets the standard for these. It is de rigueur for a certain type of counter-intuitive, to attempt to reclaim maligned pop figures, and Courtney Love is a fair subject for some measure of reclamation, if only for some of what she was dealing with while she was dealing with everything else, as it were, but while this book gets at some of those things, and brings in quite a few external testimonials to vouch for her art improving others' lives, I'm not sure the argument gets to the place the book thinks it does.

Courtney Love is complicated*. This does and has done quite a bit to earn a lot of the dislike tossed her way. The book makes the reasonable point that marrying Kurt Cobain is the thing most people hate her for, but is the thing she should least be criticized for. Fair Enough.

But, some of the complaints about sexism don't seem to me quite correct. Crawford admits a reason Love is treated horribly is because of her lack of authenticity and her ambition (absolutely true), and this would not be the case if she was a man. This is patently not true. Particularly in the land of alternative music of the early-corporate era, lack of authenticity and lack of ambition were the only coin of the realm. Ask Eddie Vedder how perceived lack of authenticity works out. Ask Dave Grohl about how "original" fans treat his ambition. Courtney Love is, or was, as much punished for the fact that she dared to pound on both of those keys at the same time by a certain brigade of alterna-fans. She is like a Southern Baptist preacher who made it onto CNN and then started preaching tolerance. The ones that perceive themselves as being turned against after getting you there will have terrible levels of venom.

Likewise comparisons to how the press treated or now treats Saint Kurt relative to Courtney are a little silly. Time is gradually fixing its perception of him, and if you ask a 25 year old today who writes better lyrics: Kurt Cobain or Thom Yorke (I'm partially choosing him because he's well past 27, which means he is maybe past the 15 year old demo, but at least it doesn't seem like I'm wishing tragedy on him), they'd go Radiohead. The same way a 75 year old guy would tell you Jim Morrison was a better lyricist than Cobain. And 50 year-olds think Morrison was a self-destructive drunk, and 25 year-olds think Kurt Cobain was a sad self-destructive addict, if they ever think of him at all. That is the nature of time, and press, and life, and worrying about ephemeral impressions of people is a bit silly, after all, even though that is, ostensibly the purpose of this book.

And, back to complications with reclaiming Courtney's image, she did admit to using heroin while she was pregnant with her daughter. Which, the public admission has nearly as much potential to screw up the poor girl as the heroin usage, possibly - I'm not a doctor, obviously.

And, more recently, she swore up and down she'd never release a Hole album without Eric Erlandson, ... and then did.

This is not to say that the vast majority of people who publicly dislike her are not doing so in an uncomplicated fashion, or that there are not misogynist assholes all over the place and the Venn diagram of them and Courtney Love haters looks like a bulls-eye.

Instead, saying anything about Courtney Love has always seemed so incredibly fraught for a certain set of feminists (who Crawford calls out a bit) and guys who are sensitive to these issues, and I can't help but think that a meditation on that would have been a more interesting book, though perhaps for me only. This book is interested in only the reclamation project, and collection of testimonials as to "Live Through This" changing fans lives' for the better.

An interesting aspect I hadn't considered, probably because I am not in any sexual minority, is that Crawford has enough people talk about how much easier it was to come out because of the events surrounding this album (and Kurt Cobain's easy and fluid sexuality) that it makes one wonder if the current wave of LGBT civil rights maybe had some deep roots in that music scene. That seems, perhaps, a broad or slightly grandiose claim, but it is indirectly nodded at, rather than made.

Also, there are some short passages about the Miss World pageant, beauty standards, beauty as power, conflicting feelings of self, and other observations. Honestly, most of that seems tacked on, a bit, as in many Grantland pieces in which a second (or third) thread is brought in to never quite dovetail with the first.

One weird note about the beginning of the book. Crawford states, as a mark of pride, that she has never purchased or listened to "Celebrity Skin." I actually felt the same way about that album and refused to purchase it for a couple of years after it came out, which turned out to be a mistake. It's a great disc that has all of the "Live Through This" influences still around, but with song-writing and polish that are a few years further along. As to rumors that Billy Corgan wrote parts of it, I discount them, because it would have been the tightest Smashing Pumpkins record by a mile and it has aged a *lot* better than the Pumpkins albums have.

Second weird note, and thing I learned: The song "Rock Star" was replaced with the song "Olympia" after the liner notes to "Live Through This" were printed. I knew the song "Olympia", or course, and think it closes out the album brilliantly - I just thought that, as a title, "Rock Star" was a non-sequitur. I don't know if I'm disappointed that that isn't the case.

* My favorite sentence of the book goes to an Eric Erlandson line: "You watch Behind the Music and think, ‘Oh, now I know her.’ But you don’t know shit."

-> My second favorite line belongs to Ms. Love herself: "I am a populist. I believe that everyone, not just people that know Fugazi personally, has a right to revolution," I love that she got the tense switches correct, as well as the sentiment.… (mere)

The curious title of this short prose work remains obscure until about halfway, when—as throughout the book—empty space is used to emphasise with devastating impact, the concept of the void. On page 38, there is this:

No collectables, no commodities.

There is nothing else on the page. On page 52, there is this:

from our
hands, our fumbling and clumsy hands, you write.

But on page 67:

no document can make you manifest.

And it's true. Nothing we can keep or create will bring back the dead.
Neither an essay nor poetry and yet both, this book is filled with shards of grief. It is rebellious, and sometimes angry, recalling shared moments of activism in protests and marches, blockades and picket lines amid the deliberate conflation of dissent with terrorism by the ruling class that still exists:

what might it be
to live
without the wage / without the state / without
the penitentiaries /to be
unafraid / to be / freely
indebted to each other. (p.64)

Images of blood and slaughter are references to Blood of the Beasts (Le Sang des bêtes), a 1949 French documentary by Georges Franju. It contrasted the suburbs of Paris with scenes from a slaughterhouse. This violence is also threaded through the references to the deliberate impermanence of the art they made.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/05/23/no-document-by-anwen-crawford/… (mere)