Behind the Music: Courtney Love aired on VH1 last night. Needless to say, it was extremely entertaining. Love is lots of things, but she is not stupid — though, perhaps that depends on how you characterize mistaking yourself for the center of the universe, doing drugs again and again until you almost die, and saying the first thing that comes into your head 100 percent of the time. Certainly, she is not boring! And so neither was this two-hour episode, which brimmed over with Love-ian bon mots like, “I have a brand. My brand is crazy bitch,” which is exactly right, and exactly twisted, and exactly sad in all of the ways that Courtney Love exactly is. The episode was also pro-Courtney propaganda — which did not really make it any less enjoyable.
Behind the Music is not known for being hard-hitting, so much as cathartically celebratory. But then few Behind the Music subjects have as many detractors as Courtney Love, since few people in the universe do. The talking heads involved — her half-sister, stepfather, former manager, former tour manager, two former bandmates, and a member of Faith No More — didn’t sugarcoat things, but all seem to still speak to Love, which is more than can be said for the scores of people omitted from this episode, including but not limited to her former bandmates Eric Erlandson and Melissa Auf Der Mar, Kurt Cobain’s former bandmates, dozens of people more peripheral to the scene with not-so-nice things to say about her, her mother, and all of the people who think whatever went down between her and Kurt was illegal. Even the absence of these folks (who probably didn’t want to participate) was not as jarring as the ending, in which VH1 made the claim that Courtney — recently in possession of a new, character-obliterating nose — is doing better than ever. We hope that this is so. Still, none of this detracts from over-all enjoyability! As proof, we offer up the below clip, in which Love reveals that one of the many reasons she ended up with Kurt Cobain, and not Billy Corgan, is that she “was all about mating for a nose.”
