Courtney Love: "I always wanted to be known as a bitch. Kurt wanted to be liked but not me."

Kurt Cobain of Nirvana with wife Courtney Love and daughter Frances Bean Cobain
(Image credit: Photo by KMazur/WireImage)

Courtney Love has opened up on how little she cares about being liked and recalls how Kurt Cobain's death saw the hatred against her reach new heights.

The Hole singer has been at the centre of conspiracies about her husband's death, even receiving death threats herself. Cobain died by suicide in 1994 at the age of 27.

As the wife of one of the most beloved male rock stars on the planet, the hatred was nothing new for Love. But it ramped up significantly after Cobain's death.

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Love tells the Evening Standard: "They said I was disagreeable. Yes, I am completely disagreeable and I’m never going to apologise for that.

"I always wanted to be known as a bitch. Being liked was never my thing. Kurt wanted to be liked but not me. He was able to hide behind me, but then I got hated. 

"Then Kurt died, and the hatred towards me reached a completely new level. I did not plan for that.

"I had a bitch capacity and I was cool with not being liked. I saw Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back and he didn’t want to be liked and I thought, yeah, I want to be like that."

It seems that even years of conspiracy theories and the associated baggage, Love still cares little what people think about her or her opinions.

Asked for her take on the current state of pop music, she says: "Taylor (Swift) is not important. She might be a safe space for girls, and she’s probably the Madonna of now, but she’s not interesting as an artist.

"I haven’t liked Lana (Del Rey) since she covered a John Denver song, and I think she should really take seven years off. Up until Take Me Home Country Roads I thought she was great.

"It’s great that there are so many successful women in the music industry, but lots of them are becoming a cliché. Now, every successful woman is cloned, so there is just too much music. They’re all the same. If you play something on Spotify, you get bombarded with a lot of stuff that’s exactly the same.

"I mean, I like the idea of Beyoncé doing a country record because it’s about Black women going into spaces where previously only white women have been allowed, not that I like it much. As a concept, I love it. I just don’t like her music."

Stef wrote close to 5,000 stories during his time as assistant online news editor and later as online news editor between 2014-2016. An accomplished reporter and journalist, Stef has written extensively for a number of UK newspapers and also played bass with UK rock favourites Logan. His favourite bands are Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Stef left the world of rock'n'roll news behind when he moved to his beloved Canada in 2016, but he started on his next 5000 stories in 2022. 

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