Courtney Love - American's Sweetheart (Bonus Track) (Jpn) (CD)

All Music Guide

Courtney Love's greatest skill is selling a myth, or more accurately, selfmyth, the illusion that she is an important rocker, the face and voice of a generation. Since she gives great interview, she was a media sensation even before she vaulted to stardom after the suicide of her husband Kurt Cobain in 1994, but after his death, it was as if she inherited his mantle of the spokesperson of the altrock revolution and she did what she did promote herself relentlessly. Soon, her fame easily eclipsed that of her band Hole, whose second album Live Through This sold respectably in 1994, but hardly well enough to support her celebrity (it went platinum, but peaked only at 52 in the Billboard charts, with only two of its singles making waves on Modern Rock radio). Still, Love was nearly ubiquitous in the music and entertainment press during the latter half of the '90s, as she boasted about the impending second Hole album as she relaunched her acting career by appearing in Milos Forman's biopic...s. Though her music and film careers faded at the turn of the century, she was never far from the spotlight, or at the very least not from the headlines, and when the disbandment of Hole was quietly announced early in the 2000s, nobody paid it much attention. Love then embarked on a solo career, first by talking about it, then by playing a few shows, then by disappearing for a while as her personal life sank into a sea of lawsuits, rumors, and public incidents. Just when it seemed like the album would be consigned to the dustheap of history alongside Guns N' Roses' alwayspromised, neverreleased Chinese Democracy, Love lurched and spit out America's Sweetheart in February 2004. Read more Less