When Courtney Love chucked a lit cigarette in Kathleen Hanna’s face
The idea of Kathleen Hanna being involved in celebrity beef is absurd on the surface, especially with another rock star woman of the same generation and vaguely the same scene. This is the woman behind Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, surely this sort of mudslinging in the rock press is beneath her? Then you remember one thing.
The other party in this spat is Courtney Love.
Now look. I am a Courtney Love defender. Celebrity Skin is a better album than Nevermind, and the only reason that the Hole front woman doesn’t get away with her brand of controversial rock star chaos and Axl Rose does (despite his brand being demonstrably far worse) is misogyny, plain and simple. However, excusing her brand of rock star chaos because she’s a woman is just as corrosive a brand of misogyny, and she doesn’t half do it to herself from time to time.
She’s a vulnerable person who had a rough as fuck upbringing, became one of the most famous people on the planet and then it goes a whole lot rougher. Basically, no one would handle that well, and Courtney Love didn’t. So much so that among the small nation of people that she’s feuded with is the aforementioned Kathleen Hanna, famously one of the most principled, level-headed and all-round smartest rock stars you could ever name.
Yet the spat that caused this whole fiasco has gone down in rock history because no one can quite work out what actually happened. All we know is that it was at Lollapalooza 1995, and that for one reason or another, Love walked up to Hanna, chucked a lit cigarette in her face and then punched her. There’s a school of thought here that Hanna brought it on herself by saying something cruel about Courtney or even Frances, and while we’ve all said and done out-of-character things that we regret, that would seem to be particularly out of character for Hanna we perceived today. Not impossible, you understand, but unlikely.
No, the root of this animosity seems to go years before that, back to when Kathleen Hanna was a very close friend of one Kurt Cobain. In fact, it was she who wrote on Cobain’s bedroom wall that he smelled like a brand of ladies’ deodorant and indirectly changed pop music forever. Love has made no secret of two things: that she has an extremely potent jealous streak in her and that, in 1995, little over a year after Cobain’s death, Love was a trainwreck who took it out her grief and anger on everyone.
What’s more, Love pleaded guilty to assault and then has never, ever talked about it in anything other than the vaguest of terms. Had Hanna really said something horrific about her child, one can safely assume that we would have heard about it. I mean, we know that there’s a chance that Marlon Brando is her father because of Love’s famously iffy relationship with shutting up
I can imagine that both women would want to put the whole thing behind them, but we all know that if it were two men who got into this spat, it would be a key part of their mystique. Just look at Jack White and Jason Stollsteimer of the Von Bondies back in the day. The fact that people still use it as a stick to beat Courtney Love with… Well, I went into what that is earlier in the article.
Plan and simple.