The great mistake Courtney Love’s America’s Sweetheart BY MATT ASHARE

The new Courtney Love CD — America’s Sweetheart, the former Hole frontwoman’s first solo album, and her first release on Virgin — opens with guitars screaming and Love unleashing a pair of raw-throated, punk-rock calls of "Hey." Nothing terribly special about that, and it wouldn’t be worth mentioning if the next tune, "But Julian, I’m a Little Older Than You" (she’s alluding to Strokes singer Julian Casablancas) didn’t also start with a roaring "Hey." Or if the rest of America’s Sweetheart weren’t littered with gratuitous cries of "Hey," "Baby," "Yeah," and other gratuitous attempts to achieve rock-and-roll nirvana. Sure, you could explain it as the musical equivalent of a literary device on a concept album that has as one of its major themes an attack on the male rock establishment. But that doesn’t make those desperate cries any less distracting or mitigate the uncomfortable feeling that an ultimately misguided singer/lyricist (who takes credit for writing the words for every song but one on the album) is trying way too hard to create to create an effect that falls flat. And that’s only one of the problems with America’s Sweetheart, a potentially brilliant modern-rock album that stumbles through a dozen marred songs, until it’s hard to reach any conclusion other than this is a great CD that was ruined in the making.

I was fully prepared to defend America’s Sweetheart with all my critical prowess until I got a copy. Not that defending Courtney Love is a particularly popular pastime these days. Indeed, it’s easier to list her positive qualities than to run through her myriad of annoying and objectionable traits, from her arrogance in the face of a drug problem that’s followed her from the infamous Vanity Fair article in which she admitted to using heroin while pregnant up through her recent problems with the law and her 30-day stint in a rehab facility. She’s the leader of the band who in 1991 released Pretty on the Inside (Caroline), a formative alterna-rock album that helped open the door for other important women in rock, and then followed it up in 1994, on the heels of Cobain’s suicide, with Live Through This (Geffen), a powerfully painful collection of punk-inspired rock that stands as one of the most moving albums of the ’90s. And yet, at just about every step of her career, she’s found a way to undermine her credibility by acting like a jackass, saying stupid things to the wrong people, and generally coming off like a selfish bitch who can’t take care of herself, much less a daughter. I can even get past all that. It brings to mind the famous line from Yeats’s "Slouching Towards Bethlehem": "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity."

So, what are her good qualities? At this point, I’m not even sure I remember. Just thinking of Courtney brings to mind this year’s precious little Grammy moment when Yoko Ono referred to the Beatles as "John and the other three" and then tried, with little success, to rally the crowd with Lennonisms like "Give peace a chance." People simply don’t like Yoko. It’s not just that she lacks charisma: there’s something too arrogant and self-absorbed about her, something that suggests she’s taking an unreasonable amount of credit for the music John created. I mention that only because it’s not a big leap from Yoko to Courtney in terms of the way a lot of people respond. I don’t think she had a damn thing to do with Kurt Cobain’s suicide — he did that on his own with a little help from heroin. But she comes off terribly in the film Kurt and Courtney. If nothing else, I got the feeling that he might have been better off in the "care" of someone else as he struggled with whatever demons made him pull that trigger.

Which brings me back to America’s Sweetheart, a five-years-in-the-making album (1998’s Celebrity Skin was Hole’s last CD) that seems almost beside the point — Courtney’s dramas cast such a huge shadow over the music that it’s hard to hear the album for what it is. I wish it were brilliantly flawed, but it’s not. It could have been brilliant with just a bit of editing. The hooks all ring true, and it’s loaded with the kind of emotionally charged poetic lyrics that made Live Through This such a classic. But for every sequence like "Three chords in your pocket tonight/Are you, you the one/With the spark to bring my punk rock back/I don’t think so" ("Mono") or "Adorable, affordable/Guaranteed discretion/In the story of my life/You’ll barely get a mention," there’s the likes of "I see Paris, I see France/I can see your underpants/I see Paris, I see France/I hear London calling." Joe Strummer, come back and save Courtney from herself.