Courtney Love Shouted Down The Sexism Female Rock Stars Face In The Music Industry

courtney-love
Getty Image

In case there’s someone out there who somehow missed similar testimonies from Charli XCX and Lauren Mayberry to name a few, Courtney Love is here to tell everybody that being a woman in the music industry means putting up with a lot of awful nonsense.

Love revealed some of the problems facing women in music during an onstage interview with GQ‘s Dylan Jones. The talk was part of the Liberatum Women in Creativity series. During her piece, Love revealed several times where she was patronized during her career and said that female rockstars are held to different standards than their male counterparts. Via Dazed:

“I always took myself really seriously… but sometimes I’d be at a venue and the guy would call me ‘sweetie’ or ‘honey’ when we were doing drums and stuff. I’d carry the drums in myself so people wouldn’t say I was a b*tch…I barely know what it is, but I learned ‘Smoke On The Water’ so I could go to Guitar Center and play that and not have guys look at me. It was different time – I think girls get taken a lot more seriously now.

There’s maybe 30 (female stars) if you count pop stars. Think about that, on the planet. Rockstars, I don’t know, I’ve never really sat down and counted female rock stars. There’s a few, there’s 10… 15… but throw a TV out on the balcony, the same stuff that Keith Richards did, the same stuff Jim Morrison did, the same things that Bono did – that we all forgot about – yeah, I think I get judged by a double standard a lot, but that’s just the way it is.”

Love also talked about the need for female artists to constantly evolve while acts like the Foo Fighters can crank out the same songs until the heat death of the universe. She also trotted out the tired story that rock is dying, though we may disagree there.

“(Rock and roll) is pretty much close to dead, unless there’s some great savior art direction, unless there’s a new Oasis or Nirvana and people buy into that and it gets as big as Kanye is,” she said. “It’s gotta be innovative, it’s gotta touch that many lives and kids, millennials, have all been raised, with very few exceptions, on rap and so I don’t know if they’d recognized it even if they heard it.”

Of course, instead of calling for a new Nirvana or Oasis, Love could have just called for a new Hole. Some say they were better than those other bands anyway.

×