Photo by Hedi Slimane
When Courtney Love and Lana Del Reyannounced that they will be touring together next May, the consensus seemed to be that it was because Del Rey openly espouses Love's late husband, without giving proper credit to what might be the most sympatico tour pairing of 2015. The fine details of Courtney Love and Lana Del Rey's artistry are fundamentally different, but parallels between the two artists abound.
For the last two-plus decades, since Hole's nascense, Courtney Love has been an excessive, triumphant and tragic character. She lost her husband and, for a time, her daughter; her grief and struggles have often been very public, her accolades often marred by misadventure and feuds. Yet, for all the apocryphal stories, her dignified ambivalence to criticism underscores the exact "shade of cool" that Lana Del Rey glorifies in her lyrics about reckless youth and "sad girl" aesthetic. While Del Rey's lyrics have tended towards guilelessness and hopeless inevitability of life—Love's vulnerability is wholly powerful—their bodies of work share an obsession that reconciles in dark fate and a weighted awareness of being regarded, consumed, by men.
Del Rey's Ultraviolence, its preoccupation with the Hollywood ideal and ubiquity of sadness therein, is not inconsistent with the insecurity and deep yearning that was so beautifully limned in many of Hole’s greatest hits. Both artists are engrossed in the idea of washed-up beauty, whether that’s Love’s Cinderella, a muse that’s "wilted and faded somewhere in Hollywood" (Hole’s "Celebrity Skin") or Lana Del Rey and her "summertime sadness" getting left at the altar in the video for "Ultraviolence". This, of course, plays into Love’s shared emphasis on the idea of being used and discarded (Hole’s "Violet"; Lana Del Rey’s "Young and Beautiful") while addressing the violence of lust or love (Hole’s "Jennifer’s Body"; Lana Del Rey’s "Ultraviolence"). What makes both of these artists so compelling is how they use these themes as a form of self-analysis: they clearly both want to be "the girl with the most cake."
We shouldn't discount the parallels between the way Love and Del Rey are fiercely contested artists who are either worshipped or maligned. Del Rey’s fractious debut was subject to impossible scrutiny when it arrived in 2012; Love has been subject to the same since before Hole so much as had a 7" single out. The haunting iconography of a doll being disassembled—what that says about manufactured beauty and how fragile it may be, the idea of a perfect woman—is an idea that languished at the altar of Live Through This only to be picked up, paradoxically, on Born to Die. Courtney Love and Lana Del Rey aren’t often compared, but when you sort through the gilded mess and loathing that surrounds them, you realize how much Del Rey draws a new iteration on Love's ambitious archetype.
Still, what seems to unite them most is their shared, unwavering visions of themselves. Courtney Love and Lana Del Rey have "Hi Hater" ambition—that is, They Will Do What They Please, Regardless of What You Think, regardless of the risk. Many didn’t think it was possible, but Lana Del Rey got even more Lana Del Rey-like on her sophomore release, and as such distinguished herself from a legion of pop artists who sound absolutely nothing like her. When she was criticized for being a sad sex object who cheaply parrots a dated understanding of romance—she responded with songs like "Pretty When You Cry", lyrics like "my pussy tastes like Pepsi-Cola," and a rip-off of the Crystals' eponymous song: "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" (a song that Hole covered during their 1995 MTV Unplugged performance). While their approaches were different, they are engaging and—more importantly—fucking with us in the same glorious ways.