Courtney Love has a long history of talking smacks about major stars, including Madonna, Brad Pitt, Dave Grohl, and now Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. Going all the way back to the early Nineties, the Hole singer has generated headlines by publicly trashing rock musicians, pop singers, movie stars, and even members of her own family. It’s a level of brutal candor you rarely see with public figures, but as Courtney Love told Rolling Stone in 1994, she simply doesn’t care what others think about her. “If people try to put me in the crazy box–’crazy fucking Courtney’–go ahead,” she said. “But if you think you’re going to stop me from where I’m going, you’re not going to do it.” She’s been relatively quiet in recent years, but the old Courtney came roaring back in a recent interview with The Standard, where she blasted many of the biggest names in music, including Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. As she awaits the inevitable wrath from the two biggest stan armies on the planet, let’s revisit some of her most memorable beefs from years past, along with ones she created just this past week.
- Brad Pitt: According to an interview Courtney Love gave Marc Maron in 2022, she lost out on a role in 1999’s Fight Club after telling Brad Pitt he couldn’t create a Kurt Cobain biopic. “I don’t know if I trust you, and I don’t know that your movies are for profit,” she claims to have said to him. “They’re really good social justice movies, but…if you don’t get me, you kind of don’t get Kurt, and I don’t feel like you do, Brad.” When news of this broke in 2022, Love took to Instagram to clarify her thoughts. “I told the story because I felt Pitt would not stop pursuing Kurt — unless I said it in public,” she said. “I don’t want Brad to be pissed off at me and become his resentment. I want him to do better. I’m not into assault. Cmon brother Pitt. I wish you well, truly. If he’s mad at me, that’s his problem. I enjoy him as a movie star immensely. Not so much as a biopic producer.”
- Dave Grohl: Courtney Love and Dave Grohl have had an extremely rocky relationship going all the way back to the Nirvana days. Things heated up in the late Nineties when Grohl implied to Howard Stern that Love didn’t write many of her own songs. “That stupid motherfucker,” she said in response. “He knows exactly what I wrote, he knows exactly the input I had on [Nirvana’s] third album. Kurt came [to the studio] to play with [Hole] more than he did with Nirvana because he liked us better.” The situation deteriorated greatly in the 2000s, especially when Love accused Grohl of inappropriate behavior towards Frances Bean Cobain, something both parties emphatically denied, but they made a fragile truce in 2014 when Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.