Courtney Love: America's Sweetheart : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

When the Rolling Stones released Sticky Fingers in 1971, Keith Richards mused, "I don't think Sticky Fingers is a heavy drug album any more than the world is a heavy world." So let's just say that Courtney Love's long-delayed comeback, America's Sweetheart, comes from a heavy, heavy world indeed. You'd have to go back to Sticky Fingers to find a major-label album so saturated in the slow-motion drug ambience of the sleazy rock underworld. It will surprise anybody who expected Love to clean up her act after so many years as a tabloid spectacle. She sounds ragged, unsteady, slurring her words. In "Hello," she howls, "I got no desires no more" -- and hearing is believing.

For her official solo debut, Love called in the pros: Matchbox Twenty producer Matt Serletic, ex-boyfriend/producer Jim Barber, Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin, Christina Aguilera hitmaker Linda Perry. But despite all the producers and song doctors, Sweetheart seems tired. Love chronicles life in the Hollywood fast lane, with sordid tales such as "Mono" and "All the Drugs." "The Plague" ends with Love mumbling, "All my love's in vain/Cannot find a vein." "Sunset Strip" is a rock version of Patty Duke's meltdown at the end of Valley of the Dolls, as Love screams, "I got pills for my coochie 'cause, baby, I'm sore/I got pills 'cause you're bad/ I got pills 'cause I'm bored!"

But the shocker is Love's ravaged voice. No matter what you've heard about her real-life problems, nothing could prepare you for how busted up she sounds. Hell, it took Rod Stewart thirty years of rum-and-Cokes and Swedish models to do this kind of number on his throat. Her voice gets processed through filters and overdubs, but she's still in rough shape, stumbling over consonants and running out of breath. Whenever she tries a ballad -- "Hold On to Me," "Never Gonna Be the Same" -- it's ghastly. Elsewhere, she keeps turning on the scream to cover up for the mediocre tunes. Her best riff shows up on "I'll Do Anything," which sounds like an old song you may remember called "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

For people who enjoy watching celebrities fall apart, America's Sweetheart should be more fun than an Osbournes marathon. But strange as it seems today, Courtney Love used to have something to say, voicing her female audience's fantasies of freedom and power. On Hole's 1994 masterpiece, Live Through This, she inhabited teenage misfits, bored housewives and beauty queens with total conviction. But on America's Sweetheart, she can't find the emotional intensity that made her a star. So she settles for the role of a hapless circus act staggering down the red carpet -- and Paris Hilton does it better.

ROB SHEFFIELD
(RS 942, February 19, 2004)