Contrary to reigning rock crit wisdom, gunning for Courtney Love to fail is not all that fun. America's Sweetheart could have been stupendous: check Courtney charging out of a Hollywood compound, flaming guitar slung low around a bare neck, shoulders suddenly and miraculously freed from the impossible weight of addiction and trauma, stuffing her solo debut in the mouths of her most vocal detractors and proving relevance against all odds. It could have been perfectly majestic, glorious, stupefying. Instead, America's Sweetheart is exactly what you thought it would be: collapsible, frantic and depressingly repulsive.
Most music fans are curiously well-acquainted with Courtney Love's battle scars, and capable of name-checking the formative circumstances for each dull, yellowing bruise. Half the post-Kurt barbs lodged at her were either painfully sexist, dumbfoundingly naive, or both-- and while it's easy to argue that Love wholeheartedly encouraged her own pigeonholing, the resulting avalanche of whore/addict punchlines also completely fucked up her chances at having her records judged on their artistic merits alone. No matter whom you end up blaming for it (see Love's grievous, unapologetic attention-grubbing, or a press historically perplexed by women with guitars), Love's sloppy public persona has long superceded her music.
Ultimately, this kind of filter is as boring as it is superfluous: arguing over whether or not Love's empowerment-heavy punk posturing was compromised by a team of plastic surgeons and Versace-fitters is interesting only as it relates to her lyrical agenda; bickering about the songwriting credits on Hole records (Kurt Cobain? Billy Corgan? Michael Stipe?) is relevant only in terms of how you finally decide to judge the respective heft of a collaborative effort.
Because in the end, journalists and fans have always been more than happy to swallow the goofy, satisfying sleaze of hair metal bands and poorly-aging cockrockers, but a drug-addled, sexually aggressive woman still grosses everybody out. And while including a discussion of Courtney's personal life in a conversation about her music may have become unfortunately inevitable, it's also totally unnecessary. America's Sweetheart comes complete with enough unforgivable flaws to nobly arm anyone even remotely interested in a vicious attack. It's finally safe to ignore Courtney's ridiculous magazine antics; this record is a far more embarrassing and desperate spectacle than shedding an overpriced shirt for a British photographer or bickering with Dave Grohl.
At its best, America's Sweetheart sounds helplessly marred, as if it's been completely and preemptively exhausted by several named ("an eight ball isn't love") and unnamed sources. Being that Love is often an overtly confessional (verging on solipsistic) songwriter, the sludge of her recreational activities comes to bear pretty heavily on her songs, both lyrically and vocally. Love's once-powerful pipes have been scratched raw, the low, rumbly growls of yesteryear giving way to a thin, disembodied screech. No matter how many filters her yelps are re-routed through, or how blushingly blatant her lyrics remain, Love's new anti-range is incapable of conveying any of the clenched-fist fury her fans have come to expect. Sometimes Love sounds harried and overwhelming, nuance-free and overstretched ("All the Drugs"); other times, her voice is so heavily treated that it becomes essentially unrecognizable (see the anonymous sing-sounds of "Sunset Strip"). Opener and lead single "Mono" is prefaced by a series of "Hey!" screams that sound so unpleasantly inhuman (they resurface before the otherwise non-specific Strokes-homage "But Julian, I'm a Little Bit Older Than You") that it's hard not to bend your ears away from your speakers in knee-jerk self-defense.
While it's unfair to directly compare Courtney's solo work with Hole's shifty discography, America's Sweetheart demonstrates a fairly monstrous decline in both quality and conviction. The record is caked in thick, indiscriminate guitar goo and peppered with quasi-confrontational lyrics ("I got pills for my coochie/ Coz baby I'm sore"), but it ultimately fails to recapture the convincingly bratty swagger of Love's tipsy past, while retaining all the dated grunge crunch. No matter how many times she hollers gabba gabba hey, America's Sweetheart is still insanely one-dimensional and oddly anti-punk (see also the "find legal downloads... save the music!" dogma of the liner notes). Half the tracks are imminently forgettable (especially the early-90s buzz of "Uncool", "I'll Do Anything" and "Life Without God"), while the others either grate ("Zeplin Song") or seem vaguely desperate in their grasps at relevance (two mentions of Eminem?).
Having exhausted either the patience or the songwriting skills of her contemporaries, Love opted to mine the resources of generations below and beyond, enlisting Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin and Xtina/Pink hitmaker Linda Perry (credited as a co-writer on nine of the record's twelve tracks) to act as collaborators. What's weird is that their presence is almost impossible to note-- some of these tracks take half-hearted swipes at pop palatability ("Never Gonna Be the Same"), but very few come close to achieving any kind of accessibility.
Ultimately, the title of America's Sweetheart isn't just cute, it's caustic. Courtney Love is only now coming to terms with the hyper-reality of being Courtney Love: drug-addicted, flailing artists are rightly tragic, but America still, for assorted reasons, finds Love annoying. America's Sweetheart is both a response to and a reflection of that collective distaste, inadvertently perpetuating Courtney-mythology while simultaneously half-smirking at it. In the end, it's the partially cooked anger here that's most compelling: In the future, Love's tragic flaws may be her only shot at redemption.
