Guys, I have some really, really surprising, and upsetting, news to share. Maybe you should sit down for this one, ’cause it might be kinda hard to hear. But it’s gonna be okay. We’ll get through this together. I promise. Alright?

Are you sitting down? Okay. Good. Here we go.

Courtney Love has not been a very good mother to her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.

Okay. It’s okay. I know it’s a shock. You can go ahead and cry if you need to.

See, in 2009, Frances Bean filed a restraining order against Courtney — yes, a a restraining order against her own mother. And, what’s worse, that restraining order not only restricted Love from coming near Frances Bean, but also from coming near Frances Bean’s grandmother or aunt (and for those of you playing along at home, yes, those are the same women whose finances Courtney was oh-so-concerned about back in November, when she accused Dave Grohl of being a greedy asshole who was taking money away from Kurt Cobain’s family), and, oh yeah, also from coming near the family dog. And why did the dog need protection? Well, according to newly released court documents:

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via Badass Digest

Dj Slashba — noun – 1. A temp. 2.  A fill-in, placeholder. 3. A pretender to the throne. 4. Someone who keeps an unlit cigarette dangling from lips. 5. A retard.

Props to our friend Nick for teaching us a new term.

Here’s some shit we did this week:

• We got a tour of the live rig used by Obscura’s Christian Muenzner.
• We debuted new music by Czar, and, thanks to our pals at Decibel, Agoraphobic Nosebleed.
• We spoke to Nader Sadek.
• We checked out the latest releases from Locrian, The Wounded Kings, and Astomatous.
• We examined Slayer’s tour rider.
• We wondered if this commercial will really help sell lingerie or not.
• We over-thought the latest ramblings of Courtney Love.
• We contemplated the most over-used words in extreme metal writing.
• We considered the music of Fallujah.
• By special request, Sergeant D. reviewed Carnifex’s Until I Feel Nothing.

Next week we have some very cool interviews, some very cool music premieres, and, oh yeah, we gorge ourselves on Turkey and celebrate ridding ourselves of that pesky little Native American nuisance. See ya then.

-AR

Yesterday, we saw video of Courtney Love flying off the handle when a fan held up a Kurt Cobain t-shirt during a recent performance; amongst other topics, her subsequent rant honed in on Dave Grohl, who, she seemed to claim, had been fired from Nirvana by Cobain. Later, as part of a kind-of-new-but-really-the-same rant, she said that “I don’t care what you listen to at home. But a guy takes money off my kid’s table… fuck him!” I wasn’t really clear what the hell she meant at the time, but a MetalSucks commenter named Chris asserted that “she was claiming Grohl is the one taking money off her kid’s table, which makes sense given the history of those two arguing over royalties and rights and whatnot.”

And bravo to Chris for apparently being fluent in Courtney, ’cause his assessment of the situation was absolutely correct. The PRP posted the below post-show interview with Love, in which she clarifies why she’s so pissed at Grohl. To hear her tell it, Grohl didn’t write any of Nirvana’s music (including the “drum riff” from “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), makes a shit ton of money from the Foo Fighters (which is not hard to believe) and is consequently not hurting for money (which is also not hard to believe) — and yet he continues to own a piece of Nirvana, and recently purchased an Aston Martin with his Nirvana, Inc. credit card (thus he is “taking money off my kid’s table”) while Cobain’s mother and sister suffer from poverty. Check it out below, and get my thoughts after the jump:

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Wowee wow wow wow. A reader calling himself Geddy Lee — whom I’m reasonably certain is not the dude from Rush — just e-mailed us the above clip of Courtney Love going apeshit at this past weekend’s SWU festival in Brazil. The cause of her outbreak is that someone in the crowd was holding up a photo of Kurt Cobain, at which point Courtney pretty much loses it and says:

“I don’t need to see a picture of Kurt, asshole, and I’m gonna have you fucking removed if you keep throwing that up. I’m not Kurt. I have to live with his fucking shit and his ghost and his kid every day. Throwing that up is stupid and rude, and I’m gonna beat the fuck out of you if you do it again. Y’know what? You weren’t fucking married to him, I fucking was. You didn’t fucking get kicked out of a band by him like Dave, he did. Go see the fucking Foo Fighters and do that shit.”

Then she storms off the stage with a final flip of the bird, and then eventually she comes back and adds, “I don’t care what you listen to at home. But a guy takes money off my kid’s table… fuck him!”

Now, I have a lot of thoughts on this matter, so I’m kinda just gonna ramble here. Please accept my most humble apologies.

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Miley Cyrus — who wasn’t even two years old when Kurt Cobain killed himself — recently did a live cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and it’s actually pretty interesting. Not because it’s good (see headline), but because it’s literally the first time I’ve ever been able to understand the words to the song. “And I forget just why I taste?” Has that seriously been the lyric this whole time? Fuck me, I really gotta pay more attention to this shit.

ANYWAY, I’m sure this is exactly what Kurt Cobain intended to happen when he wrote the song. I mean, dude refused to tour with Guns N’ Roses, so what objection could he possibly have to Miley Cyrus?

;

I predict that this performance will seem to take on new meaning roughly five to ten years from now, when Miley’s career has tanked and she’s undergone what is commonly known as “The Full Courtney.”

-AR

[via Metal Insider]

If you are heading down to Austin for SXSW, be sure to head out to some of the metal-leaning movies on tap as part of the SXSW Film Festival. In addition to the first round of films I recently spotlighted here, even more titles have been unleashed on the unsuspecting public.

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Shortly after 8 p.m., Ms. Love burst into the room with the Marchesa dress slung on one arm and the noted German Neo-Expressionist artist Anselm Kiefer on the other. She was entirely naked and leaning on Mr. Kiefer for support. She made one lap around the room, walking in front of a photographer, an assistant, a hairstylist and me. She pulled over her head a transparent lace dress that covered up nothing, and demanded my assistance — “Not you,” she said to Mr. Kiefer, who was bent over trying to help her — to stuff her feet into a pair of black Givenchy heels that were zipped up the back and tied with delicate laces in the front. Then she applied a slash of red lipstick in the vicinity of her mouth.

“I really must get out of here,” Mr. Kiefer said.

This excerpt comes from the New York Times‘ second profile of Courtney Love this year, the first of which was done by Anthony Bozza, co-author of autobiographies from Slash and Tommy Lee, in the lead-up to Nobody’s Daughter, the album Love released under the Hole moniker without any former members. The latest piece comes from Eric Wilson in the Fashion pages, as she has become a fixture of the scene in New York as well as worldwide. While much of what he writes about is her stunning acceptance into that community, Wilson was obviously unable to resist describing how Love sabotaged her own puff piece with what have become anticipated antics.

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I didn’t watch VH1′s recent Behind the Music on Courtney Love, because I didn’t know that it had been made, because who the fuck knows what’s on VH1 these days? I don’t even know what channel VH1 is on my cable system. Fuck.

ANYWAY, Elise at Reign in Blonde posted the below clip from the show, in which Roddy Bottum and a woman who claims to be Courtney Love even though she looks almost nothing like the Courtney Love I remember discuss her days as the vocalist for Faith No More. And, oh yeah, the fact that they slept together. Elise put it best: “If I’m to believe that those two banged uglies, then him being gay now makes perfect sense.” It also makes sense that he doesn’t find this annoying — he’s clearly some kind of Zen master, with infinite patience for stupidity and lack of an indoor voice.

Jump to 3:10 to see the bit about Faith No More. If you told me that the blonde lady isn’t really Courtney but the real Courtney has now had enough plastic surgery that she can successfully pull an Andrew W.K., well, I wouldn’t be surprised.

-AR

I wasn’t gonna say anything about this because it seemed like there really wasn’t that much to say, but fuck it – the whole situation is starting to get out of control, which is to say, it amuses me.

So Hole released a new album this week, entitled Nobody’s Daughter - which is either a hilarious reference to the fact that Courtney Love (who apparently now wants to be known as “Courtney Michelle,” because changing monikers after twenty years worked out so well for Prince) lost custody of her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, last year, or is supposed to be profound in some way I don’t give a shit about. I haven’t heard the album and really don’t care to; if Gary Suarez had never written about it, I don’t think I’d even be aware of its existence.

ANYWAY, Billy Corgan, who was once friends with Love/Michelle and may or may not have helped her write some songs which may or may not actually be on Nobody’s Daughter, responded to the record release with a Twitter tirade telling us a lot of shit we already knew – namely, that Love can’t write music on her own, that nobody would ever have given a shit about her if she hadn’t somehow tricked Kurt Cobain into squirting his baby-making juice into her, and that she’s a terrible mother. From Classic Rock:

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When I awoke this morning, my Twitter friends list featured a whole lot of 140-characters-or-less commentary from last night’s unintentionally hilarious Finntroll show at New York’s Gramercy Theatre. Yet tucked away between the twitticisms (see what I did there?) was an outraged comment from a friend over the gossip that Robert fucking Pattinson has landed the role of Kurt Cobain in a planned Nirvana biopic. Yes, I’m talking about the same Robert Pattinson who used the worst terrorist attack on American soil as a fucking plot device and who terrorizes us all with his continued involvement in those fucking awful vampire flicks.

I know many of you are still totally butthurt than grunge supplanted hair metal in the early 90s, forever relegating your favorite bands (which sucked) to play Indian casinos and shitty nightclubs for the rest of their “careers,” but Nirvana was one of the most important bands of my adolescence. So yeah, I’m pissed that an actor that hasn’t played a decent role in his entire life was tapped to play one of my musical heroes.

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We’ve been rough on Courtney Love here, perhaps more than is really fair. I attribute that to the perverse temptation to comment on her continuing tabloid antics. Love’s decision last year to reboot Hole without co-founder Eric Erlandson — or any other prior collaborator — really stuck in my craw, and my initial reaction to the first single “Skinny Little Bitch” was pretty unfavorable. But now that I’ve had some more time with that track and a brand new one premiered this week, I’m questioning my prior stance on the forthcoming Nobody’s Daughter LP.

Yes, I know that many of you are so completely close-minded (shocker!) about Courtney Love and Hole that the very suggestion that she might pull this one off will send you directly to the comments box in apoplectic frothing fits. But, like it or not, Hole had — and has – its fair share of fans, from the early noise rock days of Pretty On The Inside to the riot grrl grunge of Live Through This to the polished alt-rock of Celebrity Skin — and like it or not, I’m one of those fans.

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I’d kill myself, too, if I woke up one day and realized I’d been giving this thing my seed:

-AR

I don’t really know what the critical consensus was on the self-titled debut solo album from ex-Hole/ex-Smashing Pumpkins bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, but I thought it was catchy as hell. It came out just a few months after Courtney Love’s America’s Sweetheart and certainly blew that album right the fuck out of the water, that’s for sure. If you’ve never heard it, all you really need to know to understand what kind of record it is is that Josh Homme co-wrote and appears on the album alongside James Iha, Jeorde White (a.k.a. “Twiggy Ramirez”), and some other nifty guest musicians. Either those names appeal to you, or they don’t.

ANYWAY, that was almost six years ago already, and I kinda thought maybe Ms. Auf der Maur was done with music or something. But not so! She’s just released a video for “Out of Our Minds,” the title track from her new solo album, which a press release tells me “extends into a 28-minute, HD film starring and conceived by MAdM, as well as a limited edition comic book and matching Picture Disc Vinyl illustrated by Jack Forbes from Brooklyn, NY.” Personally I’m not sure that I care about anything other than the music, but, hey, good for her for being ambitious.

So this isn’t really metal and I’m not as wild about it as I was, say, “Followed the Waves” or “Taste You”* from her last album, but it’s not bad at all:

Out of Our Minds comes out March 30. And it features a duet with Glenn Danzig!

-AR

*If you can find the French language version of “Taste You,” check it out instead of the English version. The song sounds a million times sexier en Francais.

While I love New York City 364 days out of the year, it is the last place I want to be on New Years Eve. Restaurants jack up their already steep prices, clubs overcharge for the privilege of waiting interminably for a drink at their open bars, and the streets are full of intolerable amateurs, bewildered tourists, and lapsed teetotalers. Typically, I stay at home and watch the ball drop in the comfort of my Park Avenue penthouse. Yet this time I was almost tempted to break with tradition when I read that Courtney Love would be playing a black tie event at The Standard Hotel’s Boom Boom Room. The exorbitant ticket prices, which started in the high hundreds and went well into the thousands, were prohibitive enough to keep me away, but fortunately Love has graced the IntarWebs with some candid footage of her rehearsing for the show (in what appears to be a hotel room) with Micko Larkin, a member of the reconstituted Hole. The track is a difficult-to-recognize cover of The Replacements’ “Unsatisfied” and, speaking as a longtime fan of the group, it is extremely, well, unsatisfactory.

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The Starbucks Incident

Yes, I am going to continue to bitch about Slash. I understand that Slash is not Jimi Hendrix but this might be the single biggest betrayal to my formative years since Metallica released everything they’ve released from Load on, and I need to mourn.

So. Some lady says that the following singers are all on Slash’s new solo album, How Could Taking My Cues from Carlos Santana Possibly Go Wrong? I have added my own thoughts because that’s what we do around here. Click to read more…

I imagine that being the child of a celebrity is difficult under any circumstances, and I’m not sure that, had he lived, there’s much Kurt Cobain would have been able to do for Frances Bean, his poorly-named daughter with Courtney Love. The guy was obviously pretty nutty himself so it’s not like we can sit here and say “Well, everything would have been fine if Kurt had lived.”

That being said, leaving poor Frances Bean alone in the sole custody of Courtney has to be tantamount to child neglect.

So. Both Courtney and Frances have left Twitter. That’s sad only because Courtney’s tweets are so consistently fucknuts that the world is now deprived of one of the 21st century’s great free entertainments. (I didn’t even know that Frances was on Twitter.) But then again, the reason for their decision to halt all tweeting is pretty hilarious.

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Man oh man, does that Samael concert in this video for “Black Hole” look like fun. Or, at least, what I can see of it looks like fun, when the director isn’t trying to give me a seizure from flashing shit at me.

Seriously, why not just put out a cool performance video? ‘Cause this is just weak.

Not a bad song, though. Not bad at all.

-AR

So as it turns out, Courtney Love is – no shock here – a fucking liar. Despite her protests to the contrary, not only did only did Love sign off on the use of a Kurt Cobain avatar in Guitar Hero 5, but she cashed the nice, fat check she was given for the use of said avatar. Nice.

The Great Kat was/is (does anyone still care about her?) more coherent than Ms. Love, but no less aggressively nuts. I was never a fan, but for those of you who were/are, I have but one question: why?

-AR

Thanks to Shane Gillis for the video.

The Intarwebs have been buzzing and seething over the inclusion of Kurt Cobain as a playable character in Activision’s popular Guitar Hero video game, his digitized ghost forever doomed to perform Bon Jovi songs at the whim of teenage boys. Most rational people assumed that this perceived offense against the deceased grunge rocker was the fault of his widow Courtney Love, who would have had to sign off the creation of this virtual atrocity. When called out on this via Twitter, by British music journo and former Cobain family friend Everett True, the unflaggingly graceful Love took the usual high road and launched into an inscrutable six hour tweet seizure railing against, among other things, former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl.

Anyone with a fucking brain in his skull (NO PUN INTENDED!) should immediately question the notion that Grohl has any control over Cobain’s likeness. Logically, that responsibility would rest with the executor of Cobain’s estate. But of course, we’re talkin’ about COURTNEY FUCKING LOVE here, so logic goes out the window from the start. Fortunately, Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic have formulated a much more coherent response to the growing outrage expressed by Nirvana’s sanctimonious fans, most of whom have grown up to be the type of corporate sellouts that Cobain so obviously disdained.

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We’ve all been cringing at Courtney Love’s latest desecration of her dead husband for a quick buck. Thankfully, the Hole frontwoman and executor of Kurt Cobain’s estate isn’t standing in the way of an absolutely awesome reissue of Bleach, Nirvana’s classic grunge/sludge debut. First released twenty years ago on Sub Pop, the album has been remastered for the label under the direction of bassist Krist Novoselic and original producer Jack Endino.

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