After the everglow of the ‘90s wore off, it seemed like a lot of people were feeling some animosity toward Courtney Love.
Nevermind the fact that she had her own thing going on with Hole, a lot of people were starting to see her as just some fame-hungry has-been who just wanted attention wherever she went, with a few fairly ugly (but never substantiated) claims about her wanting to kill Kurt Cobain when they were married.
Even after Cobain was found dead though, Trent Reznor wasn’t ready to let her off the hook 5 years after the fact.
Outside of her publicized relationship with Kurt, Courtney was briefly dating Trent for a spell as well, before things fell out hard between the pair. Following up The Downward Spiral, Trent let most of his emotions loose on The Fragile, picking up where his last album left off and having a few choice words for Love on the song “Starfuckers Inc.”
Aside from the raw aggression that comes out of this song, Reznor claimed to have a pretty direct target this time around, saying “Starfuckers Inc. doesn’t fit in with the rest of that record, but it came from bits of lyrics I’d written over a long period and was focused at Marilyn Manson and Courtney Love. I’m not saying I haven’t fallen prey to this at times, but I think in their environment your priorities can totally flip before you realize.”
It’s not exactly hard to see why Courtney would get top priority in this situation, going so far as to use the hook from the old Carly Simon hit “You’re So Vain” and capping it off with a video that actually uses an actress dressed just like Courtney being thrown through the ringer.
The title was also stolen from another ‘90s artist as well, with Trent allegedly lifting the song title from Tori Amos’ “Professional Widow,” which is also rumored to be about Love.
That’s not even the last dust-up that Courtney would have in the world of alt-rock, from dating Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan for a spell and even saying in response to this song “don’t call yourself Nine Inch Nails if you only have a three inch one.”
The Fragile might be a lot more to take in than what we got on The Downward Spiral, but just because it’s a different flavor, don’t think for a second that Trent had lost his edge.