When the MTV Video Music Award nominations were announced in 2015, Nicki took to Twitter to critique the oversaturation of thin white women in pop music, a comment that Taylor Swift took as a personal attack. The ensuing exchange became something of a spectacle, with Taylor eventually apologizing for her reaction to Nicki’s comments. Miley Cyrus responded, “What I read sounded very Nicki Minaj, which, if you know Nicki Minaj is not too kind. It’s not very polite. I think there’s a way you speak to people with openness and love.”14 The one saving grace of the profile that got Nicki so desperately wrong was that it did capture her fearless response to Cyrus. She said, “The fact that you feel upset about me speaking on something that affects black women makes me feel like you have some big balls. You’re in videos with black men, and you’re bringing out black women on your stages, but you don’t want to know how black women feel about something that’s so important?… If you want to enjoy our culture and our lifestyle, bond with us, dance with us, have fun with us, twerk with us, rap with us, then you should also want to know what affects us, what is bothering us, what we feel is unfair to us. You shouldn’t not want to know that.”15 Kim may have actually been the first female rapper to successfully take her music mainstream, but Nicki’s intrepid journey into calling out the hypocrisy of the white establishment is a remarkable crossover of its own.
What is lost to all of the manufactured squabbling in Kim’s career is the fact that christening herself “Queen Bee” in the 1990s was always about dominating men rather than competing with other women. And though many have attempted to crown Nicki the new Queen Bee, she has resisted the title. Nicki has instead aligned herself with another feminine archetype: the Barbie doll. Kim likened herself to Barbie before Nicki when she rhymed, “Black Barbie dressed in Bulgari / I’m trying to leave in someone’s Ferrari,” in her 2003 song “The Jump Off,” but she has expressed far fewer qualms with Nicki’s self-anointment with that title than she has with any allusions to the Queen Bee. Just as there is a matrilineal transfer of power in the beehive, however, Barbie’s unapologetically pink kingdom is where the imagination and dreams of girls are the rule of law. And both the queen bee role and the legacy of Barbie are that they hold exalted, enviable positions of power and influence. The reality is that in each of their respective realms, they must work tirelessly and often without reward. They endure the oversights and slights to their contributions, perhaps looking forward to the day when they can live out their artistic and personal commitments without being thrown into such pedestrian disputes. These commitments are also crystallized in “The Jump Off” when Kim declares, “Spread love, that’s what a real mob do / Keep it gangsta, look out for her people.”
Kim and Nicki might never reconcile, and my holding out for them to do so would be more reflective of my hopes than theirs. But there is solace in knowing that the doll armies and beehives they’ve empowered and the music they’ve inspired will be their legacies instead of the tedious feud into which they were thrust. Their creative descendants will know them by the revolution in their art and the strength in their love, the kind of inheritance well suited to represent their audacious empires.
The Queen of Hearts
An Alternative Account of the Life and Crimes of Courtney Love
COURTNEY LOVE WAS DEFILING A corpse the first time I encountered her. Or so I thought in 1994 when, while sitting in the waiting room of my dentist’s office, I opened to the cover story in People magazine about the recent suicide of Kurt Cobain, wherein Courtney is noted as “wearing one of her dead husband’s trademark cardigan sweaters” in the first sentence. In the weeks following Cobain’s suicide, I imagined him committing the act in the now iconic camel cardigan he wore to perform on MTV: Unplugged. I got it in my head that Courtney took this specific garment directly from his body to wrap around herself. The story also mentioned how Courtney had taken a lock of Kurt’s hair and washed it, so it was not entirely far-fetched in my eight-year-old mind that she had collected both of these souvenirs in one ghastly fell swoop. And because I did not know then that both grief and romantic love can manifest as corporeal craving, I recognized no purpose in these rituals outside of the occult.
The story featured a black-and-white photo of the greenhouse floor where Cobain was found, with part of his right side sticking out in just enough of the frame to plant a nightmare. His now shattered head was mercifully out of the frame, but his foot was in a sneaker that looked like it belonged to a teenager. My mother saw the photo and quickly confiscated the magazine, briefly looking through the pages herself. “That poor baby,” she said before putting the magazine back on the rack. I’m still not sure if she was referring to the infant daughter he left behind or to Cobain himself, but I had no doubt that she wasn’t talking about Courtney. I would go on to become enamored of Courtney the following summer, but for those few months, in my mind, she was a mad widow disturbing the dead.
I have always bristled at the description of Courtney as “the girl with the most cake.” This spoiled, smug little creature was first introduced in Hole’s “Doll Parts” on the band’s sophomore album Live Through This and has reappeared in nearly every profile of Courtney in the decades since the album’s 1994 release. Love’s signature guttural moan sounds as much like desire as it does pity, and the accompanying image casts her as the impulsive girl child inside a grown woman’s body, a physically and emotionally clumsy brute. We are sad to see her suffer but also know that such children have a tendency to be insufferable. However, pegging Courtney as the gluttonous girl on the delicious brink of her own self-destruction is a mistake. And more and more, I am dissatisfied with the prospect of Courtney’s legacy being linked to a girl rather than a woman. I am even dissatisfied with the idea that her legacy will be linked to a human at all. Courtney Love, you see, is a witch.
An eighth grader named Meghan introduced me to Live Through This, along with a handful of other neighborhood converts, during the summer of 1994. This consortium of girls who felt a little harder than we ought to often lay on Meghan’s bed and stared at the pale green plastic stars affixed to her ceiling and listened to the songs on the album out of order. Meghan played the role of DJ, taking requests that our favorite be played next until we had listened to the entire thing. Until I saw the video for “Doll Parts,” I thought that Courtney was the crying beauty queen on the album cover. I imagined her waving to an empty dance hall, winning the contest on the technicality of being its only entrant.