When you think of musicians that have dealt with a lot of hardships in their life, who do you think of? I’m going to go out on a limb and say you thought mostly of men. Kurt Cobain from Nirvana struggled with depression and drug addiction, David Bowie struggled with fame, and practically every popular rock band has dealt with personal disagreements and difficulties. It’s something most people are aware of. As a huge music fan, and a feminist, I’m especially aware of the attention given to suffering male musicians.
But, let’s move past that into a new realm of discussion. Today, I am going to talk about three female musicians, who have also had enormous struggles in their life, but have lived through it to continue to inspire and create music today.
First, let’s talk about Yoko Ono. You know her, right? Yeah, she broke up the Beatles, and was married to John Lennon. She has long black hair, with a witchy quality to her. This is what probably comes to mind when you think of Ono, but Lennon once described her as ‘the world’s most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does’.
I think it’s clear that she doesn’t really care that nobody knows what she does. Since the late 60s, she has released fourteen experimental albums, has put out numerous art books, has received human rights awards, and still creates contemporary performance art.
Ono is also a large advocate for peace, something she’s done since she and Lennon protested the Vietnam war with ‘bed-ins for peace’, where they sat in bed in their pajamas and invited the press to talk to them.
Throughout this impressive career, Ono has faced hardship. People have long attacked her for supposedly ‘breaking up the Beatles’ when in fact she really didn’t do anything beyond hang out with them while they were recording music, and the band was already close to breaking up when she met John Lennon.
She’s faced racism and misogyny, and her art has been ignored in favour of a ‘simple narrative’ regarding her romantic history. All you have to do is read the youtube comments on any of her songs to see people saying she has a terrible voice and other horrible sentiments.
But, Ono prevails. Even at 85 she’s still creating, still advocating for peace and change. With all the hatred she faced, she never gave up, never tried to be more palatable to mainstream audiences, she just kept making music and art for herself.
Now, let’s look at another female artist who has been reduced to her relationship with a man. Courtney Love is widely known as the frontwoman for the 90s band Hole, but also for her highly publicized relationship and marriage to Kurt Cobain.
Their marriage ended in 1994 when Cobain committed suicide, and then Hole’s second album, Live Through This, came out four days later. These two events have led people to believe Courtney Love killed him just for the publicity, despite there really being no evidence supporting those claims. She has faced other hardships, such as drug abuse, the death of her husband, and dealing with her personal life being discussed in tabloids for years.
But, like the album says, she lived through it. Love raised her daughter, Frances Bean, by herself, Hole’s third album, Celebrity Skin, was Grammy-nominated, and has found success as a writer and actress.
Courtney Love has also made plenty of mistakes, such as alleged drug use during her pregnancy with Frances Bean leading to temporary loss of custody. There is also a story about Love punching musician Kathleen Hanna, who I’m going to talk about soon, at music festival Lollapalooza.
And although she has flaws and is by no means a perfect person, Courtney Love has kept going. In a recent op-ed written by Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, she said it’s a miracle that Love is still alive, but she is alive and she is still an inspiration and an icon.
The final musician I’ll be talking about today is Kathleen Hanna. In the 90s, she was the frontwoman for the punk band Bikini Kill, and was a co-founder of the feminist music and art movement Riot Grrrl. As a singer, her voice is like an explosion, going from screaming rage to soft vulnerability often in the same song. But, her struggles started young as she grew up with an abusive father.
Once Hanna started singing in Bikini Kill, she often faced harassment from men who didn’t understand the band’s message. In fact, she has described being in that band ‘as a war’. There’s a line from one of Hanna’s more recent songs that goes ‘We’d be told that we weren’t real punks by boys in bands who acted like our dads when they were drunk’. Even though Bikini Kill was pushing boundaries and creating change for punk girls, it was still very hard with all the hate they were receiving.
After Bikini Kill broke up, Hanna moved into electronic music with the band Le Tigre, but in 2005 Le Tigre went on hiatus because Hanna had contracted undiagnosed lyme disease. Lyme disease is a chronic illness that has a myriad of symptoms, and left Hanna too weak to at times even walk up the stairs. At one point, she even suffered a small stroke.
But in the early 2010s, she went into remission from lyme disease, had a documentary made about her, and started a new band called the Julie Ruin, which has released two albums. She’s been active as an activist, helped create a Riot Grrrl archive at New York University, and recently launched a tshirt company funding education for girls in Togo. At one point, Hanna did have a relapse of lyme disease, and has dealt with the trauma of having an ‘invisible’ illness, but is still an inspiration to many, myself included, today.
To wrap this up, let’s talk about why these women have been ignored, or ridiculed, or attacked, throughout their careers. Obviously, sexism plays a big role in this, but more specifically I think it has to do with how the world views women. We want to view women as one-dimensional, as tidy packages with which we can continue the gender status quo.
We say Yoko Ono is an unlistenable experimental musician, and we leave it at that. We say Courtney Love is a drug addict with a dead husband and too much plastic surgery, and we leave it at that. We say Kathleen Hanna is an un-punk angry man-hater, and we leave it at that. But what if we didn’t? What if we expanded the conversation, and let women be who they are as their completely real, flawed, and inspirational selves?
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