Lipstick and Heroin

Say what you will about Courtney Love's plastic surgeries, her infamous drug-fueled antics, her questionable parenting skills, and her arguably opportunistically parasitic clasp on grunge-rock legend Kurt Cobain before his suicide-- the woman rocks.

All the little Pink/Kelly/Avril/Paramore wannabe's take note: study Love's band, Hole, beginning with their first album, Pretty on the Inside(1991), up until their most recent, Nobody's Daughter(2010), and you might learn a thing or two about sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. What the other little pink-haired chicks try to manufacture, Love exudes. All these contemporary pink-haired-girl-rock songs nowadays sound put together like blocks: take four pieces to make a verse, then repeat until chorus. And yell, don't forget to yell.

Love and Hole, on the other hand, echo with soul. Punk soul. Rock soul. The soul of a woman who isn't calling up Timbaland for a dope beat, but a woman who's lived so far on the edge she's become vertigo-tolerant. Listen to her lyrics as well. They aren't some pop-fueled "I wanna say something shocking to get on MTV" rants. They're badass-bitch poetic rock slatherings smoothly exhaled from a belly that's known the feeling of being filled with drugs. And vomit. They exhale out of an esophagus and throat that's taken more abuse then all five members of Good Charlotte claim to have lived. They are as beautiful as a movie-star smile and as seedy as a Sunset Strip motel.

You can say she's a media whore, a drug and attention-addict, used Cobain's fame to catapult her own, a guitar-wielding cross between Joan Rivers and Heidi Montag, and an aging has-been trying to cling to something that's long been gone. You could say all that, but you'd be wrong. Despite her surgical enhancements, Love is as real as they come and she has the scars to prove it. They're visible in every line she sings. She's earned the right to be tough by being dragged down the rock and roll highway for decades.

Know your history and respect your elders, kids. Some of them have souls aged beyond your existence.