I have written briefly before about how I have Gen Z students today who weren’t even a twinkle in their mother’s eye when Kurt Cobain stuck the shotgun in his mouth, who are nevertheless legitimately massive Nirvana fans; in an era of ever-escalating rates of depression and suicidal ideation among young adults such as ours, it sadly makes perfect sense that the passions of St. Kurt resonate with them even more strongly than they did among their Gen X forebears. And listen: I’m a Nirvana fan myself! If there’s only one ’90s band the Zoomers choose to lionize, I’m glad it’s this one. Shows they have decent taste, at least. But the flipside of that coin is that there are also Gen Zers today with no living memory of the ’90s who still unironically hate on his widow Courtney Love.

A lot of that hate is of course for the same misogynistic reasons that folks have hated on her since Bill Clinton was president, the way vulgar and outspoken women are still punished for being vulgar and outspoken in a manner that men are still all-too-readily excused for (just look at the current president for evidence of that). I somehow still occasionally get an essay from a college freshman with no memories of 9/11 or even of the 2008 Stock Crash who argues in all sincerity that Courtney Love killed Kurt Cobain in order to, I guess, goose sales of Hole’s Live Through This in 1994 or something. Like Yoko Ono and The Beatles a generation earlier, Courtney Love is the woman who gets all the blame for their favorite band ending, as though the men didn’t have a thing to do with it.

Yet also like Yoko Ono (who has basically become a meme in recent years for the time she made dolphin sounds on live TV while her husband dueted with Chuck Berry), it’s not like she hasn’t played at least partially into people’s perceptions of her. She really did once flash David Letterman on the Late Show, ain’t no one defending that (even if Letterman clearly didn’t object himself). There is also her troubling and well-documented history of substance abuse (albeit that still tends to get treated as a tragic flaw in her husband, but suddenly a moral failing in her). When Love finally passes, she will not get the Dolly Parton treatment.

More baffling to me, however, are those Gen Zers who weren’t even born yet cite the time she appeared visibly intoxicated on the Comedy Central Roast of Pamela Anderson in 2004 (although call me naive, but why would anyone appear on that show sober?); or how quickly she moved on to dating Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins after her husband’s suicide (did they expect her to stay celibate? Did we get mad at, say, Russel M. Nelson for getting remarried so soon after his wife’s passing?). I’ve also heard these same youngins dismiss her snidely cause Billy Corgan co-wrote half the songs on Hole’s next album Celebrity Skin (which the liner-notes openly acknowledge–and is also, perhaps relatedly, Hole’s weakest album); or highlight how she kept Nirvana’s last song “You Know You’re Right” trapped in legal limbo for 8 years because Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic wanted it on the Boxset but she wanted it on the Greatest Hits album (and I say this with great love and respect for Dave and Krist, but Courtney Love was right on this one); or even just the fact that Kurt and Courtney reportedly fought a lot (which just goes to show how many of these younger fans simply haven’t gotten married yet). It gives me the strangest déjà vu to hear all these accusations that were already considered hoary when I was a teenager around Y2K get trotted out by Zoomers who barely even have memories of the Obama years.

So I’ve taken to defending her more and more recently. I remind these kids that were still in elementary school themselves when Harvey Weinstein was outed as a rapist in 2017 that Courtney Love had warned everyone of the same on the red carpet clear back in 2005. Suddenly all the accusations that she was troubled and intoxicated during that era make more sense when you consider how many people were invested in rendering her an unreliable witness.

But the anecdote that has so far worked the best at getting young Nirvana fans to reconsider her comes from Mark Lanegan of The Screaming Trees–and it’s basically a modern-day retelling of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, wherein the person you think you are most justified in despising turns out to be the only moral human being in the story.

Lanegan and Cobain were close friends you see, dating back to when both were just minor players in an obscure Seattle scene without prospects in the late-80s; yet even after Grunge broke big and Nirvana vastly eclipsed Screaming Trees in popularity, the two remained close (there is reportedly a duets album the two recorded together that has never seen–and likely will never see–the light of day). Lanegan, in fact, is who Cobain called repeatedly that fateful April morning in 1994. Per his 2020 memoir Sing Backwards and Weep, Lanegan had avoided picking up the phone because he thought Cobain just wanted to hang out, but he didn’t want to be around him when Courtney Love was home–their endless bickering made him uncomfortable–so he let all the calls go to voice-mail. It wasn’t till the next day that he learned Cobain had been literally making his last calls for help.

Naturally, he was plagued with enormous guilt once he heard the news. He relapsed into drug addiction, the Screaming Trees broke up only a couple years later, what few royalties he collected from their few minor hits swiftly dried up as Grunge became passé, and he reportedly became homeless, and at very real risk of following Cobain’s lead. That could have easily been where the story ended.

The reason it didn’t–the reason he later went on to find even greater musical success as co-vocalist for Queens of the Stone Age in the 2000s–is because, per that same autobiography, Courtney Love tracked him down. There’s a lot to unpack here: Love may have been troubled, but she was never an idiot, and she knew full well Lanegan didn’t like her–she knew most men didn’t like her–she once joked that her fanbase was “females, gay guys, and a few advanced, evolved heterosexual men,” and Lanegan wasn’t one of ’em. Nevertheless, Mark Lanegan was her dead husband’s close friend, so she shelled out the money, out of her own pocket, to pay for a solid year of rehab and months of rent, to clean him up and get him back on his feet. In a later Vice interview, Mark Lanegan publicly credited her with saving his life.

Again, she did not have to do this! He very obviously did not like her while Cobain was alive, and he was never anywhere close to a big enough Rock star in the ’90s for this act of charity to make the news and burnish her public image. No, we can only conclude that–much like when she outed Harvey Weinstein on the red carpet over a decade before #metoo, knowing full well she’d never be believed and it would only kill her burgeoning acting career–she saved Mark Lanegan’s life because it was the right thing to do, not because she would personally benefit. She did not let her left hand know what her right hand doeth. It was a genuine act of Christ-like charity. It was Punk as hell.

And I find myself wondering how many other Priests and Levites, figuratively speaking, passed by with a glance at a homeless and drug-addicted Mark Lanegan on the side of the road, and then considered, in the sardonic words of King Benjamin, that “The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just–“

Then along comes Love (and how perfect that her name was Love in that moment), the Samaritan–that is, the religious degenerate who is rightfully despised by the righteous and the orthodox–and she showed him mercy, bound up his wounds, took care of him, and paid the proverbial inn-keeper to care for him; and I wonder, as Christ asked the Pharisee, “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him?”

And I think too of all those too-young-to-know-better Gen Zers and too-old-to-change-now Gen Xers who still unironically lambast her as a slut and a whore, and I recall how sincerely Christ Himself meant it when He told those same Pharisees, “Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.”