WHAT IS KINDERWHORE?

At 14 years old, I remember wearing a Peter Pan collared dress screeching about how profound I thought I was. Sure, I had been inspired before. I has a weird Robin Hood phase when I was 8 years old:  I wore peasant blouses and took up archery and begged my mum to buy all the jewelry (and gemstone encrusted wands) at the Renfaire. Then my hormones kicked in and the world suddenly felt darker and less whimsical. In 1994, Kurt Cobain was dead - I was 12 and loved Nirvana like the rest of the world then Hole released Live Through This and I FELL IN LOVE. Kurt Cobain dying was the best (and most ironic/unfortunate) promo for Courtney Love's new album, released only a few days after his suicide.

This was all perfect timing in my preteen trek of musical discovery. I had already gotten a huge red bass (BADASS inscribed on the bridge) soon after discovering girl bassist icon D'arcy from Smashing Pumpkins during Siamese Dream). No more Maid Marian for me! And soon there would be a ton of these alternative girl musicians reported in Spin and Rolling Stones empowering all the little girls just like me who wanted to play 90's-style rock'n'roll:   Belly, The Breeders, Veruca Salt, 7 Year Bitch, L7, Lush, Lunachicks. That list doesn't even include the "riot grrrl" scene or the post-New Bohemian ladies (on their way to Lilith Fair).


Something about Hole intrigued me in particular. From Hole I discovered Babes in Toyland and loved them, too, for the same unidentifiable reason. Courtney Love and Babes in Toyland's Kat Bjilend (above) seemed iconic compared to other female musicians on the scene. All those bands had girls trying to be like the boys or girls too soft and sweet, but Court and Kat were just right, a marriage between feminine and fierce. Once in a band together called Pagan Babies (before they started to hate each other), their close friendship and obsession with similar themes helped to form the idea of "kinderwhore".

There was an obvious fashion to "kinderwhore" (baby barrettes, messy hair, red lipstick, Mary Janes, ripped tights), lately re-popularized (as all fashion is 20 years later). Fashion as art is especially relevant to an external persona. The "kinderwhore" expresses corrupted feminine youth, both in bratty sexuality and damaged psyche; the two bands further expressed such through the flowery/grotesque description of those subject matters lyrically. Even if this fashion and poetic preference separated Kat and Courtney from other female peers, they derived their schtick from other sources. Cross breeding film references (Valley of the Dolls to Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll), confessionalist poets (Plath) and a pinch of hyper-sexualized punkette (Lydia Lunch comes to mind), these 1990's guitar-wielding banshees boiled other art to create their vixen brew.




Of course, Courtney received comparisons to Nancy Spungen, both obnoxious dope-head groupies in the eyes of many who are accused of dragging their punk partners into a pool of heroin addiction (and inevitably death).


In retrospect "kinderwhore" is a very weird thing for girls to be into but teenagers are always fascinated by the dirty underbelly. "Kinderwhore" glamorized a SEX, DRUGS & ROCK N ROLL girl demon version of the self-destructive grunge artist. It only took reading a few interviews to figure out these tomes of influences, a juvenile women's study of the abused female psyche - what it is to be a girl growing into a woman learning about the dark natures of depression, escapism, addiction, tragedy, male predatory scaries. Little Red Riding Hood on heroin.


The world has a sick fascination with the grotesque side of womanhood and the complex personas a woman takes on. It's the reason why Cindy Sherman is famous:  her photos of mangled dolls received much attention in the art world (and her photography was used for the cover of Babes in Toyland's Fontanelle, above). The world is obsessed with Nabokov's Lolita, the original "kinderwhore" both due to the taboos within the novel but also because Lolita is the age in which a girl is not yet a woman but no longer a girl is real and liable to create monsters and victims sometime on the same side of the fence. (Interestingly enough, Caroll Baker, Kubrick's Lolita, went on to play the main character in Babydoll). Art often times is just an expression of someone's reality or someone's perception of reality and being a woman is a twisted fucked-up fairy tale for some.

"Kinderwhore" was short-lived, probably a good thing. Women wearing badges of self-destruction, romanticizing being used by men, creating a crutch on victim mentality, was never very good for any woman. Yet I see a tinge of it here and there especially with bands like The Dresden Dolls ten years later:

Time perverts things and tweaks the past into something different acting as if it was something of the same. From this:



... we have this:


No, thanks. (PS - Taylor Momsen's music? It's fucking horrible. But in the era of Paris Hilton coked up princesses, it makes sense that Courtney Love would be ripped off by actresses from "Gossip Girl". Courtney Love started off as a stripper from L.A. after all and still stomps around the bourgeoisie as a crazy person with a credit card and too many drugs.)


Even recently Meadham Kirchhoff paid homage to the "kinderwhore" on the runway (above). And Hole's Live Through This remains one of the better records of the early 90's. In retrospect Babes in Toyland's Fontanelle sounds more like a stoner rock record though I wouldn't have gotten that then. <3 <3 <3

COOL "KINDERWHORE" INTERWEBISMS!!!:
Check it!

• Courtney Love interviews one of her idols, Stevie Nicks, for Spin (1997)
• Year of the Kat, LA Times (1992)
• What Would Courtney Love Do? (Valentine's 2010)
• Women on the Verge: An Intro to Punk, Kinderwhore and Heroin Chic
• Jealousy Kills Girl Love: Courtney, Kat and the War of the Schmatte