One-time Hollywood star and Grunge superstar Courtney love is very likely an excellent example of the mid stage MK Ultra program and its demented maculation. Her father, a CIA operative named Hank Harrison was integral to the agencies steady takeover of the hippie movement in 1964 under the guise of manager and founding member of the band "Grateful dead". Growing up in such an environment gave young Courtney almost no chance at a normal childhood. Her indoctrination into the CIA cultural, control program likely began almost from birth. Courtney herself claims to have been given LSD (a drug developed by the CIA as a truth serum) at the age of four. Courtney was exposed to her father's MK ultra-tutelage for the first six years of her life until 1970 when her mother left her father.
Her mother is a psychotherapist named Linda Carrol who received U.S. national attention in 1993 when she began treating an MK-ultra Operative whose programing went haywire resulting in the killing of non-marks for sport. After being treated by Linda, Katherine Ann Power turned herself in to authorities after spending twenty-three years eluding her handlers and local authorities. From these simple facts we can determine that Courtney came from intelligent parents who took part in shady programs for the government.
Despite her mother’s efforts Courtney continued to exhibit signs of programing. In 1972 after Love's mother divorced her second husband and moved the family to Nelson, New Zealand. Love was promptly enrolled at a Religious school for Girls. But her early conditioning took over and she was soon expelled for misbehavior. In 1973, Carroll sent Love back to Portland, Oregon, to be raised by family friends. Now 14, Loves programing continued to drive her actions resulting in being arrested for shoplifting from a Portland department store. After her arrest she was put in a juvenile prison where she was exposed to punk rock music for the first time. After being released she was intermittently placed in foster care programs throughout late 1979 until she decided to be legally emancipated from her parents.
Love used her emancipation to try and distance herself from the Programs reach. Going so far as to spend time in Japan working as a topless dancer, but was mysteriously deported after her passport was confiscated. This forced her to return to Portland and once again work at strip clubs to make ends meet. This was when she adopted the surname Love to conceal her identity. She also worked odd jobs, including DJ at a gay bar. Love has stated that she lacked social skills and learned them while working gay clubs and spending time with drag queens. During this period, she attempted to undo her prior conditioning by enrolling at Portland State University where she studied English and philosophy.
Her attempt at self-governance back peddled in 1981, after Love was granted a small trust fund that had been left by her maternal grandparents, which she used to travel to Dublin, Ireland, where her handler/biological father was living. The stay lasted until 1982 when she returned to Portland Oregon and perused an interest in music and counter culture concepts like feminism. Love made friends with Kat Bjelland at a Portland night club and the two decided to move to California and start a band with a mutual friend named Jennifer Finch. Although the band failed to do much the partnership would prove important for the fledgling Riot Grrrl movement. Kat would go on to form the band "Babes in Toyland" and Finch the band "L7". As for Courtney a young woman who had her whole life forced on her would finally build her own identity by mixing aspects of the other two women she had worked with. The thing that would eventually separate her from her new identities source material was drive. Courtney briefly moved to Minneapolis to help Kats fledgling band but after sometime decided to shift her focus on acting. Before leaving she is quoted as saying "I'm going to go to L.A. and I'm going to get my face done and I'm going to be famous."
It is interesting to note that Courtney in an attempt to forge her own path and change lanes from the one she was symbolically bred for literally changed her physical appearance in an almost ritualistic attempt to become someone else. Between 1985 and 1988 Love (a backwoods Oregon girl) was surprisingly prolific. Love first earned a small part in the seminal film "Sid and Nancy" Followed by a leading role in that director's next film "Straight to Hell" as well as parts in films by The Clash, Andy Warhol, and the Ramones. Despite a great start Love found the film world to be too much and ventured back to Oregon where she took the first job she could get and began working as a stripping again. Sadly her attempt at anonymity failed when patrons of the small town began to recognize her from her films. Not sure how to continue with her life she fled to Anchorage Alaska to clear her mind and plan her next move. During that time she began to teach herself to play guitar.
Her Alaska cleansing complete Love moved to L.A. and started a new band that she named "Hole". The band had a modest but strong start. Courtney was described by almost anyone who interacted with her as driven at the least. She worked nights at the legendary "jumbos" strip club making enough money to buy equipment and transportation for the band. The band’s music and lyrics were cutting and representative of someone who had been victimized. Song titles such as "Retard Girl" and "Dick Nail" were indicative of the angst felt by a person who knew something was wrong about their upbringing but couldn't yet put a finger on it. The band released their first album entitled "Pretty on the inside" in late 1991 it garnered good reviews amongst the mainstream and indie publications. Sometime during the tour for the album Courtney met a young Seattle musician named Kurt Cobain who like Courtney Kurt was also confused, talented, and driven.
The MKULTRA program that Love was born into wasn't just a counter intelligence program against foreign actors. It was also designed to keep distention at home mitigated and manipulated to favor the programs larger goals. It's sad that despite every attempt Courtney dared to take to stop her parents directives she still found herself with the very person her handlers programed her for. Kurt Donald Cobain was roughly Loves age and grew up in a working class Northwestern American logging family. The Reagan era economic downturn cast a shadow over his home town of Aberdeen Washington. Kurt grew up poor with a dysfunctional family that much like Loves forced him to live with relatives and strangers. Kurt was also a black sheep that felt confined and manipulated by the grownups who dictated his life.
It's very telling that Kurt and Courtney's original plan as a young couple was that Love would be the star and Kurt would be the understated family man. But Nirvanas album "Never mind" disrupted the plan. Suddenly Courtney's husband was the biggest music star in a generation. Unexpectedly his fame went beyond music. Nirvana brought not just punk rock to the masses it also carried radical counter culture feminism. The powers that be moved fast to put a stop to this leftist movement and they surely felt lucky that Courtney and a few other assets were already in the middle of the movement.
I don't believe that Courtney was intentionally trying to undo a cultural revolution or that she didn't care for Cobain. But I will propose that she was a powerful pawn that was moved at just the right time. Cobain was a very confused and talented person who as his band member Krist said "thought he could beat heroin". It’s not entirely crazy that both Kurt and Courtney thought they could defeat the trappings of fame and Heroin. Out of the litany of legendary pop stars Kurt Cobain is one of the few who truly came out of nowhere to achieve stardom. A not so hidden secret of Hollywood is that almost all of Hollywood's Stars even the minor ones come from families that were already connected to the Hollywood machine. A good example is Slash from Guns and Roses whose image is that of an everyman. But, if truth is told his mother was the girlfriend and costume designer for David Bowie and many other Hollywood performers. Through her business she had the ear of all the people her son's band (Guns and Roses) would need attention from to get "discovered". No one in Nirvana had those sorts of connections. Kurt came from a broken home, Krist was a first generation American child and David Grohl was the child of a divorced teacher. Unlike most Pop culture stars no one gave them a leg up.
Many believe that Kurt was murdered and they might be right in that, he was allowed to kill himself. Kurt was definitely a Junkie in a way that only a multi-millionaire could be. If there is a conspiracy it lays in the people who held the money and how they manipulated the people who actually cared about him
The CIA certainly knew of Kurt's drug problems and the paranoia that comes with heroin addiction. In February of 1992 Courtney married Kurt in Hawaii. The first signs of the programs divide and conquer plan can be exposed in the fact that Kurt's childhood friend and band Member Krist wasn't invited to the wedding. Krist above anyone one else knew, loved, and cared, about Kurt. It also became known at this time that Courtney was pregnant. Her pregnancy was just the thing that the program needed to make their final move. What should have been a thing to celebrate immediately became a controversy. The CIA's first move was to leak Kurt and Courtney's past drug use to the press. This forced the couple to try and make a counter information campaign. Sadly their strategy worked right into the hands of the string pullers assigned to them.
In an attempt to undo the largely false press headlines circulating about them they decided to trust an author at Vanity Fair named Lynn Hirschberg (herself a low level CIA tool) who had approached the couple with the promise to put Courtney on the cover of Vanity fair magazine and write a fair article to introduce the world to Kurt's little known and misunderstood wife. The article starts with the "Author" describing Courtney as selfish and flakey and ends with accusations from "inside sources" of drug use during pregnancy. The published story was a very clear and intentional hatchet job. The article was clearly written to aid the program and was done twofold. The first thing it did was further isolate Kurt by stating inside sourceswhich gave him no choice but to start looking at everyone around him sideways. The other and most important part of this article was to propel Kurt further into the arms of another CIA operative who would have no issue with pushing a young talented person over the edge for money and country.
More than anyone in Kurt's inner circle David Geffen was situated to get close and earn the trust of Kurt Cobain. Geffen began his entertainment career in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency (WMA), where he worked his way to become a talent agent. In order to obtain the WMA job, he had to prove he was a college graduate. Despite his intelligence and gumption to attended college his untreated Dyslexia kept him from graduating from a University. So he resorted to modifying the entry letter to show that he had attended and graduated a major university. It is very likely that the CIA saw his promise as an entertainment manager and allowed his obviously forged papers to pass. He eventually went on to start his own music label and sadly retired young due to a misdiagnosed cancer scare.
In 1980 after he got a clean bill of health he started his own label "Geffen" records. One of the first records they released was "Double Fantasy" By John Lennon. It’s interesting to note that John Lennon was also monitored by the CIA, and like Kurt had a notorious wife, a heroin addiction, and was a counter culture peace advocate who oddly enough was murdered shortly after David appeared in his life. The parallels between Kurt and John(who Kurt worshiped) are hard to dismiss.
In 1990 David shifted gears with the bands he hired and started DGC records. He was seemingly smart enough to see that the musical landscape was changing and the bands he signed like REM and sonic youth were proof he was right. One of the things that almost all DGC records bands had in common was that they were young, Liberal, and antiestablishment. In fact it was Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth who convinced Geffen to sign an obscure Northwest band called Nirvana to the fledgling label. After all of Kurts "good Luck" the media eventually began attacking him. This left Kurt with feelings of betrayal and it was Geffen that Kurt clung to as the father figure he never had to tell him it was okay. So why was Kurt murdered?
This part in hindsight is pretty easy to figure out. Kurt's band not only got famous but they also elevated a lot of underground bands with them. Nirvana was infamous as advocates for bands of all sorts of race and political points. The band had cut their teeth in Olympia Washington during the birth of the ultra-feminist "Riot GRRRL" movement. These counter culture voices gained a massive foot hold on popular culture hanging on to Nirvanas coattails. Kurt was also uniquely placed to be martyred as he became worth far more dead than alive. Before his fame Courtney ran in these same feminist circles which was a large part of why she was able to get so close to him.
So why did Kurt die?
The program took its time and waited for the perfect moment to shut Kurt and the movement he fronted down. When the program finally pushed him over the edge Kurt was receiving treatment at the exodus rehab facility in Los Angeles. Even struggling in rehab Kurt was helping to make Courtney the star so he could eventually dissipate from public life and be a father. Courtney's band was recording "Live though this" for DGC records at a studio in Mariette Georgia. It seems weird that with all of LA's recording studios Courtney's handlers put her band in a studio thousands of miles away from her Husband. Despite the distance all accounts from the time show that Kurt and Courtney were in regular communication about the recording process. Reports from the time recount that Courtney would play rough recordings of songs over the phone and Kurt would critique and make suggestions. This must have been hard on Kurt as he was completely burned out by the business end of music. It's also possible that Kurt felt resentment that even in exile the caged bird must still sing for its supper. To her credit Courtney had seemingly tried her best to save him from the end he met through the tough love method. A concept that surrounded Kurt with peers who took turns testifying to how his life choices had hurt them.
She wasn't wrong to try this method let alone any other method. Kurt had become an exceptional addict with money to burn. The proof of how far gone Kurt was can be witnessed by Nirvanas performance on MTV's unplugged. It's visually obvious how disenchanted and worn out Cobain was. Kurt was Unsure of himself; making jokes at his own expense, and the band also made them back. At one point Kurt makes a joke anticipating making a mistake during a song to which Grohl remarks that "OH like he never makes mistakes". Despite all of it the caged bird still overcame every expectation creating one of the greatest concerts in pop music history. It's possible that the final display of Kurt's genius and talent can be found during that concert in the form of a cover of an old blues song entitled "Where did you sleep last night" Which was Lyrically telling to his situation. When the band finished playing an MTV executive tried to make the band play another song and Kurt, drained of all feeling declined knowing he couldn't "top it". "Where did you sleep last night" is an old Delta blues song about being betrayed by a lover. It's very telling that Kurt chose this song to close out his unplugged performance. Sadly it was the last time many would see him alive.
If you wanted to look at the cultural vacuum of Cobains death one would simply glance at the bands that became famous after his death. Kurt helped usher in an era of introspective music that also helped nerdy, political, weirdo, feminist bands to get mainstream attention.
Unfortunately despite all of Nirvanas work after Kurt's death sexist, plastic bands like "Limp Biscuit", "Nickel Back" and "Three Eleven" shot into the top ten converting the state of pop music's landscape to a pre-Nirvana state. Unlike the serious, culture shifting bands before them the music of these newly crowned bands celebrated narcissism, sexism, and blind consumption, ushering in an ignorant new norm. The major labels began feasting on selling a dumbed down casual version of Nirvana to masses in the wake of the bands implosion. Courtney's band "Hole" tried to hold the torch set before them but were overwhelmed by the massive flood of pretenders to the throne. Spiritedly and Musically Courtney was defeated. But the Hollywood system wasn't done with her. Despite all of her losses they still saw a preset avenue to profit from her designed folly. Courtney still had a large fan base and the media hadn't completely forgotten her. In order to squeeze even more cash from their investment they decided to change the narrative and milk more money from the abused cash cow they created by making all of her dreams come true.
Courtney's handlers programed her to crave attention and accolades. Deep down she likely knew that the same program that killed her husband would likely kill her if she wasn’t careful. After Kurt's death Courtney went off the rails. The likely reason for her meltdown was that Courtney was, like her husband supposed to self-destruct. Despite the cultural shift in music Courtney was still a massive figure to many people. In order to salvage her potential they shifted her focus from music to her original love, film. Grossly it can easily be construed that the reward for letting her husband be destroyed was an Oscar nomination. To Courtney’s credit she saw the writing on the wall and cleaned herself up. Part of her clearly knew that she had made an unasked for bargain with the machine her parents set in motion and that her only way forward was to play along.
The mercurial "Live through this" tour ended in 1996 and an exhausted Courtney shifted her focus toward film. She started small with a bit role in the Jean-Michel Basquiat biopic "Basquiat" and the drama "feeling Minnesota". Her performance and behavior on set were well received. This helped her land a starring role as the wife of Pornographer Larry Flynts wife Althea in Miloš Forman's film "The People vs. Larry Flynt". She was offered the role but there was one hitch Love would have to enter rehabilitation and quit using heroin. Columbia Pictures also insisted that Love take multiple urine tests under supervision while filming, despite her past Love managed to pass all of them. Her performance earned her a Golden Globe award and many positive critical reviews. During this time she also appeared on magazine covers in upscale magazines most notably Vogue as well as being the face of an ad campaign by Versace. This new version of Courtney was performing well beyond her handlers expectations. Not only had the CIA squashed a counter culture movement they managed to make one of its most recognizable flagbearers into a cog for the Hollywood machine. The makeover of Courtney Love reached its peak in 1996 and died three years later when She starred alongside Jim Carrey, Dany DeVito, and, Paul Giamatti in a biopic film about comedian Andy Kaufman who was also a counter culture practitioner before being murdered. Man on the moon was well received by critics but failed to make money at the box office. After Man on the Moon failed financially the program saw the writing on the wall and not only pulled Courtney's handlers but all of the other perks she earned. Her resources and reputation vaporized Courtney quickly backslid into old habits and despite her best efforts remains a legend lost to time. There is an old saying in Hollywood that “you are only as good as your last film".
-- Arthur B. Alexi