Courtney Love beat Diana Ross, whipped Jack White, pummeled 50 Cent and crushed Suge Knight. Now she has made it to the finals of Blender magazine's "First-Ever Ultimate Fighting Championship."
It's a battle for the coveted title of "The Ultimate Rock & Roll Psycho" and Love -- lead singer of Hole, widow of Kurt Cobain and much-arrested former junkie -- certainly deserves the honor. But to win, she has to face "the Killer" himself: Jerry Lee Lewis, a man who shot his bassist, stabbed a magazine editor and married his 15-year-old cousin. To reach the finals, Lewis defeated rappers C-Murder and DMX and heavy metal lunatic G.G. Allin in the preliminary rounds and now he's ready for Love.
Bing! The bell rings! They go at it, punching, kicking, scratching, clawing!
Well, not really. Although millions would no doubt pay serious money to see Courtney fight Jerry Lee, this is a purely theoretical battle, staged only in the demented minds of the savants at Blender. It's just another of Blender's delightfully daffy high-concept rock stories, right up there with "The Most Awesomely Mediocre Artists of All Time," which ran earlier this year, much to the chagrin of folks who like Sonny Bono, Art Garfunkel and Clarence Clemons.
And the winner is . . . well, if you want to find out who took the ultimate psycho title, you'll just have to buy Blender, which is a good idea anyway because Blender is big fun.
Created in 2001 by Felix Dennis, the mad genius who brought us Maxim, Stuff and the Week, Blender is the pop music magazine that doesn't take pop music too seriously.
Some rock mags see pop stars as poets, troubadours, sensitive artists and the voice of their generation. Blender sees pop stars as nut jobs, drunks, stoners, sex maniacs, careerists and hype-mongers who occasionally produce good music.
Blender's worldview was neatly summed up by a cover line in the April issue: "Rock Stars: They're Freakin' Nuts!"
But don't get the wrong idea. Blender isn't a muckraking or moralizing magazine. The editors revel in rock misbehavior. They seem to believe that the arrests, overdoses, brawls and car crashes of your average pop star are at least as entertaining as his or her music.
And who can argue with that? Not me. I'd much rather read about the sordid "Secret History of the Backstreet Boys" than actually listen to their CDs. And Blender gives me that opportunity this month in a story touted with a classic Blender cover line: "Groupies! Coke Binges! Stinky Socks!"
Blender brings its readers news that they just can't get anyplace else. When Rob Thomas, lead singer of Matchbox 20, announces that his dog Tyler was "sexually abused by his previous owner," Blender lets us know. When Britney Spears visits an "energy healer" in a Malibu strip mall, Blender prints a picture of the healer waving his hands over her pretty, empty head.
And when a sex video featuring Fred Durst, the potbellied lead singer of Limp Bizkit, appears on the Internet, Blender not only quotes a porn expert who gives it an erotic rating -- "zero" -- it also conducts a survey asking readers whose sex video they'd least like to see. The winner: rapper Fat Joe, with 38 percent of the vote, beating out the aforementioned Courtney Love.
