Professional Widow is not about Courtney Love.
Tori Amos, 1996, photographed by Cindy Palmano
Professional Widow (4:36) is the fourth track on Tori Amos’ third studio album, released in 1996, the avant-garde and experimental “Boys for Pele,” (BFP) marking a significant sonic shift from her previous albums “Under the Pink” and “Little Earthquakes.” Professional Widow is widely considered to be about Courtney Love, lead singer of "Hole" and former wife of the late Kurt Cobain. However, this reading is fundamentally contradictory, as BFP is explicitly about themes of reclaiming sexual and feminine identity from men and the male gaze inspired by her breakup with long-time boyfriend Eric Rosse. By piling on the public hate-train for Courtney, Tori undermines the feminist statement of the album by attacking another woman demonised and called crazy by the media. A more accurate reading of the song is that the "widow" is a part of Tori she's examining and criticising- the song is fundamentally self-flagellating.
Tori Amos, 1996, photographed by Cindy Palmano
Professional Widow, written and produced by Tori Amos, features Tori’s signature dense, mythological lyrics combined with the harpsichord, piano and her distinctive mezzo-soprano voice.
For context, a "professional widow" is someone who monetizes loss, wears mourning as a costume, using a dead man's legacy for fame. Courtney Love, then-wife of Kurt Cobain, was largely seen as a "professional widow" after Kurt's suicide in 1994. The public's grief for Kurt's suicide was taken out on his unstable, chaotic, and messy wife, amplified by the media which was brutal towards women at the time Courtney was widely blamed for ruining him and frequently suggested that she killed him to profit from his legacy as the lead singer of Nirvana. Kurt was a tortured genius, and Courtney was an evil whore to the public. Tori would have been aware that she was piling on the public hate-train for Courtney. This once again diminishes and invalidates the themes of feminine self-reclamation interwoven throughout BFP. How could a woman championing feminist ideals publicly attack another woman experiencing the exact kind of discrimination she was writing about with a brutal diss track?
Kurt Cobain (left) and Courtney Love (right) circa. 1990-1994
At its core, "Professional Widow" is a song about Tori's inner "widow," who she described in a 1996 interview as "the part of myself that's Lady Macbeth." Lady Macbeth famously manipulated and lied throughout Shakespeare's play "Macbeth," using Macbeth's ambition to persuade him to commit heinous acts in the name of fulfilling his destiny, which conveniently made her queen. Tori describes it as "my hunger for the energy I felt some of the men in my life possessed: the ability to be king. I wasn't content just being a muse. I was the creative force. I was in relationships with different men where if they could honour that, they couldn't honour the woman, and if they could honour the woman, they couldn't honor the creative force." She acknowledges her ambition and admits to self-sabotaging relationships through the metaphor of engineering a suicide and making it look like murder. "Professional Widow" is inherently self-flagellating, she's examining this part of herself that is manipulative and sometimes cruel, and she's critiquing it.
Tori Amos, 1996
"Boys for Pele" is an explicit and powerful statement about women taking back their sexual power and femininity from men. This means that "Professional Widow" fundamentally cannot be an attack on Courtney Love without seriously diluting the central theme of the album. What the song is, is a lyrically dense, sonically adventurous rant about Tori's personal failures in relationships, accompanied by the aggressive harpsichord "Boys for Pele" is known for. The song being framed as a diss track instead of what it actually is- introspective self-reflection- says more about how the media framed both women at the time than it does about the music.
Tori Amos, 2018, Native Invader Tour
