Creativity Quote by Courtney Love

It is both a dare and a rescue mission: pick up the guitar, start screaming. Courtney Love isn’t pitching music lessons; she’s demanding access to volume. The line lands because it treats “screaming” not as a loss of control, but as a technology of control - a way to occupy space that girls are trained to vacate, soften, or translate into something palatable.

In Love’s world (and the wider 90s rock ecosystem), the guitar is a gate-kept credential. It’s the prop that turns “she’s emotional” into “she’s an artist,” the instrument that can’t be easily dismissed as diary-entry confession. By insisting on the guitar, Love is calling out the machinery that rewards women only when their anger arrives packaged as charisma, sex appeal, or tragedy. This is how the industry loves its women: consumable, narratable, breakable. Her imperative flips that script. Make noise first; let the story catch up.

The phrase “every girl” matters too. It’s not “women” in the abstract; it’s the category that gets condescended to, protected, marketed, and disciplined. Love’s intent is contagious empowerment, but the subtext has teeth: you’re allowed to be ugly, loud, unlikable, and still worth listening to. “Start screaming” also nods to punk’s refusal of polish - a rejection of the idea that female expression must be pretty to be legitimate.

In context, it’s a snapshot of Riot Grrrl-era energy adjacent to Love: the cultural pressure cooker of misogyny in rock, tabloid voyeurism, and “angry woman” as both punchline and threat. The quote works because it’s an anthem that sounds like an exorcism.