Creativity Quote by Courtney Love

Courtney Love isn’t praising the White Stripes so much as admitting they poked the one nerve that still matters: artistic rivalry. “Riled me up” lands deliberately low and physical, like a bar fight you secretly missed. After a decade of being treated as grunge’s tabloid villain, survivor, or footnote, she’s naming a band that made her feel something sharper than nostalgia or grievance. Competitive, not inspired. That distinction is the tell.

The intent is partly self-mythmaking. Love has always understood rock as a contact sport where persona, credibility, and spectacle are as real as the riffs. By singling out the White Stripes, she aligns herself with a new wave of stripped-down authenticity that the early-2000s press adored: back-to-basics guitars, anti-corporate aesthetics, strict visual branding. Jack White’s seriousness about craft and image wasn’t far from Love’s own instincts, and that’s why it stings. You don’t get competitive with a band you can dismiss.

The subtext is a critique of her era’s stagnation and her own complicated position inside it. “The last ten years” quietly frames a scene that moved on without her, while implying she still has standards high enough to be provoked. Calling it “good” is a refusal to perform graceful elder-stateswoman humility. It’s also a survival strategy: competition restores agency. In Love’s world, being “riled” is evidence you’re still in the fight, not just being written about after it.