Courtney Love has told TMZ that the Muppets "raped" the memory of her late husband Kurt Cobain by using Nirvana's hit "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in their 2011 movie.
UPDATE: Jack Black has responded to Courtney Love's comments. For his response, and more on the story, please read our update. The original article continues below.
The eccentric Hole frontwoman claims that she has absolute control over the usage of Cobain's catalog, but she might not be telling the whole story. Love apparently sold half of her remaining rights to the music to Primary Wave Music and gave the company the exclusive right to distribute Nirvana's complete catalog.
Not only did the company have the legal standing to license the song for the barbershop quartet rendition in the movie, but it even sought and obtained permission from Nirvana's surviving members, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic. Even better? Grohl is in the movie.
In 2005, Love sold 25 percent of the rights to the Nirvana catalog, pocketing a cool $50 million in the process. Five years later, she was offered $162 million for the rest of her majority stake, an offer she said she was considering because the songs and their royalties were "cursed."
Regardless of what Love owns and what she has sold, both she and her daughter will likely still benefit financially from the inclusion of the 1991 song in "The Muppets."
Love's loose usage of the word "rape" recalls another recent scandal. Actress Kim Novak set off a firestorm of controversy in January by saying she felt as though she was raped while watching "The Artist." The Oscar-winning film used a score from "Vertigo," an Alfred Hitchcock film in which she acted.
"It was very painful. When I said it was like a rape, that was how it felt to me," Novak said last week when clarifying her comments. "I had experienced in my youth being raped, and so I identified with a real act that had been done to me. I didn't use the word lightly. I had been raped as a child. It was a rape I never told about, so when I experienced this one, I felt the need to express it."