Hole founder, rumored songwriter behind Live Through This, and all around difficult human being Courtney Love once remarked that, ”you’re nobody in rock unless you’ve fought me and fucked Winona Ryder.”

Love has always been funny and pretty on-point with a lot of her musings; that one is the most coherent thing to come out of her if you don’t count Frances Bean. Love indeed always seems to always be fighting with some celebrity or another, more often than not an emerging alt-rock icon; Ryder, meanwhile is less famous for Heathers and shoplifting than she is for dating cute, dirty-haired indie rocker boys.

But what if she’s right? I mean, you look at the lists of the recipients of Love’s vitriol, and Winona Ryder’s What’s Your Number list-meets-the Wikipedia entry for Sassy’s ”Cute Band Alert,” and you’ve got some real contenders for Biggest Rock Star in the World (or at least you would circa 1996).

So then if you compare the lists, and use math — the associative property, the transitive property, looking at things — we can then determine that the biggest rock star of all time is whoever is on both lists: he who has both fended off Courtney Love and not fended off Winona Ryder.

Rock Stars With Whom Courtney Love Has Feuded:

Courtney Love

  • Trent Reznor
  • Billy Corgan
  • Marilyn Manson
  • Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill
  • Thurston Moore
  • Maynard James Keenan
  • Cypress Hill
  • Madonna
  • Ryan Adams
  • Dave Grohl

Rock Stars Winona Ryder Has Dated:

Winona Ryder

  • Adam Duritz
  • Page Hamilton of Helmet
  • Evan Dando
  • Pete Yorn
  • Jack White
  • Rhett Miller
  • Ken Stringfellow of the Posies
  • Blake Sennett of Rilo Kiley
  • Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum
  • Stephan Jenkins of Third Eye Blind
  • Conor Oberst
  • Beck
  • Damien Rice
  • Chris Isaak
  • Michael Nesmith
  • Paul Westerberg
  • Ryan Adams
  • Dave Grohl

Ergo, according to the logic and parameters of Courtney Love’s quote, the two biggest rock stars in the history of music — because they have both fought with Love and dated Ryder — are Ryan Adams and Dave Grohl.

The Tiebreaker: Adams has not only feuded with Love and dated Ryder, but he also dated Love, which gives him the slight edge over Dave Grohl.

All hail your mighty rock god, Ryan Adams.

adams

Humor, Music

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About the Author

Brian Boone

Brian Boone writes about music, pop culture, and other nonsense. He does more of this kind of thing on Twitter and wrote this swell book called "‪Rock Lists For Obsessive Music Connoisseurs, Zealots, and Junkies‬," which you totally want.

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