Singer Courtney Love said she has recognized that save for a few recent successes, like last week's No. 1 album for Queens Of The Stone Age, rap and hip-hop still reign supreme in popular culture.

So, she has bestowed the iconic Nirvana song Smells Like Teen Spirit -- she owns the catalog after her late husband Kurt Cobain's death in 1994 -- unto an iconic member of the hip-hop community.

"I'm letting Jay-Z use lyrics," Love told The Huffington Post, suggesting that her daughter Francis Bean Cobain "would freak [if she knew this]."

"Jay-Z's huge and we're friends," Love continued, adding "I mean we're not besties or anything..."

She also has her own career to mind, and she is currently in the middle of a multi-city tour for a new as-yet-untitled solo album, due around Christmastime. Though she said she is delighted to show off her new material, especially one song which she said sounds like a combination of Big Black and Fleetwood Mac, she believes that too much exposure might cause it to go bad really quickly.

"I don't want to give them away, they leak and get stale by the time it comes out," said the singer.

She also hoped that she has learned from the mistakes of some of her past work. She was especially savage about her 2004 debut solo album, America's Sweetheart, which she described as "awful," with only a few quality songs on it.

"The art work for it was diabolical," she described.

"That pin-up shit was so not me. I know it sounds petty to judge the album by the art work, but it was shit. I always had done it on my own."

The album's build-up, she recalled, was also controversial because of an arrest and institutionalization she underwent in the midst of promoting the album. Love blamed part of that on her business associates at the time.

"It was a Celion Dion cliché," she said of the incident. "I went into this trap with let's call him 'Harvard Boy, who produced and managed me, and stole vast resources of mine. It impacted my career, and I got taken out to Bellevue on a stretcher. People don't seem to forget it."

Love insisted that she is trying to stay controversy-free nowadays, starting by declining to appear on a reality show she had initially considered.

"I was only going to do it because I'm so sick of being impeded by people [questioning] my mental stability because I flipped out on Twitter or that I'm still on drugs," said Love.

"I'm not going to lower myself, [but] I did think about it."

Besides, she thought, they might have cut the footage to tell their story, not hers: "It'd have been a real war fighting with the network to not edit me. I'd literally have to just sit there and not say a damn word."

For now, Love said that it's nice to be away from drama and especially lawsuits.

"I have none on my plate, and I plan on it remaining that way," she said, and later joked that she'd much prefer to be on the other side of things: "I'd love to be the plaintiff in a few."

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Courtney Love