Lots of people despised Courtney Love back in the day. They viewed her as the talentless and vulgar villain in the lurid, drugged-out soap opera that was her marriage with Kurt Cobain, and if you listened to some of them, she was actually responsible for murdering the poor guy. Bullshit. To all of it. And to prove them all wrong, Love’s band Hole produced one of the very best albums of 1998, Celebrity Skin.
Celebrity Skin was Hole’s third LP, and there are those who prefer its predecessors (1991’s Pretty on the Inside and 1994’s Live Through This) because Celebrity Skin constituted a turn away from post-grunge punk towards a more pop sound. In addition, unlike most of the songs on Hole’s previous efforts, the bulk of the songs on Celebrity Skin were team efforts, with another two being written by guitarist/collaborator Eric Erlandson without Love’s assistance. Finally, Love saw fit to enlist the help of Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy “Ol’ Cueball” Corgan, who gets partial songwriting credits on five of the LP’s twelve tracks.
The songs on Celebrity Skin aren’t merely pretty on the inside; they’re pretty on the outside as well. The LP’s title is its theme—Love abandons overcast Seattle for sunny California, and the LP’s pop leanings reflect that fact. Which isn’t to say it’s themes are sunny as well—far from it. It’s the contrast between sun-drenched melody and dark message that makes Celebrity Skin so potent a work.
Both of the LP’s two opening tracks make this clear. The title track has a guitar riff as sharp as a razor, and opens with the great lines “Oh, make me over/I’m all I wanna be/A walking study/In demonology,” after which Love runs down the cost of Hollywood celebrity (“No second billing ’cause you’re a star now/Oh, Cinderella, they aren’t sluts like you/Beautiful garbage, beautiful dresses”) and failure (“When I wake up in my makeup/Have you ever felt so used up as this?/It’s all so sugarless/Hooker, waitress, model, actress/Oh, just go nameless”). But Love ends it all on a defiant note, “You want a part of me/Well, I’m not selling cheap/No, I’m not selling cheap.”
On power pop gem “Awful” Love says it’s all shit—your party, punk (“Yeah, it was perfect, now it’s awful”), Courtney herself (“I was punk/Now I’m just stupid, I’m so awful”), etc. But this one’s a song for the girls, who are used, exploited, “royally rated,” and have their souls robbed and hearts broken. Love wants to start a beautiful prison escape (“Hey, run away with the light/Run away, it’s divine/Let’s run away, yeah, tonight/We’ll steal the light of the world.”) And what’s more, she believes women can come out on top with music (“If the world is so wrong/Yeah, you can break them all with one song/If the world is so wrong/Yeah, you take it all with one song”).
Musically “Hit So Hard” brings Pavement to mind, and lyrically it has the Crystals “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss”) written all over it. “He hit so hard/I saw stars,” sings Love, “He hit so hard/I saw God.” I kinda wish the damn song didn’t sound so muffled—it sounds like it was recorded inside a box of Rice Krispies. But there’s no denying the power of the lush backing vocals, or the song’s emotional power.
Love’s voice is both pretty and tough on “Malibu,” as is the song itself. “Crash and burn/All the stars explode, tonight,” sings Love, “How’d you get so desperate?/How’d you stay alive?” It’s a song about failed rescue, and includes the powerfully beautiful lines “And, the sun goes down/I watch you slip away/And, the sun goes down/I walk into the waves/And, the sun goes down/I watch you slip away/And, I would/And, I knew/ Love would tear you apart.” It’s hard to hear them and not think of Cobain, who slipped, a grunge Houdini, out of the chains shackling him to this world, before walking into the infinite waves of no turning back.
The very low key and hushed (Love whispers at points) “Dying” has co-writer Billy Corgan’s pumpkin-stained fingerprints over it, and is the album’s sole iffy track; “Reasons to Be Beautiful,” on the other hand, is a hard rocker that opens with the lines “Love hangs herself/With the bedsheets in her cell/Threw myself on fires for you/Ten good reasons to stay alive/Ten good reasons that I can’t find.” Love wants just one reason to be beautiful, asphyxiates in her own skin (“Miles and miles of perfect skin/I swear I do, I fit right in/My love burns through everything/I cannot breathe”), then delivers a variation of Neil Young’s famous line, to wit “It’s better to rise than fade away.” The line is intriguingly ambiguous; are we talking rising as towards to Heaven? Or simply rising above it all?
“Use Once and Destroy” is a big bad rocker but about as far away from grunge as you can get—this baby’s as air-brushed as your dad’s classic Ford Mustang, which you’re free to look at but will never, ever drive. Love is accompanied only by Erlandson’s acoustic guitar on the downcast but lovely “Northern Stars,” that is until the strings come in with some drum pum pum. Love doesn’t have the best voice conventionally speaking, and going it alone reveals its flaws, but she turns those very flaws to her advantage—it takes balls to stand naked before a microphone, and nobody this side of Neil Young (check out “Mellow My Mind”) seems less concerned that every note be in its proper place.
On this one she seems content to leave it on the down low until she suddenly bursts out, impassioned, “And I want you/And blessed are the broken/And I beg you/No loneliness, no misery is worth you/Oh, tear his heart out cold as ice it’s mine.” There are angels in this song and all over the album for that matter, and it’s almost enough to make you think Love has a Patti Smith fetish, which is scary but ultimately okay because Love’s smart and down-to-earth enough to steer clear of Smith’s other risible space monkey pretensions.
“Boys on the Radio” is one of my all-time favorite radio-themed songs, a contagious power pop confection with super-luscious vocal harmonies, and there should be a law ordaining that the song be played on the radio every hour upon the hour 365 days a year. It bears a passing resemblance to Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train,” but Love’s subject is, once again, summed up by Young’s famous adage: “All the boys on the radio/They crash and burn/They fold and fade so slow.” And once again it’s hard not to think about her late husband when she sings, “He said he’d never, ever, ever go/And heavens, heavens, heavens know/And never, ever, ever go away/Baby, I’ve gone away.”
“Heaven Tonight” is pure dead infectious, and that rarest of all things–a song on which Love seems almost happy, although it requires a pep talk to herself: “I can’t believe that I can be happy/Someone will come again, ı can’t be happy/Oh, stop your crying you can be happy/Go to heaven when you make me happy.” On the hard rocker “Playing Your Song” Love is punk tuff and pissed as she sings about being bought and sold and left a burned-out cripple; Joni Mitchell had her parking lot, but Love’s thinking bigger: “And, oh, they’ve bought and sold it all, it’s gone/They’ve taken it and built a mall/And now they’re playing your song.”
“Petals” also rocks hard, and returns once again to the LP’s guiding theme—fame is a flame that will burn the innocence right out of you. “Innocence was our fire,” she sings, “We told the truth/I miss the sweet boys in/The summer of their youth.” What place is there for purity in the corrosive capital of celebrity? None. “The world,” sings Love, “is a whore.”
Hollywood and celebrity are trash says Love, and who would know better than someone swallowed whole by the maul of fame? Love learned what it’s like to find yourself less a flesh and blood human being than a series of unflattering and voyeuristic front page photos on the tabloids sold by the rapacious to the seekers of the salacious at supermarket checkout lines across our great land.
Celebrity Skin is a triumph of survival, a show of vulnerability, and a cry of rage at the price exacted on those—who are almost always on women—guilty only of buying into an age-old lie. They’re all buying but not looking at the price tag, and by the time they do the star-stoking machinery has chewed them up and spit them out. “That fucking place should be wiped off the face of the Earth,” said David Bowie of Los Angeles. I suspect Love would agree.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
