"Celebrity Skin" / Hole / Celebrity Skin

Hole had a couple of pretty solid CDs in the 1990s which I really liked, and it's really despite the performer. Well, it's not that I dislike Courtney Love, as I actually find her fascinating. A former stripper / failed actress who meteorically rose to fame with Nancy Spungen / Yoko Ono comparisons hounding her, a tour de force performance reading Cobain's suicide note at his wake, actually having to defend herself against accusations that she killed or arranged the death of her husband, a veritibale trainwreck of a personal life, in and out of rehab, charged with being a greedy whore who is raping her husband's legacy - she's a pretty solid object of endless fascination.

I really miss seeing the soap opera of her life played out before us all, and I kind of hope she gets it back on track. The last I heard she recorded an album produced by Linda Perry (you remember her) that was supposed to resurrect her career. It seems to have been shelved and may never be released. I actually enjoyed her solo release "American Sweetheart" a few years ago, and thought it had a pretty kickass single with "Mono", in which she really gets to unleash one of the best screams in rock.



I've never been a big fan at all of Billy Corgan or the Smashing Pumpkins, but if the scuttlebutt on "Celebrity Skin" is true that he more or less wrote it (as Cobain was said to have written "Live Through This"), then it's by far the best stuff he's done. It's really hard to deny that the main riff (the one that starts the song) doesn't sound like a Corgan creation (if not the whole song structure) . The first four songs on this CD, this one being the first, are dead on awesome, most notably "Malibu" and "Awful", and there are some good ones down towards the end, but to be honest, if I ever pull this CD out these days, it's for those first 4-6 tunes.

The lyrics of this song always intrigue me, too. Look at the first couplet:

"Oh make me over / I'm all I want to be
A walking study / in demonology"

Here she starts, right after the monster riff, by giving a big "Fuck you" to everyone who criticized her for her new "makeover" of a slim , California body and a new nose and acknowledging what many many people were thinking of her at the time (i.e., a she-devil). Notice, as well, that she delivers these lines with no musical accompaniment, so she makes DAMN sure you hear what she's saying.

Then later (again, unaccompanied):

"Oh look at my face / my name is might-have-been
My name is never was / my name's forgotten"

Again throwing the gossip back at the haters that she was a talentless, derivative, coattail-riding hack.

And the final coup de grace:

"You want a part of me? Well I'm not selling cheap"

Wow. That was a pretty big "Piss Off!" back then, more or less sarcastically playing the whore role of which she was accused. Just look at all the other slurs she thows out during the song ("sluts like you", "beautiful garbage", "hooker waitress, model actress", "fading in Hollywood"). It's really an angry, defiant song, but you know what we all remember - that gorgeous, incredibly catchy chorus rising out of the bile. It almost feels like the chorus and the verses belong to two completely different songs. It's complex, disorienting, and exciting, and it's all over in a mere two-and-a-half minutes, leaving you to wonder what the hell just happened and inviting you to hear it all over again.