FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Hole – Celebrity Skin
___________
THERE are a couple of reasons why…
IN THIS PHOTO: From left: Hole’s Samantha Maloney, Melissa Auf der Maur, Eric Erlandson, and Courtney Love in 1998/PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
I am including Hole’s Celebrity Skin in my Vinyl Corner section. For one, Courtney Love – the band’s lead singer – will pick up NME’s Icon Award on Wednesday (12th). In their article, NME highlight why Love is such an inspiration. Here is a snippet:
“One of the most influential figures in the past 30 years of alternative culture, there are countless reasons why she’s worthy of the award. Here are just a few.
Think of Courtney Love, and quite reasonably, her band Hole will be the first of her musical project to spring to mind. Their 1991 debut album ‘Pretty on the Inside’ was co-produced by none other than Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, and made immediate ripples across the punk scene. The more polished but no less powerful multi-platinum ‘Live Through This’ and rip-roaring ‘Celebrity Skin followed. Years later, in 2010, came another Hole record, ‘Nobody’s Daughter’ – and album cut ‘For Once in Your Life’ is one of the more understated gems from her discography.
But there’s so much more. There was her first band Sugar Babydoll, the short-lived Pagan Babies and she’s also put out a whole bunch of solo material. In 2004, she released her debut solo album ‘American Sweetheart’ – and though she’s since spoken negatively about it (she later called it a “really crap record” during a talk at Oxford Union) it’s hard to deny its force. “Believe it or not, ‘All the Drugs’, ‘Sunset Strip’, ‘Mono’ and ‘But Julian…’ are all good songs,” she said in 2006. She was bang on”.
Hole have released some cracking albums, but Celebrity Skin is one of their most-famous and accomplished. After 1998’s Celebrity Skin, the band would not release another album until 2010’s Nobody’s Daughter - one wonders whether we will see another album from them. Whereas some prefer 1994’s Live Through This – boasting songs like Miss World and Jennifer’s Body -, I find myself coming back to Celebrity Skin. I will talk about the influence and impact of Celebrity Skin later but, now, a bit of information about the record. Released on 8th September, 1998, Celebrity Skin is the third album from Hole. The band dissolved in 2002 so, in a way, this is like a farewell – whether they knew it at the time or not. The band wanted an album that diverged from the Grunge influences of albums like Pretty on the Inside (1991) and Live Through This. The band brought in producer Michael Beinhorn to record Celebrity Skin over nine months, which saw Hole record in California, New York, and the U.K. California was especially important for Hole, and saw Celebrity Skin as a ‘California album’. The Celebrity Skin album saw Hole experimenting more; Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan co-wrote the musical arrangements on five songs. Also featured on the album was Go-Go’s guitarist Charlotte Caffey. Life in the Hole camp was a bit of a whirlwind prior to 1998. In 1995, Hole completed the final leg of their promotion for Live Through This – one of the best albums released in 1994. Rather than rest, the individual members worked on their own stuff. Courtney Love appeared in The People vs. Larry Flynt; lead guitarist Eric Erlandson collaborated in a side project, and the band members were keeping busy.
After Love completed promotion of The People vs. Larry Flint, the band reconvened. Initial sessions were not promising; songs were a little underwhelming but, as Hole relocated to different parts of the U.S., things started to shine and take shape. Whilst they were in New Orleans, the band recorded an early version of Awful. One of the reasons why I think people need to listen to Hole is because of the depth and strength of the lyrics. First off, go and get Celebrity Skin on vinyl, as it is a record that should be cherished. For Celebrity Skin, Courtney Love included several literary references, including T.S. Eliot. The song Celebrity Skin quotes from The House of Life by Dante Rossetti; there are also references of Neil Diamond, too – quite an eclectic album! I love the fact Love, as a writer, was not copying everyone else and writing about love in a very ordinary and cliched way. Instead, she penned tracks that takes from literature; it looks at L.A. in a positive way as, by 1998, Love was an A-list star – contrasting earlier material which cast L.A. in a more shallow and dirty light.
The 1990s was a rich and stunning decade for music, and it would be a very successful one for Hole. Although they split – albeit it temporarily – in 2002, look at the music they put out in the 1990s and it rivals the best from anyone else. Celebrity Skin is a remarkable album with some serious highlights. I want to source from two interviews. One is from 1998 – when the album was released -, whilst the other was written twenty years later; one can see how Celebrity Skin was viewed the immediate aftermath and how it has survived and affected so many years later. This is Rolling Stone’s take in 1998:
“The album teems with sonic knockouts that make you see all sorts of stars. It’s accessible, fiery and intimate — often at the same time. Here is a basic guitar record that’s anything but basic. On high points like “Awful” and the gorgeous “Malibu,” Hole act as though making big radio-ready hits smart now equals pure punk rock.
Love herself is a combination of Los Angeles messiness and London obliqueness, a mix of the ungovernable expressiveness of Stevie Nicks and the refracted psychedelicism of a British loner like Julian Cope. Producer Michael Beinhorn — who steered Soundgarden through the wiry heavens of guitar rock on Superunknown — helps pull together these two unlikely sides of Love’s artistic personality. The result is more shiftingly special than the heavy-handed grunge of Live Through This. Celebrity Skin is all minimalist explosion, idiomatic flair and dead-on rhythms. On “Malibu,” a ballad about separation and escape, Erlandson’s guitar changes from silveriness to something rougher in a heartbeat. This is rock & roll that’s supple enough to handle Love’s amphitheaters of emotion.
It’s wavy, like the Pacific Ocean. That’s one of Love’s other obsessions on Celebrity Skin: the promises and the agonies of Southern California. Sold-out sluts, fading actresses, deluded teenagers, “summer babes” and hunks — all this “beautiful garbage” crowds the roadside of the album. So Billy Corgan, Hole’s other major collaborator, who co-wrote five superb songs on Skin, makes real sense here. By advocating structure in ’92 with the Smashing Pumpkins, Corgan stood firm for the L.A. tradition of closely considered studio rock as an avenue to freedom. The songs he worked on here include “Hit So Hard,” an unhurried groove about full-on crushes that never lays back; “Dying,” a slightly electronicized ballad where Love reveals her need to be “under your skin”; and “Petals,” whose subtle minor-key remembrances and grand demands build to a spectacular climax. Clearly, Corgan has shown Hole how to relax and go for it”.
In spite of the fact Love was more successful and well-known than she was previously, there is that dissatisfaction and sense of discomfort. Vivid images of failed stars and beautiful bodies mingle in an album that is more like a film soundtrack; a film noir about L.A. in the late-1990s, penned by someone who has experienced the ups and downs of the music and film industries. I can remember the album coming out in 1998 but, apart from singles like Malibu, I don’t think I investigated that closely. More recently, I have been listening to Celebrity Skin and seeing it in a new light. It is interesting seeing how an album ages and whether it sounds dated. I think Celebrity Skin is a record that sounds so relevant and important in 2020.
In their review of 2008, this is what Spin had to say about Hole’s Celebrity Skin:
“Pop” is the crucial term: Celebrity Skin carries the conversation beyond the traditional postpunk loop of raw power and pretty poison, dirty glam and curdled self-loathing. These things all figure. But Love manages also to chat up early pop star Shakespeare and latter-day saint Stephen Malkmus, hi-cred novelist Denis Johnson, and lo-life Art Alexakis; the title off-quotes Burt Bacharach. Twice.
Still, pop isn’t a reference game; it’s a way of life on which the record bets everything. Celebrity Skin is likely to piss off anyone still indulging in the fantasy of Courtney as punk Goddess/feminist Fury; if you want the howl and the open wound, you’ll have to dredge Puget Sound. But that’s not where this record is calling from; it dials in from a more southern Pacific. After various production peregrinations, Michael Beinhorn ends up finding a bastard mix of sweetness and weight: ice cream grunge, with a shock of fab guitar parts from Eric Erlandson plus a gang of new-wave synthesizers. Most of the music was written by the band, with free advice from a Smashing Pumpkin (five tracks) and help from both a Go-Go and a Blinker the Star on “Reasons to Be Beautiful.” In exchange for the astonishing consistency of mood that made Live Through This a breakwater of ‘90s rock, Celebrity Skin produces a cataract of great songs, spectacularly polished.
The challenge for Celebrity Skin is whether it can be heard above the din, the life stories and public displays of affliction. But like all great records, it’s at its best when it attempts the impossible task of swallowing all that noise. At the end of “Reasons To Be Beautiful,” rather than turning away from the tell-all, the singer puts her back into it until the song trasmutes into an answer to her husband’s suicide note, talking back to the lost summer: “When the fire goes out / You better learn to fake,” she sings, knowing the last say counts for nothing and having it anyway. “It’s better to rise than fade away,” she promises, as if all pop stars weren’t doomed to do both”.
Look around the music landscape now, and one can find artists and albums that pick up little pieces from Celebrity Skin. Whether it is the rich compositions or the striking lyrics; the panache and power of Love’s vocals or something else…Celebrity Skin is an album that has influenced through the years. I will wrap up soon but, before then, I want to bring in an article that examined Celebrity Skin twenty years after its release:
“Despite the cultural whitewashing of Hole’s significance stemming from fear of strong women and the questionable personal actions of lead singer Love, the huge significance of Live Through This – a feminist punk rock album – on modern rock and even mainstream pop music is astounding. Females who are taking over the pop industry or fulfilling Courtney Love’s wish that ‘Every girl in the world would pick up a guitar and start screaming’ are joined by a battalion of rule-breaking queer men and women alike.
Bands that are loud and impossible to ignore and have the rebellious and unwavering spirit of Hole at heart – disavowing the patriarchal sentence placed on Hole to become lost in history at every turn. To state my opinions on the sexist treatment of Hole’s legacy would be one thing, but – instead – let’s explore the sheer amount of significant contemporary artists from all genres affected by that legacy. That’s right, I brought receipts.
The teachings of saint Courtney have not escaped some of rock’s heavyweights as well. UK Alt-rock giants Garbage’s 2001 Record ‘Beautiful Garbage’ is named after a quote from Hole’s 1998 mega-hit, Celebrity Skin. A dingy, begrimed, rock song about the cult of Hollywood hidden behind a snarling eye-roll of pop overtures. It lies somewhere closer to the bastard child of Fleetwood Mac and Blink-182 than it does Nirvana. Brody Dalle of the Distillers is another example and is probably the artist who owe’s the most to the first lady of grunge – Brody’s ‘Signature growl’ is her version of a vocal technique that Courtney coined.
Inspiring women who have become icons themselves, the girl-rockers of today also pay homage to their virulent mother. Upcoming superstars from bands like Pale Waves, Dilly Dally and Skating Polly all look like clones of each other because they’re all drawing inspiration from the ‘Kinderwhore’ fashion trend coined by Love. Every time you see an angry goth-girl in a Wednesday Addams dress and Dr Martens, or a girl with bangs chain-smoking in a leopard print fur coat, it’s down to the girl with the most cake. The alt-rock grrl band Honeyblood suspiciously share a name with a lyrics from Hole’s ‘Gutless’.
In the same vein, other contemporary pop artists who may not sound similar to Courtney but acknowledge her influence on their artistry include: Charli XCX, Lorde, St Vincent, Marina and the Diamonds, Tove Lo, Sky Ferreira and Avril Lavigne. There you go Love-haters – IMAGINE LIVING IN A WORLD WITHOUT SK8TR BOI. But seriously, the blood Courtney shed throughout the nineties has seeped so deeply into the fabric of pop-culture whilst the male-dominated industry tried to hide the stain – if you look for it, and god forbid let women talk about what inspires them, it’s really not that hard to find”.
If you have not got Celebrity Skin on vinyl, make sure you grab a copy or, as I keep saying, stream it if you cannot get it on vinyl. Nearly thirty-two years after its release, this mighty album still sounds…
ABSOLUTELY amazing.