FEATURE:
Love and Hate
Hole’s Celebrity Skin at Twenty-Five
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A top twenty success…
when it came out in 1998, Hole’s Celebrity Skin celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary on 8th September. Whilst many feel the album is less or not as good as the band’s 1994 sophomore release, Live Through This, there is no doubt Celebrity Skin is a classic! Containing some of the band’s best-known songs – including Malibu and Celebrity Skin -, I wanted to look ahead to twenty-five years of an amazing album. The band (Courtney Love – lead vocals, rhythm guitar, Eric Erlandson – lead guitar, Melissa Auf der Maur – bass, backing vocals, and Patty Schemel – drums) - are incredible throughout. I think I actually prefer Celebrity Skin to Live Through This. I am going to come to a review for the 1998 gem. Before that, there are a few features I will highlight. They give us some context of and insight into Celebrity Skin. I guess, as the band were in turmoil and there was definite friction and fracture. Although Love was clean from heroin and had starred in a string of films, she was struggling to write - claiming she was stuck in a rut. Most bands would struggle to produce a cohesive and successful album. This ode to California – its darkness and light – was a hit. A GRAMMY-nominated album that appears on many of the greatest of all-time list, it peaked at number nine on the US Billboard 200, number four on the Australian Albums Chart, and number eleven on the UK Albums Chart. There is no denying its majesty and importance! Many artists have been inspired by the album and Courtney Love’s incredible lyrics. Although the band are amazing throughout Celebrity Skin, I feel Love is the standout. There is a mixture of emotions in her voice. Such a stunning and moving listen, I feel it is only right to give Celebrity Skin the salute it deserves. I am not sure whether there is a twenty-fifth anniversary release planned – let’s hope something comes about!
I am going to start out with parts of an incredible feature from Stereogum. They marked twenty years of the album in 2018. The hatred, anger, darkness and tragedy that runs through many songs – including the epic title track – does not make Celebrity Skin feel too oppressive or suffocating. It is a very raw and real album that has resonated with fans through the years:
“California has long been the land of reinvention in the American imagination, the place that people go to lose and find and then lose themselves again. Even the word “California” is synonymous with “freedom” in our popular culture — in some cases boundless, in others extremely limited. There is no place that better exemplifies California’s mythology, its promises and failures, than Los Angeles. It was built to be the future, a landscape so sprawling that it had to contain every possible outcome within its changing borders. Opportunity as far as the eye can see. LA is a dreamscape and a wasteland and whatever splits the difference. In her book of essays Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, & LA, the socialite-turned-essayist and true LA woman Eve Babitz explains: “You can’t write a story about LA that doesn’t turn around in the middle or get lost.”
Hole’s third album Celebrity Skin (which turns 20 tomorrow) sounds like LA. It’s polished, decadent rock with something rotten at its core, a celebration and condemnation of what Courtney Love names “beautiful garbage” on the title track. It is an album with a dramatic, he-said-she-said backstory made in the aftermath of terrible tragedy. Writing about Celebrity Skin presents the perfect opportunity to get lost. There are many threads to follow, there are controversies on controversies on controversies to track, and then there is the actual music, which is some of the very best the ‘90s had to offer. Celebrity Skin marked a lot of endings: alternative rock as truly alternative, the end of the decade, and the beginning of the end of Hole.
“We’re just the type of band where everything is falling apart all of the time,” guitarist and founding member Eric Erlandson once said. “Making that record was insane. There were obstacles at each step of the way, nothing was smooth and easy.” The album artwork is a perfect distillation of that energy: a photo of the band on a beach at night and everyone’s gaze is averted aside from Love’s. She’s staring straight at the camera and behind her is a tall, skinny palm tree on fire. “Oh, make me over,” is the album’s opening line, a statement of purpose.
To make Celebrity Skin, Hole tapped into what bassist Melissa Auf der Maur once described in an interview with MTV as the “California muse.” Ideas weren’t coalescing, the band wasn’t getting along, and Love decided the album needed some kind of unifying theme, something anyone could relate to. She wasn’t going to mine her fraught personal life for ideas. “Let’s tie this together with a concept, even if it’s fake,” Love said during the interview. “For directional purposes.” So Hole started to work in the grand tradition of writing about Los Angeles, thinking about “California as a metaphor for the American dream.” That clichéd, almost cynical approach to songwriting landed their biggest commercial hits and made Celebrity Skin an era-defining album.
Hole started writing in three different cities before returning to their hometown of LA. They tried New York, New Orleans, and Memphis, music capitals that lacked the right atmosphere. At that point in time, inspiration that wasn’t terribly depressing was hard to come by. Love’s husband, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, killed himself four days before Hole’s seminal sophomore album, Live Through This, debuted in 1994. Soon after, the band’s bassist Kristen Pfaff died of a heroin overdose. Love became tabloid fodder and drummer Patty Schemel was battling a worsening drug habit. In spite of all that, the band took Live Through This on a long and tumultuous tour, replacing Pfaff with Auf der Maur. Shows were uneven, with Love breaking down or going on lengthy, rambling monologues about her dead husband, behaviors that were attributed to her heavy drug use. In ’95, Hole joined the Lollapalooza lineup, during which Love allegedly punched Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna. That same year, a wasted Love threw her compact at Madonna during the VMAs. It was, to put it mildly, a rough couple of years.
None of that madness cheapens Live Through This. It is the kind of album that, if you hear it at the right moment in time, will change your life. It would be impossible for Hole to make another just like it. Love’s acerbic public persona inverted on those songs. She became at once ferocious (“Violet”) and fragile (“Doll Parts”), a woman singing about her aggrieved childhood and the joys and burdens of being a wife and a mom and a rock star and a ticking bomb because of it. There is no album that I would rather listen to on any given day of the week; it is a masterpiece, a definitively feminist work of art that also happened to be a critical success, buoyed in part by the fateful timing of its release and that prophetic title that seemed to hint at the turmoil the band would undergo in the months surrounding its release”.
The next feature that I want to reference is from CRACK. I think that so many of the reviews have been unfair and underwhelming. Never quite getting the acclaim across the board that it warrants, I do hope that its approaching twenty-fifth anniversary compels reassessment and new investigation:
“People hungry for a widow’s album had to be content with a swift reference to Cobain’s suicide note (“it’s better to rise than fade away”) on angsty alt-rock ballad Reasons to Be Beautiful and its morose sibling Petals. But rather than focus inward, the album critiques the dark allure of celebrity and the way LA both attracts and destroys like a venus fly trap. The album’s poppiest moments may evoke palm trees and boulevards, but there’s also a nauseous sweetness in the images of rotting beauty (“I squashed the blossom/ And the blossom’s dead”).
Critics who balked at its excessive polish missed the point: why, the album questions, aspire to old notions of “authenticity” in rock when LA and celebrity culture dominate? Hole always wanted to be a mainstream band, and those involved felt that this third album would be as commercially successful as Live Through This and Nirvana’s Nevermind.
In fact, Celebrity Skin did represent the height of Hole’s success, selling over a million copies and earning three Grammy nominations. The secret of its success is, perhaps, simple: it was the American Dream writ large in addictive riffs and seedy glamour. As Love explained to a BBC radio host in 1998: “In America at least, if you’re born a serf, you can die a king.” If you work hard enough, you can die an infamous rockstar. But in hindsight it captured a particular moment: this was the last hubristic summer before the rise of Napster in 1999, a development that would wreak havoc on the music industry. The excesses of Celebrity Skin, captured masterfully in the broken allure of the title track’s video, was a final shimmer of light on the Pacific ocean as the sun went down on an era”.
Arriving in the world in 1998, the world was changing. Celebrity culture and the tabloidisation of it was near its peak. Some of the great albums from the year – from the likes of Madonna and Massive Attack – were hugely exciting and progressive. Pop queens were entering new phases. Brilliant work from Beck and Beastie Boys sat with PJ Harvey and AIR. It was a thrilling and wonderful time for music. I am not sure many albums assessed the times and harsh realities of the world – or, for Hole, California - like Celebrity Skin. It seemed a very real and relevant album in 1998. In many ways, many of its messages and mandates still are pertinent and powerful. Albumism wrote about Celebrity Skin for a feature in 2018:
“The album itself is dedicated to Cobain, which is also felt on “Malibu” and “Boys on the Radio.” “They crash and burn / they fold away so slow,” she sings, paralleling the “Crash and burn / all the stars explode tonight” lyrics that open “Malibu.” But it’s hardly romantic. If anything, it’s the angry and ugly part of grief, the bargaining before the acceptance. She’s tired of being a punching bag for Kurt’s fans who blame her for his suicide. “Do what you want / 'Cause I'll do anything / And I'll take the blame” she sings wearily in “Boys on the Radio.” It’s the end of a relationship, when you are exhausted from arguing, when you have seen the unflattering parts of someone you love but that love is still there, somehow. Even if it poisons you. Even if it hurts.
(Love has alternately said “Malibu” was written about Cobain’s stay in rehab and her boyfriend Jeff Mann, who lived in the city.)
And the drama! Oh, the drama of this album’s birth. The band struggled to write. Courtney described herself as “in a rut” and Michael Beinhorn famously screwed with drummer Patty Schemel, forcing her to play eight hours a day for two weeks, only to dim the sound and play Love the worst tracks in order to convince her to replace Schemel with session drummer Deen Castronovo (and, on tour, former Shift drummer Samantha Maloney.) Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan was brought in to co-write several songs and played bass on “Hit So Hard” and “Petals.”
But from that darkness came commercial success, Grammy nominations and spots on several “Greatest Albums” lists, including NME magazine and the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. And yes, 20 years later, some of it sounds a little clichéd, a little like high school poetry, and Eric Erlandson’s guitars have an unmistakably ‘90s sound that exists only within that time period and cannot be replicated.
I think about Courtney Love a lot. I consider her one of my Goddesses, alongside Siouxsie Sioux and Tori Amos and Mother Goddess Patti Smith. She has a reputation as a feral, wild woman, alternately lovelorn and savage, Hollywood glamour and boulevard trash, and she uses all of it on Celebrity Skin
She is an original, unvarnished and unafraid, and she encourages her listeners to be too, be they in 1998 or 2018, because society has not improved much with respect to how it treats women. There will always be wolves hungry to feast on the innocent. There will always be a way to tell a girl she is hideous in order to sell her beauty back to her. Courtney knows, maybe better than anyone.
“You want a part of me?” she growls. “Well I’m not sellin’ cheap.”
And neither should we”.
Perhaps the recipient of more praise retrospectively than it got in 1998, there was still plenty of love for Celebrity Skin upon its release. In their 1998 review, Rolling Stone had this say. I especially love the blend of love and hate; the fierce and tender; the explosive but intimate:
“HEY, THERE’S ONLY us left now,” Courtney Love notices on the title rocker that opéns Hole’s new album, the band’s first since 1994’s Live Through This. Her co-stars are a bassist, Melissa Auf Der Maur; a drummer, Patty Schemel; and one pent-up guitarist, Eric Erlandson, who keeps going for the throat. Love sounds sick of people who don’t miss vinyl, who don’t understand how to use records as ways to make sense of their lives.
Celebrity Skin — an album about fame, beauty, life and their opposites — is Hole’s passionate response. It’s sprung, flung and fun, high-impact, rock-fueled pop with the body and flexibility of really good hair. Hole are immediately in your face with the cheese-metal riffs and cuddly dissolves of “Celebrity Skin,” a track full of cloudless energy that seems to explode the malaise that has surrounded Love since husband Kurt Cobain’s death. “If the world is so wrong,” Love insists next on “Awful,” “Yeah, you can break them all/With one song.”
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.
Other songs are as impressive. On “Reasons to Be Beautiful,” Hole recapture the Los Angeles of X, the first punk band to burlesque the downside of L.A. “Miles and miles of perfect skin,” Love sings, “I swear I do, I fit right in.” But as much as she loves a boho band like X, Love lives for grand gesture. After howling through “Northern Star,” she cheers up with “Boys on the Radio,” one of the most moving pop songs the Nineties have heard. The text involves Love’s male competitors, and how she loves and hates them. As Erlandson switches from strum-y verses to exquisitely fucked-up chords ever so slightly behind the beat, Love’s unreal vocal attitude — sensuous but distant, as though she’s tugging at the pop nation, her life and your heart, from Venus — takes the song someplace else altogether. She considers “endless summer nights” that she knows are illusions but that she craves anyway. With its odd angle on heartbreak, the song is an end-of-the-century “More Than a Feeling.” And as Celebrity Skin keeps arguing, that’s something the world can sure use.
You don’t need to know or love Courtney Love — to care about her highly chronicled trek from ripped cropped tops to Versace gowns — to enjoy this album. Even Love herself, though, can’t deny her own myth: In the album’s very first verse, she casts herself as “a walking study/In demonology.” Love has not seized the occasion of the third Hole album to force her thoughts into a meticulous memoir, a well-put apology or even a clear explanation. On Celebrity Skin, she isn’t especially after journalistic precision, and she isn’t devising some glam plan to seem brilliant. She just knows exactly the kind of rock star she wants to be, and is it”.
Twenty-five on 9th September, the mighty Celebrity Skin turns twenty-five. I hope that fans around the world will celebrate it. Courtney Love (Cobain) herself is going to write a few words I am sure! If you have not heard it recently, then make sure that you take time out to dive in. I remember hearing it in 1998 and being amazed back then. I find myself blown away now. The wonderful Celebrity Skin will make…
AN indelible impression.