Celebrating Patty Schemel, born on this day in 1967. —Ed.
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.”