Hole’s first three studio albums reflect the personal and professional transformation of Courtney Love. First, she recruited Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon to produce Hole’s debut, Pretty On The Inside. Gordon and co-producer Don Fleming captured Love’s band in its early, noisiest incarnation. Next came Hole’s commercial breakthrough and grunge classic, Live Through This.
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That album reflected survival, something Love knew all too well. She had married and started a family with Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who committed suicide a week before Live Through This was released in 1994.
But Love had become a creative force, both as a rock star and as a Golden Globe-nominated actress in The People vs. Larry Flynt. Hole’s third album, Celebrity Skin, documents Love’s stardom and the chaos—often self-inflicted chaos—she endured to get there. The title track is Love’s darkly triumphant hit with an epic riff by Billy Corgan, and a dire warning from Shakespeare.
About “Celebrity Skin”
Love co-wrote “Celebrity Skin” with Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson and Billy Corgan from The Smashing Pumpkins. The main riff to “Celebrity Skin” is pure Corgan, and you can almost sing “The world is a vampire” over it.
But Corgan’s “vampire” also makes for a good metaphor in “Celebrity Skin”, and the cost of participating in a zero-sum game like the entertainment business. Knowing what she wanted, Love played this game like it was a drug-fueled chess match. Her behavior was like catnip for tabloid journalists, and she collected many critics along the way to stardom.
Oh, make me over
I’m all I wanna be
A walking study
In demonology.
The following lines reference Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice. Love describes the bargain one makes to be famous. Likewise, the “pound of flesh” is the metaphorical price that Hollywood demands.
When I wake up in my makeup
It’s too early for that dress
Wilted and faded somewhere in Hollywood
I’m glad I came here with your pound of flesh.
“Beautiful Garbage”
Love’s iconic image in the 90s employed glamour ironically. On Live Through This, a pageant queen appears on the album cover with mascara running down her face. And the combination of Love’s babydoll dresses and smudged makeup put into focus the crashing reality of the underground world she navigated at a young age. She experienced the entire gamut of class and status, from a trust fund to strip clubs, drugs, Cobain’s fame and death, her own fame, airline fights, backstage fights, a custody battle, and a deluge of lawsuits.
Still, she survived, and Hole had platinum-selling records. You hear both a triumph and a warning in “Celebrity Skin” and its raw glamour. It’s Love embracing fame while calculating its cost. Her accumulated tragedies are required burdens for anyone desperate enough to play this game.
One of Hole’s best-known songs is “Violet”, where Love repeats: “Go on, take everything!” “Celebrity Skin” might be the sequel to “Violet”. But in her Hollywood story, once you remove the veneer of glamour, you’ll find people being tossed out like “beautiful garbage.”
Shakespeare and Tragedy
Another lyric from “Violet” reveals that Love knew exactly what she was getting into: “I told you from the start just how this would end.”
You don’t have to be a scholar of Shakespeare to understand how tragedy formed his greatest works. And you cannot separate Love’s stardom from tragedy, either. “Celebrity Skin” applauds the fame, then asks: Was it all worth it?
Photo by Niels van Iperen/Getty Images
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