Pretty on the Outside (Celebrity Skin - Hole)

Member Name: edie

Product:	Celebrity Skin - Hole
Date:	20/02/01 (37 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Not a sell out

Disadvantages: Too glossy for its own good

Courtney Love is a controversial figure for all kinds of reasons that I don’t have space to detail here, but in the end only question that matters is whether her band Hole’s album are any good musically. And for me, Celebrity Skin passes the best test you can use to measure an album: whether it gathers dust in a pile in the corner or has a permanent place on rotation on your CD player. In my case, it’s definitely the latter.

After the visceral anger of Hole’s last album Live Through This, Celebrity Skin was dismissed as a commercial sell-out. True, the stylings of West Coast MORer’s like Joan Jett and Fleetwood Mac, that so angered the grunge purists, might be off-putting. I quite like Fleetwood Mac (my shameful secret) so maybe that’s why I enjoy this album. But to describe it as sell-out sort of misses the point. Courtney’s whole ambition was to be a big star and she never made any secret of the fact. And Celebrity Skin with its expensive production values, big hooks and mile-high choruses certainly fits the bill.

As great as Live Through This was, to have done a 12 song replica of it would be been the real sell-out as well as totally pointless. Mainstreaming was probably an inevitable process. As Courtney probably realises: Playing Your Song, one of the few raging Live Through This type-songs on Celebrity Skin, documents the commercialising of alternative rock. So maybe its better to see the album as a reflection of her post-Seattle life. And apart from the painful Kurt-themed Northern Star, it’s an undeniably Californian album in subject matter, musical style and art work, right down to the famous LA palms on the sleeve. In fact looking at these palms you notice they’re actually on fire, and to me Celebrity Skin perfectly captures a dark side of the sunshine state.

Most critics compared CS to stadium rock and while they definably have something in common, 60s girl groups seem li
ke a most accurate reference. Hit so Hard is an obvious homage to Phil Spector’s notorious He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss). While the "poppier" songs knowingly replicate the unnerving quality of many Spector classics, songs that are just so excessively romantic that they actually become far creepier than they were meant to be. Under the churning vermilion choruses of Celebrity Skin its impossible to ignore that so many of the songs hinge on images of death, especially that of drowning in the big blue ocean: Boys on the Radio warns that "the water is too deep, you could close your eyes and really sleep" and Malibu co-opts the watery suicide of A Star is Born: "Hey baby, I’ll walk into the waves". While on Heaven Tonight, Courtney’s self-described "happy song", the happiest idea she can conjure up is that of going to heaven.

For someone who seemed to have so enthusiastically bought into the Hollywood dream, Courtney is surprisingly downbeat about it on Celebrity Skin, from the sarcastic account of the star-making process in the title track, to the exhaustion it causes in Petals. Hollywood must provide a lot of anger-inducing material and she's probably storing up a volcanic amount of rage (which bodes very well for the next Hole album. But for now this album with its glitter on the outside and emptiness and misery on the inside seems to be the perfect metaphor for Courtney’s new Hollywood life.

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