Celebrity Skin
Well at long last September 8 rolled around, the release date for the long-awaited third LP by Hole, Celebrity Skin, and I woke with a start and marched right to an above ground trolley and stepped on--heading to the triangle of record stores I frequent, Tower, Record Finder and Streetlight. On the trolley I sat down and a nicely dressed woman sat beside me and suddenly the overwhelming odor of a drunk person wafted by me and I discovered that a young drunk man was moving from seat to seat harassing everyone with, "Why are you giving me the silent treatment?" "Why are you ignoring me?" "Oh, pretending I don't exist?" "Okay then...I'm not here...ignore me!" He was getting right up in peoples faces with his booze-laden breath and slurred questions, even pulling the headset off of the guy in front of me who had a Walkman on, no doubt, in case such an annoyance were to occur. No one except one woman who meekly said, "Please get away from me" responded to his incessant harassment, until he inevitably turned around in his seat to face me. He hadn't managed three words into a sentence before I blurted out at a pretty loud volume, "Fuck you! I don't want you talking your drunken shit to me, nobody on this bus does so I suggest you shut the fuck up, don't talk to me and don't even look at me. Turn your ass around and leave everyone the fuck alone right now or you'll be sorry, not that your lame ass isn't sorry enough already, you pathetic fucking drunk!" Did the other riders feel relieved or empowered and thankful that I chose to be the Billy Jack of innocent muni riders and stand up to this asshole? Nope.
Not one, "Yeah, shut up jerk," Right on, for that," no applause or chorus of agreement whatsoever came from the occupants of the train--which genuinely surprised me. Not breaking his gaze at me, he responded, "Nice missing teeth you have there," referring to one missing tooth on my front lower jaw. He then asked me if I had lowered the window due to his breath. I said I didn't lower the window and stated, "What's with the insult, is it okay for a drunken swill like yourself to randomly insult strangers on public transportation? Is that okay?" I stood up and said excuse me, exiting my seat and said to him, "You are a worthless shitbag," and told the driver that a man in back was harassing people, which is why I needed to exit the train right now, please. He let me off. I was so furious I was shaking and wish I'd have knocked his face in but I'm not that violent a person--I more just wanted to spit in his face--just something to prove a point, that he was a zero, nothing, dirt under foot. As I pressed forward to my original destination I grew even more angry and would like to thank the fellow riders of that train for sticking up for me so fervently--really, it was overwhelming--not a single word or motion to the driver to put things right, just sitting there taking abuse and doing nothing to change it. I hope the fucking cretin puked all over all of you "let's not involve ourselves" spineless drips. I wish you many many more uncomfortable muni-hell rides in your grim futures, you deserve it fully. As for me, Muni is such relentless hell anyway, I'll be walking most places I need to go, that's the beauty of San Francisco, it's just seven miles wide--walkable in a day. With a public transport system so fucked up, mired up by turgid bureaucratic follies, computerized improvement fallacies, and Mayoral publicity stunts, even Mussolini couldn't make these trains run on time, let alone keep them free of assholes, which comprise 99% of all people I'm starting to believe.
So, finally I made it to the record store and purchased a couple copies of Celebrity Skin--liking the cover photo very much, Courtney with her sheer top barely hiding the breasts that give Jamie Lee Curtis a run for her money as Hollywood's best pair. Bassist Melissa Auf DerMaur looks positively stunning, which she's always been but her glamour potential is progressing nicely--she smolders with a dark mythical intensity, Eric Erlandson looks like the introverted guitar-wizard lady-killer and Patty Schemel (possibly ex-drummer but the split is not official, termed leave of absence for personal reasons--rehab) looking very much more the lipstick lesbian than her grunge-dyke formative years, all in front of palm trees burning during the fires in Malibu.
Let's start with the Title cut: Wow, what a single! It's got a great rock and roll riff, thrusting out of the first notes of the song like an erect penis. It's almost too male, too headbanger, too punch-that-international-symbol-of-satan-in-the-air but then the lyrics come in and temper it all with decidedly feminine imagery, "When I wake up in my makeup/ it's too early for that dress," I feel that the title cut offers up the most perfect argument to Smashing Pumpkins Billy Corgan's claims that he's so very much responsible for a great deal of the music on the album. How tired of him to talk such shit on Howard Stern when he is fully credited for what work he did do on the record, and how small he seems trying to brand his involvement indelible on work that is so clearly unflinchingly female--and unmistakably Courtney. So he wrote a good hook, fine, but words like "It's all so sugarless/ Hooker/waitress/model/actress/Oh just go nameless" or "Wilted and faded somewhere in Hollywood/ I'm glad I came here/ With your pound of flesh." are what makes a Hole record a Hole record and the songs final line, "No I'm not selling cheap," is a line Mr. Corgan should be considering. When I bought the import single of "Celebrity Skin" and played it at The Hole in The Wall, it produced audible yelps of positive response in the crowd. It's an oddly powerful pop song--an instant classic. Billy Corgan, in all of his "co-writer" the magic is mine, that riff is mine self-aggrandizement should be so lucky as to even have a song half as good as this one on the latest Smashing Pumpkins record. I suspected it the first time I ever saw his band, now I'm certain, he's a wussie and a sexist jerk-off .
Classic is a word that keeps coming to mind as I listen and re-listen to this disc, and as Love keeps saying in interviews, she has drawn a lot of influence from major L.A.-based bands classic rock albums of the seventies, like The Eagles Hotel California and Fleetwood Mac's Rumors. That feeling registers, you sense that she set her sights on creating a record that would come to be known as representative of a certain space in time, evocative of a generation and their debauchery, experiences, enlightenments, truths, cynicisms. That's a tall order to project such an impact upon a current release, something that is said about a work usually after it has persevered and stood the test of time, but Celebrity Skin just feels like it will. There's a strength about Hole's third release that portrays the band and Courtney Love as having matured to a point where setting their sights so high seems not only logical but literally the only thing Hole could have done. The critics have had a lot of time to prepare for a savaging of this record, something critics have a proclivity for when it comes to Courtney, so armed with an extreme rock critic-like knowledge of music history, pronounced opinions, a definite gift for writing some of the most compelling rock and roll lyrics in decades, more finances at their disposal than previously, talented committed musicians, far more time than the six weeks Live Through This took to record, and an unfailing ability to maintain something many musicians lose along the way, which is being a true fan of rock music, Hole unleashed Celebrity Skin.
The overall feel of the new record is definitely different than previous Hole records, yet more than substantial threads of common qualities remain. In some ways this is a highly produced shimmering blockbuster of a pop record, a quality not exactly reminiscent of the past two LPs, yet Live Through This most definitely showed signs of such structure emerging. While lips and pens have "sell-out" so ready to fly forward at this release, to me it seems like a natural progression. If I want the harsher Hole I'll listen to Pretty on The Inside, and wonder how many of those nagging about the softening of Hole even ever listened to that horrible screeching scary noisy dark and brilliant record they apparently long for. Happily, it seems that Courtney and crew know all too well what criticisms will come of this release and they don't care. As Courtney said in an interview in Addicted To Noise, "This record is revenge for all the bands that kicked me out because I liked R.E.M.!"
The stellar cuts on the album keep changing in my estimation, I was immediately stuck on "Playing Your Song" the one cut that seems to be the most harsh or hard-hitting, or the only one with the word fuck in the lyrics, which seems to be a farewell to grunge, making possible reference to her late husband or any number of musicians with the lyric, "Hey you, so bored and cynical/ It's fucking wonderful/ They sold you out." The cut has a lovely shimmering guitar intro worthy and evocative of Echo and The Bunnymen whom Courtney thanks first in her list of thankyous in the album credits. It clearly isn't the only Bunnymen-ism musically and lyrically on this record (how about the repeated refrain in "Use Once and Destroy" of "I went down to rescue you," and it's lyrical and musical similarity to The Bunnymen's first hit single "Rescue,") and the reference choice is clever as hell, landing just ahead of the retro-renaissance the group will now undoubtedly start to enjoy full-force.
Hole stuff at