Celebrity Skin

Certain Songs #613: Hole – “Boys on The Radio”

August 5, 2016 by Jim Connelly

Album: Celebrity Skin
Year: 1998

I mentioned this in my post on “Violet,” but in December 1994, Hole played Live 105’s “Green Christmas” being broadcast live from Berkeley, which I stayed home on a Friday just to tape off of the radio.

I was rewarded with a pretty ferocious and barely-together performance that twice featured a new song that seemed to be written in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s suicide & Hole bassist Kristen Pflaff’s OD, especially since it had the following lyric:

Certain Songs #612: Hole – “Celebrity Skin”

August 4, 2016 by Jim Connelly

Album: Celebrity Skin
Year: 1998

If Live Through This was already scandalous because of its (relative) polish, then the big, brassy and glossy Celebrity Skin was tantamount to high treason against indie ideals.

Not that Courtney Love gave a fuck: the circumstances surrounding Live Through This and Kurt Cobain’s suicide had made her infamous, something she milked on AOL as well as the subsequent tour, and her performance on The People Vs. Larry Flynt threatened to make that infamy tip over into actual fame.

Hole – Celebrity Skin

December 31, 1998 by Jim Connelly

(DGC)

I know why people hate Courtney Love. Crazy, contradictory and caustic, she’s so fake she’s beyond real. And, of course, coming from a subculture where realness equals sincerity equals artistic integrity, her fakeness and ambition give all of the people who worshiped her poor dead husband (or even her earliest music) an easy target. Yet, her goal to make a record that would cut across this most fragmented pop scene ever is strangely noble. And naïve. And no less informed by artistic integrity than, say, Modest Mouse or Silver Jews. Of course she failed — even the impact of Nevermind was probably overstated by those of us who were impacted the most, and things have just unraveled further since — leaving us with a record that has far more flaws than her brand-new body. More highlights, too.