Celebrity Skin is the third studio album by American alternative rock band Hole, released on September 8, 1998, in the United States on DGC Records and internationally on Geffen Records. It was the last album released by the band before their dissolution in 2002. Hole intended for the record to diverge significantly from their previous noise and grunge-influenced sound as featured on Pretty on the Inside (1991) and Live Through This (1994). The band hired producer Michael Beinhorn to record Celebrity Skin over a nine-month period that included sessions in Los Angeles, New York City, and London. It was the band's only studio release to feature bassist Melissa Auf der Maur. Drummer Patty Schemel played on the demos for the album but was replaced by session drummer Deen Castronovo at the suggestion of Beinhorn. This issue created a rift between Schemel and the band, resulting in her dropping out of the tour and parting ways with the group, though she was still credited.
The band sought to use Los Angeles and the state of California as a unifying theme and began writing what they conceived as a "California album" in 1997. Unlike Hole's previous releases, the final songs on Celebrity Skin featured instrumental contributions from several musicians outside the band, primarily Billy Corgan, who co-wrote the musical arrangements on five songs. Auf der Maur's former bandmate Jordon Zadorozny, as well as Go-Go's guitarist Charlotte Caffey, also contributed to the composition of one track. Frontwoman Courtney Love, who wrote all of the lyrics, named the album and its title track after a poem she had written that was influenced by T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". Motifs of water and drowning are also prominent throughout the album.
Celebrity Skin is Hole's most commercially successful album. It peaked at number nine on the US Billboard 200, number four on the Australian Albums Chart, and number 11 on the UK Albums Chart. To date, it has sold over 1.4 million copies in the United States alone, has been certified as double-platinum in Australia by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), and platinum in Canada by Music Canada (MC) and the United States by Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It garnered Hole a number-one hit single on the Modern Rock Tracks chart with the title track, "Celebrity Skin". Critical reaction to the album was very positive and it was listed on a number of publications' year-end lists in 1998, including those by Time and The Village Voice. The album was named the 265th greatest album of all time by a 2013 poll by NME magazine and was featured in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Production and composition
Recording history
In September 1995, Hole completed the final leg of their year-long tour in promotion for their second studio album, Live Through This (1994). During the hiatus that followed, the members of Hole began working on individual projects. Frontwoman Courtney Love was cast as Althea Flynt in The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) alongside Woody Harrelson, lead guitarist Eric Erlandson collaborated with Rodney Bingenheimer and Thurston Moore on the short-lived project Rodney & the Tube Tops from 1996 to 1997, bassist Melissa Auf der Maur provided backing on Ric Ocasek's album Troublizing (1997), and drummer Patty Schemel played with the Lemonheads on the tribute album Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks (1996).
After Love completed her obligations promoting The People vs. Larry Flynt, the band reunited to write new material for their next album, titled Celebrity Skin. According to Love, the embryonic versions of the songs "weren't very good" and "not written well". However, the songs developed following the band's relocation to several parts of the United States, including Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans. During their time in New Orleans, the band recorded a number of demos, including an early version of "Awful" (1999) and songs which later developed into "Dying" and "Hit So Hard". Erlandson later said he felt that "everything was falling apart... Making that record was insane. There were obstacles at each step of the way." The original plan was to have Billy Corgan as executive producer, who was a second choice after Brian Eno, The final recording sessions were completed at Quad Studios in early 1998. These sessions were also video-taped by a friend of the band, as noted in an October 1998 article in Spin magazine. Auf der Maur characterized the sessions as being based around Love's busy schedule at the time: "It was her Hollywood phase", during which she would "chain-smoke Marlboro lights", "go to the beach at 7AM with a personal trainer and auditioning. She'd just done [The People vs.] Larry Flynt."
thumb|upright=.6|left|Love played a custom [[Squier Venus|Fender Vista Venus on the album]]
According to Love, her vision for the album was to "deconstruct the California Sound" in the L.A. tradition of bands like The Doors, The Beach Boys and The Byrds, In addition to Corgan, Auf der Maur's former Tinker bandmate, Jordon Zadorozny, and Go-Go's guitarist and songwriter Charlotte Caffey helped co-compose the track "Reasons to Be Beautiful".
A wide variety of guitars, effect pedals and equipment were used during the recording of Celebrity Skin. Love used Fender tube amplifiers, Matchless amps, Ampeg amps and a Randall Commander that belonged to Love's late husband Kurt Cobain. Love's primary guitars during the sessions were her custom Fender Vista Venus and a Chet Atkins Gretsch.
Drum tracks
Despite receiving credit on the album, Patty Schemel only recorded drum tracks for its demos, and was replaced by session drummer Deen Castronovo during the final recording sessions; thus, her drumming does not appear on the finished tracks. According to Schemel, Beinhorn was actively "psyching her out" in the studio when she began recording. According to sound technician Chris Whitemeyer, Beinhorn would request endless takes of Schemel's drumming, only to then lower the volume in his booth to inaudible levels, sit back, and read a newspaper. Whitemeyer also stated that Schemel was forced to drum in the studio eight hours a day for over two weeks, and that Beinhorn "wanted Patty to give up".
Music and arrangements
Celebrity Skin marked a major shift in Hole's musical style, emphasizing a more mainstream alternative rock sound. Rolling Stones James Hunter observed that the album features shifts in guitar sounds that alternate from "silveriness to something rougher in a heartbeat," adding that it is teeming with "minimalist explosion, idiomatic flair and dead-on rhythms."
In 2018, Melissa Auf der Maur reflected "That wasn't something I was striving for but it was something Courtney and the label were. At the time I was like, 'why are you making this so fancy?' but she had a whole vision for her art."
Lyrics and themes
thumb|left|upright=.8|The works of [[T. S. Eliot influenced Love when writing the album's lyrics]]
While writing the lyrics for Celebrity Skin, Love aimed to "marry great hooks with a dense [lyrical] vision... I want to be as perverse as I'd like to be—while making you hum along with it." Several songs on the album reference, and sometimes directly quote, multiple literary works: The album's title track directly quotes The House of Life by Dante Rossetti ("my name is might-have-been"), as well as William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice ("So glad I came here with your pound of flesh"). "Awful", the album's third single, references Neil Diamond's "Cherry, Cherry", as well as the American spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot".
Various lyrical references to Hollywood and California culture are present throughout the album. Celebrity Skin examined the more opulent elements of Los Angelesspecifically from the perspective of Love, who at the time had risen as an A-list star but "deconstructed the concept, picking off the healing scab of her public reinvention to rehash the wounds of her past".
Another prominent lyrical and aesthetic theme on the record is water and drowning, as noted by Erlandson in a 1998 interview on the album's composition and recording sessions. Erlandson cited the drowning death of Jeff Buckley, as well as the deaths of both Erlandson's and Auf der Maur's fathers of pulmonary edema and lung cancer, respectively. Commenting on the recurring images throughout the album, Love said: "I'm a Cancer. I recycle." She subsequently clarified that she had derived the name from a short-lived band in Los Angeles named Celebrity Skin, as well as a bootleg pornographic magazine featuring nude candid photos of celebrities. though frontwoman Courtney Love later revived the band with new members for the release of Nobody's Daughter in 2010.
Singles
Despite the extreme measures undertaken by Hole's label, DGC Records, to prevent the album from leaking (including an "iron clad" agreement that prohibited music journalists who received advance copies from allowing anyone else to hear or record the album), the first single from the album, "Celebrity Skin", was leaked three weeks before its intended release dates and played "nearly a dozen times" on New York radio station WXRK (92.3 FM) and their Los Angeles-based sister station, KROQ-FM (106.7 FM), on the weekend of July 31 to August 2, 1998. DGC spokesperson Jim Merlis denied that the leak originated from them and issued WXRK a cease and desist order on August 3, 1998.
The lead single, "Celebrity Skin", was officially released on September 8, 1998, the same day of the album release. and entered the top 20 of the United Kingdom, Scotland, and Iceland. It also topped the US Alternative Songs chart and the Canadian Rock/Alternative chart. The single was nominated for Best Rock Song and Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group at the 1999 Grammy Awards. It was followed by "Malibu", released on December 29, 1998. The single peaked at number 81 on the US Billboard Hot 100,
"Malibu" was nominated for Best Cinematography at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards and nominated for a Music Video Cinematography Achievement provided by the Music Video Production Association. The single also received a nomination for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group at the 2000 Grammy Awards. The third and final single, "Awful", was released on April 27, 1999. It peaked at number 13 on US Alternative Songs chart and entered the ARIA Top 100 Singles Chart and the UK Singles Chart.
| rev2 = The Austin Chronicle
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| rev3 = Entertainment Weekly
| rev3score = C+
| rev4 = The Guardian
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| rev7 = NME
| rev7score = 8/10
| rev8 = Q
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| rev10 = Spin
| rev10score = 9/10
Celebrity Skin received positive reviews from music critics. The Village Voice critic Robert Christgau said Love is "better punk than actress, better actress than popster" and listed the title track and "Awful" as the album's most notable songs. Robert Cherry of the Alternative Press described Celebrity Skins sound as "meticulously orchestrated guitars, multilayered vocal harmonies, quantized drums and sheeny studio magic" and said the songs "hit nerve centers like a thousand AM classics". The Austin Chronicles Marc Savlov referred to the album as "end of the summer crunch-pop from the most enigmatic woman around" but criticized Love's "painful, quasi-Freudian vein" and "Michael Beinhorn's slick, SoCal production". Entertainment Weekly reviewer David Browne said "the music is sleeker and more taut than anything Hole have done".
Accolades
Several publications included Celebrity Skin in their year-end periodical lists, including Time, who listed the album at number nine on its Best of 1998 Music list, Spin, who listed the album at number 11 on its Top 20 Albums of the Year list, Los Angeles Timess Robert Hillburn ranked it number five on the list of Top 10 Albums of the Year. The 2013 NMEs The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time ranked Celebrity Skin 265th on their list. It is also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (2010). Celebrity Skin was nominated for Best Rock Album at the 1999 Grammy Awards. The album was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on October 13, 1998, and later certified platinum on December 21 for shipments in excess of one million copies. and was certified Gold by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).
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Personnel
Credits adapted from the liner notes of Celebrity Skin and Hit So Hard: A Memoir.
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! scope="row"| Japanese Albums (Oricon)
| 23
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Year-end charts
{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"
|+ 1998 year-end chart performance for Celebrity Skin
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! scope="col"| Chart (1998)
! scope="col"| Position
|-
! scope="row"| Australian Albums (ARIA)
| 83
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! scope="row"| Canada Top Albums/CDs (RPM)
| 90
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! scope="row"| US Billboard 200
| 152
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{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"
|+ 1999 year-end chart performance for Celebrity Skin
|-
! scope="col"| Chart (1999)
! scope="col"| Position
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! scope="row"| Australian Albums (ARIA)
| 45
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! scope="row"| US Billboard 200
| 129
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