Hole – Celebrity Skin

Corgan’s riff, Love’s lyric, Beinhorn’s single

Hole released Celebrity Skin on 31 August 1998, on Geffen, as the first single from the album of the same name. The album followed on 8 September. The song runs 2 minutes and 42 seconds. Courtney Love, Eric Erlandson and Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins wrote it. Michael Beinhorn produced it. It was recorded in 1997 at Conway Recording and Record Plant West in Los Angeles, during album sessions that also passed through Olympic Studios in London and finished at Quad in early 1998. The single carried Best Sunday Dress and a demo called Dying.

Hole had been quiet while Love made films, including The People vs. Larry Flynt. The new record was meant to leave the rawer sound of Live Through This. Melissa Auf der Maur, who had joined on bass after Kristen Pfaff’s death in 1994, has said the polish surprised her. Drummer Patty Schemel played on the demos. Beinhorn then brought in the session drummer Deen Castronovo for the album, and Schemel was off the finished record. That decision split the band. The title track is the bright end of the change: a short verse, a wide chorus, and guitars that sound clean next to the noise of 1994.

Love has said Corgan supplied the main guitar riff. He was in the room for a short stretch of a long album, about twelve days by her later count, not the whole run of recording, which took the better part of a year. She compared him to a teacher who would not hand over the answer. The words are hers. One line lifts the opening of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem A Superscription, the phrase “my name is might-have-been.” Another uses Shakespeare’s “pound of flesh.” The subject is fame as a surface you can use, not only a trap.