Courtney Love was one of the visionary figures in the popular music of the 1990s. By the time her third and final album of the decade with her band, Hole, was released, she was one of the world’s most famous musicians, and Celebrity Skin reflects that on several fronts. The lyrics to the title track evoke Shakespeare (“I’m glad I came here with your pound of flesh”), the poet Anne Sexton (“My name is ‘never-was’”) and the titular exploitative porn magazine to illustrate the disposability of women in the entertainment industry aspiring to fame. The lyrics are disturbingly cutting, but the next song, “Awful”, goes further, looking through a wider lens at the violence of the system (“They know how to break all the girls like you/They rob the souls of the girls like you”) that underpins it. 

Unlike the scabrous sound of Hole’s previous albums, the band brought in Billy Corgan and Soundgarden producer Michael Beinhorn to give Celebrity Skin an ultra-produced, radio-ready sheen. The resulting glossy hooks of the songs lend an additional layer of complexity – the music has the liberatory power of the classic rock it was modeled on but the lyrics tell the story of the women and girls who too often were collateral damage of the male musicians who made it.