Hole
Celebrity Skin

THE REVIEW

Our fellow Caparezza says that the second album is always the hardest in an artist's career. Nothing more true. The second album is a mathematical test, it's there where you understand everything... unless you play in Hole.

In fact, you can never know what might happen the day after or the day before the album's release. In that April of '94, the month "Live through this" was released, terrible things happened for Hole and for the whole scene, destined to mark a musical era. "Live through this" was considered the best rock CD of the year by "Rolling Stone" magazine... well, what to say then... it seemed the test was passed. But it wasn't so for Hole. After such events, at this point, it wasn't the second CD that was the most difficult in their career.

After such storms, we all were waiting for them at the bend, we all wondered if the warning LIVE THROUGH THIS had been beneficial if they were able to live beyond all this. The answer came to us in September '98, after 4 years of analysis, depression, and a phone call to Billy Corgan. The CD starts with a nice riff... you immediately think of Eric... the song proceeds...: "look at me, I'm everything I want to be, a living study of demonology" and then it goes on attacking Hollywood and other aspects of show-business... you think immediately of Courtney, but you notice there is something new in the atmosphere... you think of Billy Corgan, who spent more than two weeks in the studio with Hole to collaborate on this album.
However, despite his influence, you realize it is quite a personal CD. Personal for Courtney and all of us. At this point in the story, we wanted to know something from her who lived it inside, not only for Kurt but for all the grunge that vanished with him. She tells it to us between a sixties-pop song and an alt-rock one.

It all started with the riot grrls, good carefree times of dreams and female battles, see AWFUL, in which she says: "it was all perfect, now it's something awful..." to make you understand how it was all an illusion, but warns you that those battles were not unfounded...: "They steal the souls of girls like you to control you...", and closes with disillusioned hope: "they bought it all to build something new,... make it beautiful..."
The story continues... HIT SO HARD, MALIBU, perhaps you understand that from those distant '90s, musically nothing can be repeated, so it's worth letting grunge go, venturing into a carefree pop-rock melancholy, sweet that leaves a bitter taste. So too BOYS ON THE RADIO or HEAVEN TONIGHT, where joy is mixed with the deepest bitterness. The personal bitterness of Courtney. Towards Kurt, towards society, towards the same grunge scene... towards those who didn't understand her in the midst of this pain, towards those who misinterpreted her... who accused her.

The story becomes more intense, REASONS TO BE BEAUTIFUL, NORTHERN STAR or USE ONCE&DESTROY, completely confessions full of rancor, hatred and overall love. Sad and ironic songs, full of melancholy and perhaps also full of fatigue. The scene is dead, love is dead ("...and now i know that love is dead, you've come to bury me..." — Dying), and admiring the glories and joys of the recent past, you see everything disappear, like a flower withered in the loveliest season. Kind of like saying that youthful dreams are destined to remain dreams, but how sad it is when you wake. So, this album, released in 1998, thus in full post-period, is the precise x-ray of the state of health of rock, a genre that, having reached the peak of its development in the nineties, now ages and tends to fade.

"Celebrity skin" closes a chapter of a long-lasting story, which, at the end of the millennium, must increasingly come to terms with the remains of the past, unfortunately without finding ways of renewal. What will become of rock in the 2000s will be told to us by Courtney in her solo CD "America’s sweetheart" released in 2004, an album full of memories, which claims with irony, a prominent place in the scene for the last true innovators of rock.