page_title: Celebrity Skin
section_title: Lyrics and themes
hierarchical_section_title: Celebrity Skin / Lyrics and themes
caption_attribution_description: English: T. S. Eliot, photographed one Sunday afternoon in 1923 by Lady Ottoline Morrell
context_page_description: Celebrity Skin is the third studio album by American alternative rock band Hole, released on September 8, 1998 on Geffen Records and in the United States on DGC 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 and Live Through This. 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 the demos for the album, but was replaced by session drummer Deen Castronovo at the suggestion of producer 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 received the drumming credit on the album.
  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.
context_section_description: 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." She cited an array of literary influences, including T. S. Eliot. 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. Whereas the band's debut, Pretty on the Inside, had dealt with the "repulsive aspects of L.A.—superficiality, sexism, violence, and drugs", Celebrity Skin examined the more opulent elements of Los Angeles—specifically 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". Commenting on the themes, James Hunter of Rolling Stone notes that the album is lyrically obsessed with "the promises and the agonies of Southern California. Sold-out sluts, fading actresses, deluded teenagers, “summer babes” and hunks—all this “beautiful garbage” crowds the roadside of the album." Gil Kaufman, writing about the album for MTV, noted that "Love's crash-and-burn lyrics are full of provocative, self-referential phrases that might harbor double or triple meanings."
  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.  "Those were literal things," said Erlandson, "but drowning became a metaphor for this record and for all the people we had lost." Additional lyrical motifs include angels, stars, and heaven. Commenting on the recurring images throughout the album, Love said: "I'm a Cancer. I recycle."
  On the album's title, Love divulged that she initially wanted to name it Holy War, as she felt it was "a mission statement. It's a statement of such pretense and import. It's incredibly ambitious." Erlandson alternately wanted to name the record Sugar Coma, which Love opposed, stating it was "pedestrian—it denotes the end of a cycle. Something deadly. If executives like it, you know it's bad." The final title, Celebrity Skin, was teased by Love during a 1995 interview with Jools Holland, in which she joked that she was considering naming their upcoming album Celebrity Skin because she had "touched a lot of it". 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.
caption: The works of T. S. Eliot influenced Love when writing the album's lyrics
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