Rewind: Celebrity Skin - Hole

I'll never forgive Courtney Love for making me buy $25 nail polish. Somewhere between her fall from grace as punk rock's reigning noise queen and the new millennium, Courtney showed up in the pages of Vogue or Elle (I don't remember which) sporting a glamorous new look, but her nails were painted a deep, dirty, metallic blue. Bad girl nails. A few years later every girl in every mall in America would be wearing dark nail polish, but this seemed a studied reminder of her past (or some clever marketing on the part of the magazine -- most likely the latter). A week later I was at a Chanel counter dropping twenty-five bucks on their "Cosmic Blue" shade. For a perpetually broke twenty-something, it felt really decadent -- and badass, in a chic sort of way. (I mean, it's Chanel.)

I wasn't really intending for this to sound like an add for overpriced cosmetics, but the whole "paying too much money to look punk" aesthetic was a big part of the waning years of the 90s after grunge and punk had been co-opted by corporate America, and Nirvana morphed into Bush. Okay, the late 90s were kind of terrible as far as pop culture was concerned, but some of those years were the best of my life. A couple years after that magazine spread, post-movie career Courtney Love released Celebrity Skin with her band Hole. It was a huge departure from the rougher Live Through This, and even further away from Pretty on the Inside. I feel a little like an infidel saying this, but it's still my favorite Hole album.

Yes, the production is clean, clean, clean and all the punk dissonance has been replaced by a radio-friendly, melodic rock sound, but is that really such a bad thing? Why has it become the bane of my generation for its icons to make a commercial rock album? Done well, commercial rock is, well, pretty damn awesome, and Courtney's always had a great rock voice.

One other thing I've noticed, going back more than ten years later: Courtney was about my age when all these songs were written. Maybe it's that late-thirties ennui that makes it so relatable now (and I can't even pretend to have led half the life she has).