Recommend me something similar to Hole's 'Celebrity Skin'

The combined pixie-dust of Corgan and Michael Beinhorn on Celebrity Skin is sheer pop alchemy. I love it.

I am reminded of Whitechocolatespaceegg --> Liz Phair.

I should clarify Eppy - there's definite similarities in the music, it's just that the difference in vocals makes me tend to overlook them.

I'd say the closest Smashing Pumpkins track might actually be "Today" because it's their sunniest.

IMO, the contrast between the sunny production and the nihilistic lyrics, a la Steely Dan, is a central ingredient that sets it apart from Corgan

This is amusing to me because Corgan's said the song was written on a birthday when he was thinking about committing suicide, and that therefore the intent of the song is thoroughly sarcastic.

i forget, did he have a hand in "petals"? that song kills me... sheesh, talk about fleetwood goth. completely girly and witchy.

Urgent & Key Corgan tracks: title track, "Hit So Hard", "Malibu", "Petals"

Urgent & Key Non-Corgan tracks: "Awful", "Use Once & Destroy", "Northern Star", "Boys on the Radio"

So I sorta think it's about half 'n'half.

Ned perhaps the difference b/w Celebrity Skin and "Today" is that the irony isn't laid quite so bare - the choruses of "Today" call out the verses as liars, whereas on the sunny numbers on Celebrity Skin do not let their masks slip so much, or perhaps it's that they're pitched at a place where sunniness and suicidal depression can co-exist more easily . "Awful", "Malibu", "Boys on the Radio" all focus around notions of disillusion and dissolution, damage and decay - not physical but emotional/psych/social... "How are you so burned when you're barely on fire?" "I know that you were rotten to the core"... and yet this does not render their sunniness sarcastic, they're much more wistful than anything else, and maybe this is why people think of "1979" (except that "1979" is only wistful: Corgan is more interesting in focusing on one particular emotion and taking it to extremes, it's the goth in him. Courtney is aware that songs mean different things for different people, have multiple purposes. This is perhaps the pop star in her)

.I'm tempted to think the use of musical sunniness in Celebrity Skin is a meta-statement about the triumph of music over biography. In the same way that Fleetwood Mac's songs persevere on radio long after everyone has forgotten the intra-band warfare, Courtney's lyrics seem obsessively focused on the afterlife of Nirvana etc. ("all the boys on the radio/they crash and burn they fold and fade so slow..."), "the legacy" for better or worse. So she writes (or co-writes) deliberately "timeless"-sounding rock music to comment on the fragility of a moment in rock - the star winks out but the songs live on, she says, and I want mine to as well..

xpost oops Tim just kinda said this.

Oddly I really disliked "Hit So Hard" when I first got the album?!?!?

The only thing I recal thinking about this song is that it was a knockoff of "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)."

Personally, I also love "Heaven Tonight," even if it's just a musical excuse for Billy Corgan to make a Cheap Trick reference, and I think it's a sweet lullaby to Frances.

corgan wasn't involved in heaven tonight in any way. it's a love/erlandson composition, and it was courtney's idea to pay tribute to cheap trick by that reference.

"Playing Your Song" = the most "Live Through This" song on the album. LOVE IT.

Her enunciation of "FUCKIN' WONDERFUL" proves she's a great singer.

i think it's just that she's so scatterbrained that she has a new emotion every five seconds, or she can find a variety of different emotions in one stock "mood" (how many people ever only feel DEPRESSED when they're sad? no, they feel sarcastic, wistful, mad, confused, occasionally exhilarated).

The only thing I recal thinking about this song is that it was a knockoff of "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)."

it took me many years to admit this, but i like it more than "he hit me." it feels more vulnerable, not quite so glib and arch in its irony.

Well, smackdown to me, then :-D

I still think it's a great song.

sure! I love the whole record, why not. "Reasons.." has the "miles and miles of perfect skin" line in it, and a Pavement reference and "When the fire goes out you better learn to fake/It’s better to rise than fade away." so great.

perhaps it's that they're pitched at a place where sunniness and suicidal depression can co-exist more easily

I think it's basically.. the 90's was all about boys on the radio caught in, uh, downward spirals and Courtney's saying, stop, enough of this! (I agree.) I don't find it nihilistic in the least - all the references to passing moments & fading away are more.. acknowledging that & moving on, really. Never been a fan of Billy Corgan but he seems totally stuck in that old melodrama.

xpost

I agree: her lyrics are often exemplary. Compare the how-do-you-like-me? celebrity games of the title track with Nirvana's "Serve the Servants" and the latter just seems sour and enervated.

Not specifically, but her witty unpredictable's been discussed in a few other threads...

TS: "Malibu" versus "Simple Kind of Life"
ts: courtney vs brody
why do people on ILM hate "live through this" ?
Who are the great lyricists of today?

Stolen from a late 80s/90s L.A. band featuring Don Bolles, wasn't it?

-- jonfromsweden (jon.la...), March 14th, 2006.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

and i just noticed i used the word "great" two times too many.
-- jonfromsweden (jon.la...), March 14th, 2006. (jonfromsweden)

The remix:
i'm amazed too. and happy. this is a truly grebt album and to see this grebbt discussion, eight years later and without any focus on courtney love's public persona but all about the music, is grebbbt.

Almost 100 posts in, too. This place is weird without Alex in NYC...

I've only heard a couple of songs on Celebrity Skin, so I won't try. I prefer Autobiography to I Am Me, though I like the latter quite a lot; and when Mikael Wood reviewed Autobiography he said that basically it was this decade's Live Through This, so maybe I won't like Celebrity Skin quite as much as I like Live Through This.

(But Autobiography actually has much more of a spring in its step than Live Through This Has does. Autobiography explicates the pain so as to dance free of it. On Live Through This, the pain is a big part of the dance. As it is on the title song of I Am Me.)

I think you will enjoy Celebrity Skin, then.

I also love the other spin on the line darla quoted from "Awful": "It was punk, it was perfect, now it's awful!"

No-one's ever really explained to me the Tori/Courtney/Trent mythology behind "Professional Widow".