HOLE – CELEBRITY SKIN – VINYL LP – NEW SEALED - RARE - COURTNEY COBAIN NIRVANA

	€		58
	$		67

 HOLE – CELEBRITY SKIN – VINYL LP – NEW SEALED! - RARE

Condition: Mint

Long Out Of Print

Label: Geffen

CAT NO- 425 164-1 

Year of release:1998 (September) Europe

Producers: Beinhard/Erlanson

Tracklisting

Celebrity Skin

Awful

Hit So Hard

Malibu

Reasons To Be Beautiful

Dying

Use Once & Destroy

Northern Star

Boys On the Radio

Heaven Tonight

Playing Your Song

Petals

Recorded at Conway Studios, Los Angeles.
Additional recording at Quad Studios, NYC; Olympic Studios, London & Record Plant, L.A..
Mixed at South Beach Studios, Miami.
Additional mixing at Image Recording, L.A. and Ocean Way Recording, L.A..
Mastered by Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound, New York, NY.

Reviews:

THE FIRST THING YOU THINK when 'Celebrity Skin ' smacks you in the nose is that you may never need to hear a rock'n'roll record ever again. It feels that good as soon as Courtney sneers the word "demonology" across a monster riff revived from somewhere in LA in the late-'70s. And that's just the title track, the opener. Then it gets even better. The second track's called 'Awful' and it's an elegy for riot grrrl dressed up like Fleetwood Mac, Courtney boasting, "I was punk/Now I'm just stupid". Then it gets better again. 'Hit So Hard' is a blatant shocker, a rewrite of The Crystals' infamous 'He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)'.

And then you remember this: nobody understands the mechanics of pop stardom better than Courtney Love. Nobody knows when to kiss and tell, when to hide and seek, when to bleed and when to bite back like Courtney . She was born to it, birthed into it, totally bought all the shallow, constant make-overs as metaphor for our deepest, unsolvable anxieties. She's an actor. Always has been. We're being manipulated.

Courtney understands that the rock'n'roll lifestyle is what we all desire and she knows us all for fools. She's been there and she's trying to get out. Courtney knows when it's real, it's hell. She makes you believe one thing: you wouldn't ever want to be Courtney Love. And when cornered she can even make herself believe that she's doing it all for us, just so she can turn around and spit, "Fuck you, I'm not gonna be your martyr." It's her way of surviving. Ruining our fantasy. Selfish bitch.

Courtney thinks we want her dead and she's probably right. After all that Kurt business, she found her impetus to survive not in the natural human reaction of shock or remorse or fear or regret but in sheer bloody-minded revenge. After all that fucking mess, the instinct for revenge put her in the psychological place she needed to be to continue. Oh no, she wasn't the vampire that sucked the blood from Kurt's career, she was the lioness protecting her cub, Frances Bean, from the hovering vultures. From us.

It's fantastic how Courtney has turned around a life entirely and tirelessly dedicated to gaining our attention into a haughty scream for dignity. Which, of course, when you peel back all the bruised layers, is yet another demand for attention. It goes on and on. That list of things interviewers aren't allowed to ask: what it boils down to is Kurt. He's our hang-up, not hers. She's moved on, into the movies, and just because she didn't die around him doesn't mean she's about to let us sacrifice her career and her new film and her new album on the altar of someone else's ghost.

She's had the audacity to claim in interviews that 'Celebrity Skin ' isn't autobiographical. As if! She's a soap opera, she's a drama queen. She can't help it. That's who she is. She is one of the the few pampered egotists in the business who have earned the right to use the metaphor most frequently used on 'Celebrity Skin ': the drug/love one of getting under someone's skin ('Dying') or being hit so hard you see God ('Hit So Hard') as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if love and smack are both equal addictions. She's about the only person alive who could record something as gloriously inane and hopelessly escapist as 'Malibu' ("Don't lay down and die/Hey hey/You know what to do/Oh baby drive away to Malibu,/I>") and not be in the least ironic. She's about the only person left alive who can record something as miserable as the wailing lament 'Northern Star' and get away with it because... well, because we know where she's been and it could have been so much worse.

Much of 'Celebrity Skin ' seeks to sound bright, to con us that she's clear of the darkness. But the lyrics drag her back in. Even with 'Heaven Tonight', written for her daughter, she can find within her no positive images beyond the dreadful cliche of galloping horses and the surely unintentional morbidity of equating joy with being taken to heaven.

The brightness becomes her but Courtney can't accede. She's just to bitter. You can take the girl outta the Trailer Park but you can't take the trailer park outta girl. After all she's been through, it's amazing that what comes out of "Celebrity Skin " is not that death is the biggest betrayal of all, but that selling yourself cheap is. According to his awful suicide note, that's the reason Kurt killed himself. And that's still the core credo that Courtney clings to, viciously berating those she feels have let themselves down on 'Playing Your Song'. Still punk, then, but dressed up smarter.

Which is what the much-vaunted commercialised Fleetwood Mac sound is all about. It's her greatest revenge on the world for making her the way she is, for making her crave success so much. She thinks that in becoming the worlds biggest pop star, she will finally escape the treadmill to fame she's been on since birth. She thinks she's sucker-punched us into buying this record that, when it deservedly gets to Number One, she will finally be free to live a dull old life like the rest of us.

This Courtney Love, the Courtney of 'Celebrity Skin ' and 'Awful' and 'Hit So Hard' (among the greatest opening trio of songs on an album ever), is both monstrous and marvelous. She's the most pure, self-obsessed, perfect, honest, ugly, shameless, hypocritical, beautiful and transparent pop star on the planet. Even granted that the impetus behind most records is to reach as many people as possible, the naked agenda behind every note of 'Celebrity Skin ' is transparently to sell, sell, sell. It needs to be massive. Courtney craves the success. This is a person, remember, who reputedly spent many of those hours that Kurt was missing calling a radio station, pretending to be listeners requesting songs on her albums. Albums that, until now, were to damn harsh for the radio.

So 'Celebrity Skin ' is built for success because Courtney thinks that success is the answer. But it's not. It's respect. And there are grant her that. Because of her gender. Because of her past. Just because...Courtney Love should forget about us. We're not worth it. It's the cross she bears and the source of her genius that she can't. 'Celebrity Skin ' should be her, "[I]Fuck you, goodbye". She should swan off to Hollywood now and make millions of movies because she will never make a better record than this. Hardly anyone will. She should quit but she won't. Welcome back.

Another review:

"Hey, there's only us left now," Courtney Love notices on the title rocker that opéns Hole's new album, the band's first since 1994's Live Through This. Her co-stars are a bassist, Melissa Auf Der Maur; a drummer, Patty Schemel; and one pent-up guitarist, Eric Erlandson, who keeps going for the throat. Love sounds sick of people who don't miss vinyl, who don't understand how to use records as ways to make sense of their lives. Celebrity Skin — an album about fame, beauty, life and their opposites — is Hole's passionate response. It's sprung, flung and fun, high-impact, rock-fueled pop with the body and flexibility of really good hair. Hole are immediately in your face with the cheese-metal riffs and cuddly dissolves of "Celebrity Skin," a track full of cloudless energy that seems to explode the malaise that has surrounded Love since husband Kurt Cobain's death. "If the world is so wrong," Love insists next on "Awful," "Yeah, you can break them all/With one song." The album teems with sonic knockouts that make you see all sorts of stars. It's accessible, fiery and intimate — often at the same time. Here is a basic guitar record that's anything but basic. On high points like "Awful" and the gorgeous "Malibu," Hole act as though making big radio-ready hits smart now equals pure punk rock.

Love herself is a combination of Los Angeles messiness and London obliqueness, a mix of the ungovernable expressiveness of Stevie Nicks and the refracted psychedelicism of a British loner like Julian Cope. Producer Michael Beinhorn — who steered Soundgarden through the wiry heavens of guitar rock on Superunknown — helps pull together these two unlikely sides of Love's artistic personality. The result is more shiftingly special than the heavy-handed grunge of Live Through This. Celebrity Skin is all minimalist explosion, idiomatic flair and dead-on rhythms. On "Malibu," a ballad about separation and escape, Erlandson's guitar changes from silveriness to something rougher in a heartbeat. This is rock & roll that's supple enough to handle Love's amphitheaters of emotion.

It's wavy, like the Pacific Ocean. That's one of Love's other obsessions on Celebrity Skin: 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. So Billy Corgan, Hole's other major collaborator, who co-wrote five superb songs on Skin, makes real sense here. By advocating structure in '92 with the Smashing Pumpkins, Corgan stood firm for the L.A. tradition of closely considered studio rock as an avenue to freedom. The songs he worked on here include "Hit So Hard," an unhurried groove about full-on crushes that never lays back; "Dying," a slightly electronicized ballad where Love reveals her need to be "under your skin"; and "Petals," whose subtle minor-key remembrances and grand demands build to a spectacular climax. Clearly, Corgan has shown Hole how to relax and go for it.

Other songs are as impressive. On "Reasons to Be Beautiful," Hole recapture the Los Angeles of X, the first punk band to burlesque the downside of L.A. "Miles and miles of perfect skin," Love sings, "I swear I do, I fit right in." But as much as she loves a boho band like X, Love lives for grand gesture. After howling through "Northern Star," she cheers up with "Boys on the Radio," one of the most moving pop songs the Nineties have heard. The text involves Love's male competitors, and how she loves and hates them. As Erlandson switches from strum-y verses to exquisitely fucked-up chords ever so slightly behind the beat, Love's unreal vocal attitude — sensuous but distant, as though she's tugging at the pop nation, her life and your heart, from Venus — takes the song someplace else altogether. She considers "endless summer nights" that she knows are illusions but that she craves anyway. With its odd angle on heartbreak, the song is an end-of-the-century "More Than a Feeling." And as Celebrity Skin keeps arguing, that's something the world can sure use.

You don't need to know or love Courtney Love — to care about her highly chronicled trek from ripped cropped tops to Versace gowns — to enjoy this album. Even Love herself, though, can't deny her own myth: In the album's very first verse, she casts herself as "a walking study/In demonology." Love has not seized the occasion of the third Hole album to force her thoughts into a meticulous memoir, a well-put apology or even a clear explanation. On Celebrity Skin, she isn't especially after journalistic precision, and she isn't devising some glam plan to seem brilliant. She just knows exactly the kind of rock star she wants to be, and is it.

Privatauktion, ergo keine Rücknahme.

Viel Spaß beim Bieten und liebe Grüße,

Jitomate77