Celebrity Skin
Hole
The New Abnormal
The Strokes
All The Young Dudes
Mott the Hoople
Courtney Love was one of the visionary figures in the popular music of the 1990s. By the time her third and final album of the decade with her band, Hole, was released, she was one of the world’s most famous musicians, and Celebrity Skin reflects that on several fronts. The lyrics to the title track evoke Shakespeare (“I’m glad I came here with your pound of flesh”), the poet Anne Sexton (“My name is ‘never-was’”) and the titular exploitative porn magazine to illustrate the disposability of women in the entertainment industry aspiring to fame. The lyrics are disturbingly cutting, but the next song, “Awful”, goes further, looking through a wider lens at the violence of the system (“They know how to break all the girls like you/They rob the souls of the girls like you”) that underpins it.
Unlike the scabrous sound of Hole’s previous albums, the band brought in Billy Corgan and Soundgarden producer Michael Beinhorn to give Celebrity Skin an ultra-produced, radio-ready sheen. The resulting glossy hooks of the songs lend an additional layer of complexity – the music has the liberatory power of the classic rock it was modeled on but the lyrics tell the story of the women and girls who too often were collateral damage of the male musicians who made it.
The New Abnormal, released almost two decades after The Strokes’ classic debut Is This It, was an altogether successful reset. An extraordinarily tight rhythm section anchored their signature sound, but during the group’s 2010s wilderness period, the music – even at its best – was frequently jarring, sounding like machines in a factory cramming as many ideas as possible into a three-minute song. They finally slowed down and stretched out on The New Abnormal, and the result was some of their most effortlessly beautiful and affecting music since their early days. “The Adults Are Talking” is a definitive song for the band, with a hypnotically clicking beat and a circular melody, but finds its strength in restraint. “Selfless” is achingly pretty, and the closing “Ode to the Mets” employs the band’s chiming guitar playing to articulate devotion and disappointment in a way only an artist 20 years in could pull off
Exhausted and demoralized after several years of the recording/touring cycle with no commercial success, by early 1972 Mott the Hoople disbanded in defeat. As the legend goes, the British group’s tiny devoted fan base included David Bowie, at that moment a burgeoning star. Bowie convinced them to stay together by giving them the song “All the Young Dudes” and producing what became their long-awaited commercial breakthrough. Those two events – the pathetic end followed by a sudden reversal of fortune, framed the rest of the band’s self-mythologizing career. Elegiac, descending chords and gay-coded lyrics made the title track a definitive moment of the UK glam rock era. Lines like “oh, brother, you’ve guessed/I’m a dude, dad” and the song-closing exhortation “I’ve wanted to do this for years!” are still startlingly frank and exuberant. Mott’s records had always been lean, tough and wryly literate; reductively, they sounded like Highway 61 Revisited as played by The Stones – so they adapted to Bowie’s glam influence while still sounding like themselves. Their own songwriting had tightened up in the interim as well. “Momma’s Little Jewel,” “Sucker” and “One of the Boys” added swing to their usual guitar nastiness. Anchoring it all was Ian Hunter’s croaking voice, laden with pathos, and lyrics compassionate and cynical in their depictions of the moral rot at the core of the music business. That became Mott’s primary concern on All the Young Dudes and its two follow ups, which form the basis of the band’s second act.
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