![]() The connection to water ran deeper for a band whose members were mostly very into astrology. Drowning emerged as a clear metaphor for everyone they had lost. Two months before Kristen’s death, Kurt had died, submerged in his own addiction and physical and inner torment. During the writing of the album, Jeff Buckley, with whom Courtney had been friends, drowned in a river. New bassist Melissa Auf der Maur’s father died of lung cancer. Guitarist Eric Erlandson’s father had died, according to Eric in a 1998 interview with Rolling Stone, almost “drowning in his own body, he couldn’t breathe”. On the inside of the CD, a dedication reads: “…To all the stolen water of Los Angeles and to anyone who ever drowned.” In 1994 Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff tragically overdosed and died in a bathtub. This was a Courtney no one could imagine.” This was a product of New Courtney. “She was glamorous and pretty, no track marks. “I think a lot of us fans had a sense of relief when Celebrity Skin came out,” says Tisha, a fan and ex-addict, who, like others had been worried about losing her to drugs or suicide, given what she’d been through with Kurt and the media. This pop-rock product was inseparable from Courtney: the woman and the concept. ![]() This was a love-hate letter to Los Angeles, delivered by a Courtney Love now with beachy blonde curls, dressed in pastels with glittery eyes wide and minus the irony that had until this point characterised the 90s, particularly within rock. ![]() In the eyes of the public and music press, who still packaged her as all of these symbols – for example, on this Celebrity Skin album cycle she made NME promise before speaking with them that they wouldn’t write whore, bitch, widow or murderer on the cover – she was a living, breathing, screaming, fucking study and Los Angeles, rather than Seattle, was now her stage. Non-fans went to Hole gigs in 19 to witness The Courtney Show, perversely intrigued by a distraught woman tossing herself into the crowd or starting diatribes about the husband she had just lost. Moreover she knew people craved someone in pop culture to enact the roles. In interviews and music, Love has always acknowledged and played with archetypes – a witch (vengeful and angry female, bog monster of a woman), Medusa or Siren (bewitching Yoko slut who drags men, especially deified grunge gods, to their doom), evil widow (Touring? Half-naked? Dating? Grieving in the ‘wrong’ ways) and Medea-level twisted mother (neglectful, addict bearer of child as referenced in “Plump” lyrics “ I don’t do the dishes / I throw them in the crib”).
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