Beyond fake

Hollywood makeover be damned: Courtney Love is back. What was so inspiring about Love in her grunge years was she never attempted to cop a pose of any sort; she let it all out in a terrific and often terrifying spectacle. Her band Hole's new album proves that, even with the world's finest designers and most powerful spin doctors in her employ, Love couldn't cover up or stamp out that inner rage, those imperative urges that move her art and made Hole's prior two albums, Pretty on the Inside (1991) and Live Through This (1994), such visceral successes. It's not that anybody needs to see her falling apart at the seams again - we just want what we always got from Love in her music: the truth. While she struck emotional truths with her performance in The People Vs. Larry Flynt [1996], it's been through her songs that she comes clean personally - examining, even reveling in, the messy emotions inside, the cold realities most of us run from, if we acknowledge them at all. Call it the Hole truth; and with the long-awaited new Hole album Celebrity Skin, Love delivers yet again. Of course, what she's delivering is markedly different from her grunge days in sound and sensibility. But it shares an unbridled honesty with Live Through This, a record that very nearly defined its time - and was released just days after Love's husband, Kurt Cobain, killed himself in April 1994.

In his suicide note, Cobain quoted Neil Young's classic refrain: "It's better to burn out than fade away." On Celebrity Skin, Love responds to her dearly departed: "When the fire goes out you better learn to fake / It's better to rise than fade away." In this lyric we can read her survival strategy. Trauma affects us all differently; in Love, it manifested itself in an about-face, a cover-up of the unruly emotions she traded on. Love has always been a woman of extremes, so it probably should not have been so surprising that in constructing her new protective shell, around the time that she became a movie star, she went to the other extreme, coming up with a sanitized version of herself that was so squeaky clean and perfectly packaged it was hard to reconcile with the loose cannon of a mere few years ago.

Faking it is not a new concept for Love: "I fake it so real I am beyond fake" she boasted on Live Through This's "Doll Parts." And fans took her word for it when she went Hollywood. It's been said so frequently of Love these days that she really did want to be the cheerleader after all; that given the chance she went full-on ahead and became the Farrah Fawcett-style beauty queen that was parodied on the album cover of Live Through This. Love's public betrayal of all that she'd been was total. It was one thing to witness her physical transformation. Watching her become a perky Hollywood starlet felt like a stake through the heart. It also seemed patently false, but to Love it may not have been; perhaps she needed this reinvention to escape her troubled past, to distance herself from the trauma that was her very old self.

In the final track on Celebrity Skin, Love envisions the world as both a war and a whore. To an extent she, too, has been both. Love spent her rock star years throwing punches at anyone she deemed in her way and bullying journalists who might have a different version of her truth, but she was quick to sell out her punk fury for the soft focus lens of Hollywood. One positive thing Nick Broomfield's scathing documentary Kurt and Courtney did for Love was to give viewers insight into her volatile behavior. Love's pugnacious father Hank Harrison brags onscreen about the pit bulls he used to keep his daughter in line in her youth. A few frames later we hear Love herself threatening a journalist on an answering machine. In this scene she is the spitting image of her father; it is an absolutely chilling moment.

If Love has truly learned how to keep herself from becoming that, then she has really overcome, in both her life and art. And Celebrity Skin suggests she has: this time she's not falling down or spiraling out of control but taking control of herself and her image. The packaging and selling of her self and image as a pop commodity is a prevalent theme on the album, and it's one that Love has always understood; only now she's getting more buck for her bang. "You want a part of me?" she snaps in a dare that concludes the title track, "Well, I'm not selling it cheap."

Say what you will about how she got where she is today - she's a master manipulator, a calculating conniver, "she's full of poison, she obliterated everything she kissed" as Love sings on "Celebrity Skin" - but ultimately it is all extraneous to the merits of her art. Though in her art, too, there's been speculation about authenticity: Who did write these songs, melodies, hooks? Did her late husband have a strong hand in the crafting of Live Through This? Did Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan get the full credit he deserves on this new record? (He's listed as cowriter for the music to five tracks.) No matter. It's always been Love's contribution to the works that brought them to life: her unapologetic, unrepentant words. Others may have had a hand in lighting the matches, but the fire is all her own.