Celebrity Skin
by Hole
- 134
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 44
- Danceability
- 0
- Acousticness
Hole had gone quiet in 1996 as Courtney Love's film career took off. The following year, the band came back to write and record "Celebrity Skin." Love and guitarist Eric Erlandson wrote it with Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins. Love later said Corgan supplied the main guitar riff. Michael Beinhorn produced, Deen Castronovo played drums, and Melissa Auf der Maur was on bass.
Love's lyrics borrow a line from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem "A Superscription," "My name is might-have-been," and take "pound of flesh" from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. The title is shared with an independent magazine showing celebrity nudity and with a short-lived Los Angeles punk group that included former Germs drummer Don Bolles.
Released on August 31, 1998, it was the first single from the album of the same name. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart on October 10, the only Hole single to do so. It earned two Grammy nominations. Nancy Bardawil directed the video. Drummer Patty Schemel, still in the band, does not appear in it. Samantha Maloney stood in with red hair, and Schemel learned a video was planned only after it was shot.
Celebrity Skin runs at 134 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.79 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 448 ms. It is in A major, Camelot 11B, which shares its notes with F# minor and mixes cleanly with D major and E major.
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