Hole – Awful

I kept to the party line on Celebrity Skin at first–i.e. it was a half-assed Billy Corgan ripoff, and why wasn’t Courtney still in mourning for Kurt, blah blah blah. But then a kid wanted to sing “Malibu” and asked me to play guitar, and lent me the CD in order to learn the song. And besides falling head-over-heels in love with “Malibu,” I discovered what I think, along with “Violet,” is the real gem of the Courtney Love catalog: “Awful.”

You can’t even pin this one on Billy, since the song is basically the same chord progression over and over, with little minor variations, so it’s really the lyrics and the delivery that carry it. And oh, the lyrics. First off is a theme Courtney’s gotten majorly into of late, and one I really, really like: the way the structure of the music business has an effect on the art that comes out of it. And it’s way more nuanced and informed than your usual “they don’t, like, respect the music, man” stuff we’d usually get. The little callout that starts it all (“they royalty rate all the girls like you”) is a cool little reference to the internal legal structure of the biz, where labels use the power they have over new bands to enforce a uniform royalty rate (usually 11 X 3/4) that limits the one thing most artists make money from: the publishing (songwriting) royalties. It’s a bit too much to get into in a guest-blogging spot, but Courtney has written about it a good bit in the last two years, both in the widely-circulated speech (which contains some errors, but never mind that now) and, if you’re willing to parse her reference-laden syntax, on numerous posts on the Velvet Rope. Maybe I’m biased, but I do think understanding the way the biz works is vital to any musician or even music fan who’s into pop. (Jay-Z, for instance, is lots more enjoyable at that point–“I know who I paid, dawg–Searchlight Publishing.”) Courtney, more than almost anyone else I can think of, has done a lot to make people aware of how the legal structure of the biz works, and that’s a valuable thing.

Then it’s on to another great theme: the whole self-aware Eminem stuff that we all like so much. (“I was punk! Now I’m just stupid! I’m so awful.”) Court’s had shots taken at her by everybody at this point, so it’s nice to see this, especially in relation to the rest of the song. Then a brief detour to some teenage-girl-power stuff (“just shut up, you’re only 16”), which, honestly, I’ve always loved. Girl nerds need all the help they can get, because they can turn out the kewlest anyway.

But then: oh then, then comes what must be one of the best couplets in all of pop music. And it comes and goes really fast, Courtney doesn’t linger on it or repeat it, but I’ll be honest, this makes me cry every goddamn time I hear it:

If the world is so wrong, yeah, you can break them all with one song.

If the world is so wrong, yeah you can take it all with one song.

Now, how beautiful is that? What I love is the turn that happens between these two lines, a turn that I think a lot of the grunge kids were heading towards, but got sidetracked, by and large: from the nihilism of wanting to destroy the world to the hope of trying to engage with it. It’s in the continuum of “I’m mad and going to do something about it!” Black Flag LA hardcore -> “I’m depressed and going to get stoned” Seattle grunge -> …well, I’m not exactly sure what ->. But maybe, I think, it’s all coming back a bit in the sort of dance-music-embracing, pop-loving music that’s starting to bubble up right now; it’s no accident (and not, as some have implied, only frontrunneritis) that’s led Court to embrace the Strokes & co. Grunge was an undeniable anomaly, a space of freedom that opened up for a brief time and then closed, the result of which was to lead people back to the righteousness of the underground, even though we’d all hope that we could at least learn that lesson from grunge; but we never do, do we? We saw daylight for a bit, and instead of chasing it, we either did way too many drugs (Kurt, Kirkwood, the Deals, Jimmy Chamberlain, Kristen Pfaff, etc. etc.) or burrowed our heads back underground. But I think we’re starting to dig out again, and this is a couplet we could all stand to remember.

And that “if”: it’s a challenge to a certain assumption, that the world is corrupted and debased and saying well, if so, then this music we all love and which seems to have such power should be able to do something about that. And the fact that it doesn’t means that either you’re going to have to give up and accept that the world is irredeemably fucked up; that you can fix it, you just need to write that one song; or that the world is actually OK, which is why one song can’t actually make that much of a difference (c.f. art-under-oppression theories). The second choice is a good one–I’m all for people chasing the perfect song–but I think I prefer the third.

Still, Court goes for the chase-the-perfect-song thing with the final lines: “They bought it all, just build a new one, make it beautiful.” It’s a good point, and a great turn, and the emphasis on beauty–well, not what you’d expect from a star-fucking junkie whore, is it? No it’s not, and maybe that should clue us in that Courtney, crazy though she may undeniably be, is more than just the ex- we all love to hate. The lovely way the “I was punk! Now I’m just stupid!” comes back at the end–how she’s admitting that yeah, she’s just stupid; she’s not morally pure and righteous and indie. She likes having songs people listen to. She wants to actually do something with it, not just stay within a certain circle of people who all agree on everything anyway. And yeah, I think that, set to a great melody and a great arrangement, is about all I can ask for in a song.