Brushfires are common in Southern California. Due to the inherent dryness of the climate coupled with the Santa Anas, I grew up generally unimpressed by minor conflagrations; expected them as the norm. Just the price you pay for living here, I thought. Even when one came within a few miles from my house, and another one that flared up just down the hill, it was never all that unsurprising or disturbing, and there was always the expectation that it would be quickly snuffed.
This cavalier attitude is one of the great, amazing, deluded character traits of Southern California. We make this ingrained pact with the environment to accept potential disaster in exchange for living in such a beautiful part of the world.
I'll live on a faultline if it means I get a nice view!
The rest of the world hates us and relishes our every foible, but have you seen the backyard? Yes, that's the ocean!
The fires just destroyed my home. Guess I'll rebuild it! [months later] Oh no! Mudslides!
What I love about Los Angeles is its inherent fakeness, its insincerity, its complete lack of authenticity and the attendant lack of pretense about history. As such, it does not suffer the burden of its past like, say, the South or New England, and is seemingly free to constant change without much zealotry. It is, for better or worse, the perfect theoretical American city. If America was founded by Brits yearning for religious and social freedom, then Los Angeles was founded by these early Americans and their indignant, righteous hubris that the West was theirs. And what better signpost for religious and social freedom than Los Angeles, with its Scientology and cults and the free-for-all that is Sunset Blvd? You asked for it, America. We stole water and imported palm trees to build a fake paradise as a shrine to your dreams and visions of What We Could Become, so we shouldn't be surprised when nature rebels.
This is not to make light of the current situation, which is ghastly and terrifying. Speaking as someone who lived through the fires of 2003--four years later and the similarities are striking--there is nothing quite like the continual ash fall; the thick cloud of reddish brown obscuring the sky day and night; the smell and tactility of the air seemingly frying; and the fear of spontaneity, that your home will be next.
This is, however, a music blog, and this disaster feels like as perfect time as any to discuss Hole's seminal Southern California epic, Celebrity Skin (Everclear's "Santa Monica," what with its tailor-made "Leave the fire behind/Swim out past the breakers/Watch the world die" sentiment, seems most apropos--but what is there to analytically unpack when it already speaks for itself?).
What impresses, first and foremost, about Celebrity Skin is how it is able to lyrically, sonically, tonally represent the spirit of Los Angeles in all its beauty and vapidity and decay and paradoxes. It sounds, for one, like driving around the Greater L.A. Area: at first you're bombarded by flash and glitz, by the ocean and vistas, but you start noticing unsettling things--the trash on Hollywood Blvd, the deep race-class divide, or the rats living in the palm trees, let's say. And then you drive further out, into strip malls and tract housing and industrial landscapes. It gets pretty ugly out there, no matter that you're still, technically, in glam L.A.
It also sounds like a smart person's reaction to/critique of the city. There is a strong ambivalence to Los Angeles' hollow/depth dichotomy that runs as a seeming theoretical stance throughout the album's songs, its content and sonics. Which mirrors the city's inhabitants as well: even the smart Los Angelenos are concerned with shallow ephemera, with surface pleasure, hedonism, and aesthetics. And, trainwreck personality she may be, there is certainly no rock intellect quite like Courtney Love.
"Oh make me over," she snarls to begin the record, following feedback that recalls the vacuum of liposuction and a glam-metal cockrock riff (supplied by Billy Corgan), and as an opening statement of declarative intent this word+sonic combo might as well be L.A.'s rock Preamble. "Oh make me over/I'm all I wanna be": what better manifesto for a transplant looking for re-invention/suscitation/juvenation in this City of No History? Here, you can become everything you want, granted you're willing to pay every price. Lyrically, Love sets up all the archetypes: "wilted and faded, somewhere in Hollywood," the "hooker-waitress-model-actress" is "a star now" but also might as well "go nameless" in such a cruel, corrupt social system as this, where you can easily go from "might-have-been" to "never-was" to "forgotten." By the end, you know your worth, and aren't "selling cheap." This "selling cheap" epilogue is both hilarious and poignant in its acceptance of compromise that you've already undertaken ("Oh make me over"), and obviously you have to sell yourself for notice/recognition/acclaim, but you've set a price. In spite of the compromises, you still have some semblance of dignity.
And that's just track one. "Awful" bounces along like those great punk-to-pop Los Angelenos the Go-Gos while deriding the music industry that corrupts the "sweet cherry" of "little girls," and with it's "royalty rate[s]," turning "perfect" punk into something awful, like you (meaning Courtney or our Courtney-like L.A. protagonist), you compromised sell-out whore. "Hit So Hard" is an odd, debatably postmodern rewrite of the Crystals' "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)," except without all the archly cynical production and distant singing, and with empathic lyrics like "He's cold/Give him a candy coat," it becomes more of a Lifetime TV movie than the winkingly stoic original, replete with perverse religious awakening. Out-ironied by Carole King? Who would have thought. Unless Courtney's sincerity is all irony, which I wouldn't put past her.
With the glossy confectionary production of opening triptych "Celebrity Skin"/"Awful"/"Hit So Hard" hiding some knotty lyrical content, one would think that, with a title like "Malibu," the next song would follow suit. It is, instead, the glorious turning point of the record. The production certainly follows in line with the preceding trio, but only up to a point. While it is probably the lushest sounding recording on the album, it is at this point where the record begins its irreversible rot. The guitars begin by ringing and crashing like the Pacific onto the vaunted shoreline of Malibu, Courtney cooing at the top of her register like the savior angel she intends to be for the song's "desperate" You, with the help of Melissa Auf der Maur's glorious backing harmonies. But then it begins to sound like undertow, with the onset of the chorus, where the guitars drive darker and the drums crash heavily, destroying the verse's optimistic flutter. Courtney tries to keep it Hopeful and Pop and Wish-Fulfillment, but altogether abandons it when she snarls "And I knew," followed by a Joy Division reference, which is all the necessary defeatism you need to get the point across. By the end's "I can't be near you/The light just radiates," producer Michael Beinhorn adds a filter that makes Courtney's voice sound like water in your ears. Are you drowning? Is she in heaven, whispering the words to you from on high? Or are you, and she screaming upwards into the clouds and sky? At any rate, no trip to Malibu--no matter how damned beautiful it is--is gonna save you. Especially not when it's all on fire.
The following quartet is what happens when paradise proves less spectacular than you'd originally thought. When all the compromise comes back to haunt you, or when history--even that which you thought you'd escaped, or thought was nonexistent--catches up to you. You may also be going to the Valley, which is why things are getting ugly.
For Courtney, Kurt starts rearing his head. In "Reasons To Be Beautiful," she sneers at his famous suicide note. "Dying" rewrites his "I think I'm dumb" as an affirmative. The City of Industrial "Use Once & Destroy" lifts its title from "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter," or a syringe. And then there's the Pumpkins-string death dirge of "Northern Star," running "to the pines," alluding to Cobain's own final death rattle at the end of MTV Unplugged.
The damage has been done at this point. Hole attempts to shoo away the storm clouds with the general upbeatness of "Boys on the Radio," the greatest song Fleetwood Mac never recorded, but it's "endless summer night"s are more elegiac and wistful than celebratory. "Heaven Tonight" seems like a slap-in-the-face parody after all the preceding gravitas, but when you think of it as equestrian daydreams of a Torrance girl, then it continues the depressiveness. We're headfirst in the Valley now, as "Playing Your Song" regresses to suburban grunge angst, yelling about how "they built a mall." This town will co-opt everything it can.
Which brings us to the big, (melo)dramatic conclusion of "Petals." In it, the flowers that have "bloomed and blossomed" have also quickly wilted, and Courtney decides that our earlier protagonist--that "walking study in demonology," that "hooker-waitress-model-actress," that sellout--is "too pure for this world," and it is instead the world that is the whore, not the girl. In effect, she's right. She has played the game according to its rules for the sake of status hunger, only to find that the game is corrupt, and has made her corrupt herself. "Tear the petals off of you/Make you tell the truth," she implores, but what truth is there to find when it's all dishonest? When it's all fake? Didn't you tear off everything that was true about you--the body fat, the bad hair, the big nose, your too-ethnic name--to discover the truth of the lie? What petals are left, and what more truth is there? The hedonism of earlier has given way to a near-pious longing for salvation. Another re-invention/surrection/juvenation. No wonder this city has so many religions. And even those are fake. It's heaven and hell on the coast. And after these fires, the landscape will be reborn again. Until the rains come, and the flashfloods enable mudslides in the next apocalypse. Los Angeles: used more than once, never destroyed. It keeps rising from death. I am at its altar, and pray for its safety.
What a self-centered demigod.
And just to prove that she knows what she's talking about:
all photos courtesy of latimes.com
Recent Comments