Awful. Hole. 1998. DGC.

 If you can recall with any degree of clarity Courtney Love’s televised appearances during the heights of her popularity in the nineties, it might be with a shudder of embarrassment. Love was determinedly messy and her every move, though apparently spontaneous, was itself a calculated provocation. She seemed always in the business of wresting celebrity from its media managers—the journalists, the photographers, the interviewers from MTV—and, consistently, she deliberately made herself appear uncool before them.   Her restlessness made a lot of people uncomfortable, as if unpredictability made her more dangerous than, say, Howard Stern. In January, 1998, female sexuality and the male power dynamic reached an exploitative nadir in the States when, in a television speech, President Bill Clinton spoke the now infamous line, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Nine months later, Hole released Celebrity Skin, its third record. The third single from that album, Awful reads like a checklist for the ritualization process that teenage sexual exploitation has become, except that the song actually plays like that process with the social stigma removed, making it a celebratory power exchange. The twentieth century is the tale of alternative power economies, a tale collected in Steven Levitt’s and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics (2005, William Morrow). Rock and roll, pornography, the drug trade; cultural shibboleths from the last century, now absorbed into the power hungry maw of a globally consolidated capitalist-politics machine that dominates the new century, and celebrated, with our help, by social media. Certainly, this was not the aesthetic principle of beauty that Love calls for at Awful’s climax, but she foresaw that too: “It was punk. Yeah, it was perfect, now it’s awful.” The song—which, compared to 1994’s Live Through This, is overproduced for easy consumption—still gleams with priceless irony, the only weapon left to the powerless, and the one, if deployed properly, that stabs at the truth and refuses commodification.

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