LA woman

Courtney Love's California dream

by Josh Kun

I liked it better when Courtney Love was Northwest-identified. She was easier to ignore. But now that she's gone LA -- now that she's made herself at home in a 90210 palace, hooked up with actor boyfriend X, and headlined a Viper Room benefit for her yoga center -- an Angeleno native like me can't help taking notice.

Of course, Courtney hasn't just gone LA. She's exploiting the city's history as the capital of manufactured celebrity, tapping its symbology of excess, and remaking herself with the help of its pomo slipperiness. Her new tactic is not to just drive down Melrose and invite Sandra Bernhard for a cappuccino at Red (as Sandra claims on her new album I'm Still Here Dammit) but to explain herself through LA and to reposition herself as an LA musician. This impulse is at its flimsiest in the Chinatown-meets-Day of the Locust packaging of Hole's latest album, Celebrity Skin (Geffen): the pictures of burning palm trees next to shots of the Department of Water & Power.

In the interview that appears in the January Allure, the air-brushed cover girl even talks like an LA-booster mythologist. Courtney begins with the gold rush -- it "literally changed the global economy forever." And Love compares her own move to LA to the way gold prospectors risked all looking for new lives and new fortunes. Then it's on to plastic surgery, which now that she's an LA girl is beyond being safe to admit to -- it's a pre-requisite. Her confession that she went under the knife for two nose jobs is so vintage LA-speak that it feels studied, or just plain cribbed from Aaron Spelling or Gregg Araki: "If I'm gonna speak and use my voice and my ability to communicate a character and a nuance, I have to be somewhat pleasing to look at. I don't want to play best friends and kooky villains. So I whacked it."

Unfortunately, this self-consciousness is absent from Courtney's most extended LA riff yet, the video for Hole's "Malibu," which wants more than anything to be taken seriously as a video about LA image and LA apocalypse. After overhead shots of backyard pools, wrecking balls crashing through city simulations, and endless cuts to more of those fire-blazed palm trees, it ends with a pouty, sea-nymph Courtney walking through a beach full of siliconed Baywatch blondes -- sort of City of Angels-meets-"California Girls," the David Lee Roth version. She's not wearing the red lifeguard one-piece, not clutching a plastic baby, and she is the only one, we're supposed to believe, who has any free will. We're also supposed to believe that her blonde is different from their blonde, her breast implants different from theirs, her story different from Pamela Anderson's, though if Courtney were going for a real critique, she should have donned the Baywatch gear herself.

As Mike Davis reminds us in Ecology of Fear, earth-scorching firestorms rip through Malibu almost every two years. But the fires in Hole's "Malibu" -- polite flames that neatly cling to palms and bark and spot the sand like Friday-night bonfires -- are nothing like the Santa Ana over-dry-chaparral fires that burned celebrities out of their hillside mansions in 1993. Davis makes "the case for letting Malibu burn" because Malibu will always burn (he calls it "the wildfire capital of North America"), and the rich folks who live on the hill will always push the land to its sustainable limit and will always be rescued and then bailed out.

In "Malibu," Hole make the case for letting Malibu burn so they can pose in front of it. They let it burn so that they can be celebrities and arsonists, so that they can see their celebrity skin aglow in the fake acid orange of a coastline that, as Courtney herself sings, is "barely on fire."

On the radar

* The way Lucinda Williams sings "coffee, eggs, and bacon" on the title track to Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (Mercury).

* Mr. Dibbs and the rest of the 1200 Hobos posing as turntable apocalypse cultists on Presage's Outer Perimeter (Future Primitive Sound).

* Minnie Riperton's haunting "Loving You" Burger King ads.

* Africa returning to itself via Cuba on the reissue of Las Maravillas de Mali's 1965 homonymous debut on Maestro Sound.

* April March's perfection (invention?) of Francoface on behalf of her new Chrominance Decoder (Ideal).