Names and Things

108. J. GEILS BAND, "Centerfold"
Produced and written by Seth Justman
EMI America 8102 1981 Billboard: # 1

109. HOLE, "Celebrity Skin"
Produced by Michael Beinhorn; written by Billy Corgan, Eric Erlandson, & Courtney Love
DGC 1194 1998 Billboard: # 85

There's an old friend of mine from high school--let's call her "Nellie," because she played Nellie Forbush to my Emile de Becque back in the day--if you Google Nellie's real name, the first eight or so hits refer to a nude scene from a fairly well-known Hollywood film that was released around the time I knew her. She is nude in that movie, even in that scene, but the pictures that those webpages connect to her name are not pictures of her.

For someone of a younger generation, the idea that there could be nude photographs of a friend of mine up on the web must seem positively quaint. Gens X and Y have been snapping pics and videos of each other and posting them online with abandon now for at least a decade. That's one of the many things that makes J. Geils' "Centerfold" a real historical artifact: an era in which you could be surprised to encounter nude images of someone you knew in school seems so very long ago. We have all been so fully pornographied now that some people can actually be blase about it.

But Peter Wolf is not singing in this silly little single about someone who made private photos that suddenly became available to millions of people. He's singing--well, he's actually singing about himself (typical man), but the young woman whom he is remembering in this song presumably chose to allow a professional to take nude photographs of her, possibly as a stepping stone to a more varied career in the entertainment industry. That was the case with my old friend Nellie: the producers of that film she was in spotted her during a location shoot in Manhattan, asked her if she wanted to be in another scene, there was nudity involved, would she mind that, etc. As it turned out, she was in a second movie the following year, also shot in Manhattan, and this time she wore lingerie. Among us old theatre pals (who were not seeing much of her anymore at that point), the joke was that in her third movie she would be fully clothed. As far as I know, she was never in a third movie.

To hear Courtney Love sing about it, though, such decisions might actually be a viable career path--or maybe not. It feels as if Love is doing that chicken-hearted thing here of being autobiographically ironic by pretending her song is about someone else. Let's not kid ourselves, though: this song is most assuredly about her, even if the publication she was plagued by was probably not Celebrity Skin but Fox Mulder's favorite Celebrity Sleuth. In retrospect, it's clear now that the marketing of nude, semi-nude, or just plain titillating images of celebrities was only getting warmed up in the pre-Britney-Lindsay-and-Paris era when this single was released. I'm sure at the time Courtney thought that she had the whole situation under control. I'm using them, I bet she thought, they're not using me. If she chose to wear an outrageous outfit to get publicity, or to play Larry Flynt's mistress in order to advance her acting career, she was using people's image of her as a way of gaining wider currency for herself.

This seems like another one of those cases--and there are so many of them in pop--where the song in time proves so much wiser than the singer. Ten years on, I'm not sure I'd say that Courtney Love used the star-making machinery more than it used her. The popular image of Love today mostly casts her as the multiply addicted bimbo who married St. Kurt, while the fact is that she was responsible for at least one great rock and roll album (Live through This) and at least a half-dozen very thoughtful songs. That's no small achievement. Still, to a lot of people, she's little more than bright blonde hair, a ton of eye makeup, and a pair of prominently displayed breasts.

As Shakespeare's Mark Antony maybe should have said, the porn that women do lives long after them, but their art is oft interred with their plummeting CD sales. That's why I'm so glad that all those webpages got Nellie's real name wrong--no, that they got her name right and her body wrong. Because Nellie's body should belong to her. Images of it should not be out there for idiots to drool over. Like Courtney Love, the Nellie I knew was an artist, in this case a truly gifted comic actress. I hate thinking of her reduced to a tough answer in a porn trivia game.