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.

The Vinegar Tasters c. 1970

21. JUDY COLLINS, "Both Sides Now"
Produced by Mark Abramson; written by Joni Mitchell
Elektra 45639 1968 Billboard # 8

22. HOLE, "Clouds"
Produced by Kim Gordon and Don Fleming; written by Joni Mitchell
1991 Did not make pop charts

23. JONI MITCHELL, "Both Sides Now"
Produced by Paul Rothchild; written by Joni Mitchell
1969 Did not make pop charts

Behold the Vinegar Tasters! The illustration above is supposed to be an allegorical representation of three major Asian philosophies, with the three men around the barrel of vinegar meant to represent (from left to right) Confucius, Buddha, and Lao-Tse. The copy I've put up of the woodcut in question is pretty murky, but I'm told you're supposed to read their facial expressions as sour, bitter, and smiling in that order, indicating the affective bent of their views on the pain of earthly existence.

If we made a similar triptych of Joni Mitchell, Courtney Love, and Judy Collins gathered around this song, their expressions would not exactly match those of Confucius, Buddha, and Lao-Tse, but there would be a certain correspondence. Collins' version remains, I think, the most widely known and by far the sunniest interpretation of the song. Even if you could somehow remove that Mitch Milleresque glockenspiel from the arrangement, Collins still seems to grant only lip service in her performance to the downside of life. She may say that she recalls life's illusions, but she seems to be embracing them too. Collins, like Lao-Tse, seems to believe that even the vinegar of life is part of the natural order.

Courtney Love and the rest of Hole, however, seem to be the Buddhists in this interpretative picture. In Love's defense, she was allegedly forced by her hippie parents to sing this song repeatedly at the dinner table growing up, and that's enough to drive anyone to make a dirge out of even the most innocuous tune. But if Collins seems inclined to stress the Win side of life, Hole seems equally as inclined to stress the Lose side of the equation. Something's gained for Collins in living every day, but much more is lost for the members of Hole. Like Buddha, Love and her friends seem inclined to find life to be a world of dust, pain, and illusion. (And after all, wasn't it Buddha who taught his followers to seek Nirvana?)

And then there's Joni, who actually wrote the song, of course, and who serves as the Confucius of this philosophical hootenanny. Her accompaniment for the song is so simple that one probably doesn't notice it. It's just an acoustic guitar--"just," as if an experienced guitarist can't make her instrument speak with dozens of different voices and intents. Both Collins and Hole pile on the instruments in their arrangements, pile on the noise, to support willful sunniness or cloudiness as their temperaments lead them. Mitchell, though, just strums with a pick, adding a little figure at the end of each refrain that grows more tentative with each verse. And her strumming hits the downbeat so hard each time in most measures that one could easily interpret it as the other shoe of fate dropping, no matter what the singer thinks or plans. As far as her vocal is concerned, she's not angry the way Love is, nor is she bravely facing the deluge the way Collins may be. She just seems . . . resigned.


So who's the optimist in this picture? Who's the nihilist? Who's the realist? Like almost everything else in this life, it's open to interpretation.