‘Reasons to Be Beautiful’: Hole’s most underrated song
By 1998, Hole rested on fragile ground, and their third album, Celebrity Skin, was almost never fully realised.
Once their ambition was fully restored, the resulting Celebrity Skin heard the band use California as muse, with frontwoman Courtney Love, particularly, seeing the Americana image of the state’s lore as a wider concept to anchor the album. “The tradition of writing about Los Angeles, writing about California,” she explained to MTV in 1998, “As a metaphor for the American dream, as a metaphor for all of our collective experience.”
The album became Hole’s most commercially successful, being the successor of 1994’s breakthrough album Live Through This. Since its release, Celebrity Skin is often regarded (to paraphrase) as Hole’s ‘soft’ album, in comparison to the abrasive, guttural intent of its predecessor. In fact, listening closely, Celebrity Skin is just as heavy, only communicated with a quieter tone that softens the impact of its contents.
Where California served as a conduit for the opposing images of beauty and destruction on Celebrity Skin, a thematic undercurrent is, evidently, grief. ‘Reasons to Be Beautiful’ opens with a haunting image, as Love recounts her own suicide from a third-person point of view: “Love hangs herself / With the bedsheets in her cell”. With quite a morbid beginning, Love reminds us that she has never been one to mince words, especially on Celebrity Skin, where reality and its many facades are prevalent.
Such an image suggests that grief and the ‘correct’ grieving process (versus a supposed ‘improper’ one) weighed on her mind. Intended to linger, these opening lines also speak to the wider sentiment within which Celebrity Skin solidified its meaning. Love had become accustomed, for better or for worse, to living every moment of her life under the glare of the public eye. As a result, every blemish, mistake, or otherwise became tabloid fodder, sensationalised beyond belief, all while she continued to navigate her grief in the wake of the deaths of her husband, Kurt Cobain, her bandmate, Kristen Pfaff, and others.
One can imagine that the incessant verbal abuse that she was subject to by the public (going as far as death threats hurled at her onstage) began to take its toll, even as Love continued to project a strong exterior. She became the object of a 1990s witch hunt, where collective anger looked for a scapegoat for the losses of the decade. Further, if the so-called ‘American dream’ that preoccupied Hole warrants constant surveillance and judgment as a price for fame and fortune, then Love and her bandmates were caught in something of a paradox.
As a result, ‘Reasons to Be Beautiful’ hears the frontwoman, with a gripping vulnerability, address her darker moments that even the public eye was not privy to. In this song, we can imagine her alone, contemplating the meaning of life in the aftermath of dual grief and fame, placing her very being under lock and key. “Threw myself on fires for you / Ten good reasons to stay alive,” she cries, after the opening lines, before admitting, “Ten good reasons that I can’t find”.
The song’s constant questions loom heavy, as they all circle back to the harrowing opening lines in their search for meaning. Love begs for “one reason to be beautiful / Oh, and everything I am”. Where does the search for beauty, for continuing to keep up a facade, fall in favour of a reason to simply stay alive, when pain becomes overbearing? “I live my life in ruins for you,” she reflects, with an exhaustion masked beneath her signature snarl.
Images of beauty infiltrate the lyrics: flowers blossoming and fading, “perfect skin”, the purity of being born, extinguished by images of sickness and destruction, speaking to the echoing muse of California and her dilapidated glamour: “My love burns through everything,” Love sings, “I cannot breathe”.
‘Reasons to Be Beautiful’ closes with Love’s paraphrase of Cobain’s suicide note, which he wrote with references to Neil Young’s ‘My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)’, where he sings, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away”. Love opts for, “When the fire goes out, you better learn to fake / It’s better to rise than fade away”. The story of the song becomes heartwrenchingly full-circle, the parallels of suicide coming together. There is the obvious anger that seeps into every word, but the grief and subsequent sadness remain most captivating. Anger, then, becomes one of the facades that haunt the narrative.
As ‘Reasons to Be Beautiful’ sketches a story of grief’s shadow-like presence in a desperate search for beauty, the song proves to keep Celebrity Skin sewn together, and hears Love in one of her most brutally honest moments.
