due to her feeling the need to compete with her peers at the time. In the 2011 documentary Hit So Hard, based on Hole's 1994–98 drummer Patty Schemel, Love referred to Pretty on the Inside as "unlistenable". "That record was a calling card for rock critics and hardcorers", Love said. "[It was me saying] "This is what I do, and I'm not going to back down from it. I am announcing my persona as a cunt."" Lyrical content Many of the album's lyrics are narrative and diaristic in nature, and were heavily drawn from Love's personal life and experiences in her teenage and young adult years. In a press release promoting the album, Love said: "These songs are about my own weaknesses and impurities; things about myself that I hate ... paranoias, petty concerns, and pithy, pathetic things that are inside of me." Many of the songs are lyrically abstract and describe shocking scenes of violence. Recurrent themes discussed in the lyrics include elitism, beauty and self-image, abortion, prostitution, suicide, murder, "red lights", and self-destructiveness. Q Magazine described the lyrics on the record as "confrontational" and "genuinely uninhibited". Hannah Levin of the Seattle publication The Stranger analyzed the lyrics to the track "Mrs. Jones", calling it a "particularly rattling sketch of what appears to be a rape scene, with Love seamlessly handling three perspectives: the ugly attacker ("Look into the bloodrot, you suicide bitch / It takes an hour with you to make me want to live"), the vengeful victim ("The abortion left an abscess / Don't ever talk to me like that again"), and the supportive narrator ("Just like a pro, she takes off her dress / And she kicks you down in her snow white pumps")." The song also quotes the Rudyard Kipling poem The Ballad of East and West. "Garbadge Man", discusses abandonment and alienation, as well as crisis of spirituality, and is one of the few songs on the album to feature a verse–chorus–verse composition. The album closes with two songs that are bridged together as a single piece: "Pretty on the Inside", noted for its hostile lyrics and allusions to vanity, and "Clouds", a dark and raucous cover of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now" from her 1969 album Clouds. The cover of the song features altered lyrics that appear to illustrate a suicide scene. According to drummer Caroline Rue, Love wrote the lyrics of "Babydoll"