"Celebrity Skin" is a single by American alternative rock band Hole, released by Geffen Records on August 31, 1998. It is the debut single from their third studio album of the same name and is their most commercially successful single, being the only one to reach the top place on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart. In October 2011, NME ranked it the 126th best track of the past 15 years. Composition Music and arrangements The song was written and recorded in 1997, after Hole's reported hiatus the previous year due to frontwoman Courtney Love's burgeoning film career. Love and Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson co-wrote the song with Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, whom Love later said provided the main guitar riff. Lyrics The lyrics, written by Love, contain several literary references; the line "Oh, look at my face / My name is might-have-been" is directly lifted from the opening verse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem, "A Superscription," (and also quoted in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night) while the phrase "pound of flesh" originates from William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Commenting on the theme of celebrity, Love said: "Once you've stood onstage bleating your schoolgirl poetry, are you going to stay there, when you have the power and ability to give yourself a platform? I mean, here's the celebrity, and we all know it's stupid and ephemeral, but why not foster it? Why not feed it? Because all that it will do is give the thing that has substance – the art – more power." The song's title shares the name of an independent pornographic magazine of the same name showing celebrity nudity, as well as a short-lived punk rock group from Los Angeles that featured ex-Germs drummer Don Bolles. Love joked on Later... with Jools Holland in 1995 that the song was entitled "Celebrity Skin" "'cause [she] touched a lot of it." Journalist Carrie Bell of Billboard noted in 1998 that the song dissects "the problem of maintaining an image and living in the public eye." Guitarist Eric Erlandson responded to this statement: "Courtney writes what she feels, and this is obviously one of her observations of Hollywood. We used this great hollow city as inspiration for the album." Release "Celebrity Skin" was released as the debut single of its eponymous album, Celebrity Skin, on August 31, 1998, reaching the top 10 on the US Billboard