So Courtney’s back. Almost six years to the day after the release of her solo album (America’s Sweetheart, February 10, 2004) and almost twelve years after the last Hole album (Celebrity Skin, September 8, 1998), Hole—or what passes for it—has a new single.
“Skinny Little Bitch,” the lead single from Nobody’s Daughter (due April 27), is being offered as a free download for 24 hours (12n ET today to 12n ET Thursday) through the Nobody’s Daughter website. The website seems to be down at the moment (too many downloads caused a crash, maybe?), so keep checking back.
Given that Courtney has been a non-entity musically for so long, this is a smart move—although if it were me calling the shots, I’d probably make this download available indefinitely. A six-year absence is an eternity in the music business, so Courtney and her label people are going to have to work hard to re-establish Hole’s presence.
So much has changed since that last record—which, lest we forget, was a stiff. When America’s Sweetheart hit the stores, there was no Wikipedia, no Facebook, no Twitter and no YouTube. The most expensive iPod you could buy still had a black-and-white screen and could only store 40 gigs. Six years is also the time that passes between entering grade 8 and the end of your first year of college—an eternity.
It gets even worse when you start looking at the last Hole record. Back in 1998, CD sales were still climbing, there were questions about the legality of MP3 players and the introduction of this thing called “Napster” was still almost a year off. And record labels still conducted junkets.
A few weeks before the release of Celebrity Skin, I got invited to talk to Hole in LA. And it was weird.