Pretty on the Inside

The music of Pretty on the Inside has been noted by critics for its abrasive instrumentation and arrangements, often with melodies "buried" underneath.[1][18] The album's sonic elements are heavily influenced by Los Angeles hardcore punk as well as New York's no wave scene; many of the tracks are accompanied by overt use of feedback, experimental playing, wah pedals, and use of sampling and interpolation. Rapid sliding techniques and string muting are also heavily present on the album, as well as what Love and Erlandson describe as "Sonic Youth tunings".[19] Love's vocals range from whispers to violent screaming, often in succession with the extreme shifts in speed and volume.

Drummer Caroline Rue described the band's songwriting process as collaborative and organic; she stated that she wrote her own drum parts in response to Love's guitar playing and lyrics, adding that Love never gave her direction or requested that she make changes to her drumming approach.[21]

The album contains numerous musical references to other musicians and songs, specifically in "Sassy" and "Starbelly": The guitar riff featured in "Starbelly" is based on Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl"[22] and features analog cassette excerpts from "Rhiannon" by Fleetwood Mac[22] and an early recording of "Best Sunday Dress" by Pagan Babies, one of Love's earlier bands with Kat Bjelland; "Sassy" includes snippets from an angry message left by Nymphs singer Inger Lorre on Love's answering machine, accompanied by a singular chord progression repeated throughout.[23][24] Love has admitted that the main riff to "Mrs. Jones" was copied verbatim from "Dark Entries" by the goth rock group Bauhaus, one of her favorite bands as a teenager.[25]

In a 1991 Canadian television interview, Love commented on the album's coarse musical structure. She said that since the band was from Los Angeles, the "metal capital of the US", they thought they were making a "pop record with an edge", and were surprised by people's reactions when they were told it was violent and extreme.[18] Love added, "It was all about the expression of my experience. I was not coming from a black void; I was trying to create light ... I was trying to heal."[8] In an interview with Spin magazine several years after its release, Love said that she was "posing in a lot of ways" with the album: "It was the truth, but it was also me catching up with all my hip peers who'd gone all indie on me, and who made fun of me for liking R.E.M. and The Smiths. I'd done the whole punk thing, sleeping on floors in piss and beer, and waking up with the guy with the fucking mohawk and the skateboards and the speed and the whole goddamned thing. But I hated it. I'd grown out of it by the time I was seventeen."[26] In a 1994 interview with Kurt Loder, Love admitted to having been "consciously self-conscious" when making the record due to her feeling the need to compete with her peers at the time.[7]

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".[20] "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.""[20]

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.[8][26] 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."[27] Many of the songs are lyrically abstract and describe shocking scenes of violence.[28][29] Recurrent themes discussed in the lyrics include elitism, beauty and self-image, abortion, prostitution, suicide, murder, "red lights", and self-destructiveness.[28][30] Q Magazine described the lyrics on the record as "confrontational" and "genuinely uninhibited".[31]

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")."[28] The song also quotes the Rudyard Kipling poem The Ballad of East and West.[lower-alpha 1]

"Garbadge Man", discusses abandonment and alienation, as well as crisis of spirituality,[28] 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,[8] 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.[8]

According to drummer Caroline Rue, Love wrote the lyrics of "Babydoll" about Madonna, whom she had seen driving in Los Angeles in a Mercedes-Benz, hence the lyric referring to a "Nazi car".[32]

In a 1991 interview with Everett True, Love stated "I try to place [beautiful imagery] next to fucked up imagery, because that's how I view things" and that "I sometimes feel that no one's taken the time to write about certain things in rock, that there's a certain female point of view that's never been given space."[33] In spite of the album's graphic lyrics, though, the underlying female themes in many of its songs led some journalists to tag the band as being part of the riot grrl movement,[34] which Love was not directly associated with.[35][36]

Caroline Records press kit cutout promoting the album (1991)

Pretty on the Inside was released on September 17, 1991, in the United States on Caroline Records and on City Slang in Europe.[41] The album's lead single, "Teenage Whore", was released in Europe on September 23, and entered the UK Indie Chart's Top 10 at number one on September 28, 1991, beating out "Heaven Sent An Angel" by Revolver, "Let It Slide" by Mudhoney, and "Love to Hate You" by Erasure, among others.[42][43] On The Chart Show on Channel 4, the song's title was censored with ellipsis in place of the word "whore".[42] The single's success in the United Kingdom led the band to perform a twelve-date tour of the country supporting Mudhoney. The subsequent success of both the album, single, and tour saw Hole embark on a further three tours of the United States, Germany and Western Europe in the latter half of 1991, playing again with Mudhoney, as well as alternative rock acts Daisy Chainsaw and Therapy?.[44] While the album gained traction in the United Kingdom, it failed to chart in the United States despite extensive touring, though it was known to be outselling Nirvana's output before the band's release of Nevermind the following week.[45]

On December 19, 1991, the band played their final show of the tour in Hollywood at the Whisky a Go Go opening for The Smashing Pumpkins, which ended with Love smashing her guitar headstock onstage at the end of their set after lukewarm reception from the audience.[46][47] Los Angeles Times journalist David Cromelin noted in his review of the concert:

Smashing Pumpkins' singer-guitarist Billy Corgan referred to himself as "a frustrated Midwestern youth" at the Whisky on Tuesday ... Smashing Pumpkins was preceded by smashing guitars, courtesy of Hole. The tortured, transfixing L.A. group's pairing with the headliners should have made this a bill to remember, but the audience was primed for Pumpkin and didn't take to Courtney Love's powerful howls of anguish. Hole ended its set in a tantrum, as Love ordered the band to halt and hurled her guitar to the ground. Guitarist Eric Erlandson finished things off by demolishing his instrument with a few impressive swings. Frustrated Midwestern youth, meet frustrated California youth.[46]

The same evening, Joe Cole, a roadie and friend of the band, filmed their live set with Henry Rollins of Black Flag. After the show, while en route to his Venice Beach apartment with Rollins, Cole was murdered in an armed robbery.[48] Hole would dedicate their second record, Live Through This, to Cole in 1994.

After Hole's 1991 tour concluded, a music video for the track "Garbadge Man" was released, though the album's only single, "Teenage Whore", did not receive a music video. The video is fairly abstract and a reflection of Hole's no wave influence at the time, with shots of Love and other band members in a car interspersed with shots of them performing outside the window. According to Love, she tracked down original rolls of radiographic medical film from Denver, Colorado, that had been used in the Vietnam War, which the music video was then shot on, giving the images an X-ray-like appearance.[49] The video was shown on MTV's 120 Minutes in 1992 during an interview with Love and Kim Gordon, and was broadcast again on the show in 1994 and 1995[50][26] but was never as popular as the band's later videos. For the music video, an alternate mix of the song by Gordon was used to eliminate profanity.

The album was released on CD and cassette in the United States, but received a release on vinyl LP throughout Europe by City Slang, based in Berlin, Germany. The first 3,000 pressings of the LP featured blue vinyl, while the following pressings were in standard black.[51]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[52]
Robert Christgau	[53]
Melody Maker	(positive)[54]
PopMatters	[30]
Q	[31]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[55]
Select	4/5[56]
The Stranger	[28]
The Village Voice	(positive)[57]

Pretty on the Inside was received with acclaim by many British and American alternative press. In a review by NME, the album was positively compared to Patti Smith's Horses, as well as the debut albums of the Ramones, Television, and New York Dolls, and was branded as being in "a class of its own",[36] while Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote in The New Yorker that "Pretty on the Inside is such a cacophony ... very few people are likely to get through it once, let alone give it the repeated listenings it needs for you to discover that it's probably the most compelling album to have been released in 1991."[36]

Simon Reynolds of The New York Times described the album as "a cauldron of negativity... [the band] grind[s] out torturous sound, vaguely redolent of Black Sabbath... Ms. Love's songs explore the full spectrum of female emotions, from vulnerability to rage. The songs are fueled by adolescent traumas, feelings of disgust about the body, passionate friendships with women and the desire to escape domesticity. Her lyrical style could be described as emotional nudism."[58] Jonathan Gold of the Los Angeles Times similarly noted that the lyrics present "a terrifying emotional landscape, closer to Kathy Acker novels than to anything you might think of as pop" and praised Love's vocals as "astonishingly expressive" and ranging from "howling rage to the sort of sardonic sneer associated with the Fall’s Mark Smith...  Whether it wanted one or not, the decade finally has an equivalent of Patti Smith’s Horses. Play it loud. Pretty on the Inside is about as pretty as a flayed wound."[59] Gold later commented: "If Pretty on the Inside were a horror movie, it would be all the parts that you have to look at through your fingers."[60] LA Weekly's Lorraine Ali echoed a similar sentiment about the album's harsh nature, describing it as a "slithering nest of ugly thoughts and horrific admissions too intriguing to pass up."[61]

Critics compared the album to the works of various artists, ranging from Black Sabbath to Patti Smith

Spin's Daisy von Furth noted a lyrical preoccupation with "the repulsive aspects of L.A.— superficiality, sexism, violence, and drugs. Love is the embodiment of what drives the band: the dichotomy of pretty/ugly ... The pretty/ugly dynamic also comes across in Hole's music ... a song like "Teenage Whore" at first comes across like a ranting noisy rage, but underneath is a surprisingly lush melody."[38] Spin ranked it among the 20 best albums of the year in December 1991.[62] Melody Maker columnist Sharon O'Connell wrote that the album was "the very best bit of fucked up rock 'n' roll [I've heard] all year,"[54] while Deborah Frost of The Village Voice called it "genre-defying", taking note of Love's reputation on the album as "the girl who won't shut up ... She is all the things that she should not be, and she shoves it, raw, right in your face."[57] Hannah Levin of the Seattle publication The Stranger praised the album's production by Gordon and Fleming, stating that "despite Pretty on the Inside's reputation as an unhinged, raw-sounding debut, a great deal of professional calculation went into putting this record together."[28] They also applauded Love's lyrics, writing that the album "judiciously toes the line between the evasively obtuse and overtly obscene".[28]

In a 1994 article, Rolling Stone journalist David Fricke called the album "gloriously assaultive" and "a classic of sex-mad self-laceration, hypershred guitars and full-moon bawling ... in particular the spectacular goring of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides, Now" (aka "Clouds") at the end of the record. You don't really know the solitary despair at the core of that song until you've heard Love's embittered delivery of the last two lines — "It's life's illusions I recall / I really don't know life at all" — over guitarist Eric Erlandson's fading squall."[63] In 1995, Alternative Press magazine ranked the album at No. 74 in their "Top 99 Of '85–'95" list, noting that "Love works in extremes and wears that scarlet letter when she feels like it, and when she doesn't she rips it off, never neglecting melody and language as the real medium for her message."[64] Wendy Brandes of CNN, while reviewing Hole's third release, Celebrity Skin, in 1998, described Pretty on the Inside as "the musical equivalent of scrubbing one's eardrums with sandpaper".[65]

Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic gave the album a notably positive review in 2002's AllMusic Guide to Rock, calling the album "uncompromising," and further noting: "The jagged white noise and buzzing guitars articulate Courtney Love's pent-up rage as well as her lyrics, and while that might make the album difficult to absorb in one sitting, it also makes it a singular achievement."[34] Music historian Andrew Earles referred to the album as "brick-heavy...a crushing mix of Mudhoney at its finest, sludge-metal, Sonic Youth, and Love's terrifying but also moving vocal performance."[13] PopMatters reviewed the album in 2009, noting that it has "bold musical splendour on display" that "[leaves one feeling] nothing short of gobsmacked".[30]

In a 2015 retrospective assessment, Spin noted the album's overt noise rock influences, writing that it "played like a AmRep release".[66]