Courtney Love, Billy Corgan, and the “Indie Politics” of the 90s
In the 1990s, authenticity was everything. Or at least everyone insisted it was. Alternative rock positioned itself against the artificiality of pop stardom; celebrating raw emotion, ugliness, and vulnerability as signs of artistic truth. But the decade’s most iconic musicians quickly discovered that authenticity could become its own kind of performance. In a recent episode of The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan, Corgan and Courtney Love discuss the intensity of what they deem “indie politics” and the gatekeepers of the 90s music scene.
Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins are two of the biggest bands of the 90s, with both achieving commercial success and a lasting cultural impact. With this success came the accusations of “selling out” and inauthenticity in favor of fame. The big idea of the time was to come across as naturally, or even accidentally, cool. Love, who is described by both her and Corgan as incredibly ambitious, discusses how that ambition was expected to stay hidden. Unwritten rules were established in the indie and alternative scene and to be open about her desire for fame and success was a direct contradiction to those rules, leading to distrust from peers who kept ambition locked away.
The pair calls out the hypocrisy amongst the people that bought into and pushed the “indie politics” of the time. Their main argument being that the scene of the early 90s presented itself as anti-commercial and morally superior to mainstream rock, but in practice operated through intense gatekeeping, status hierarchies, and social policing. They described it as deeply concerned with who was “real,” who was “selling out,” and who was politically or culturally pure enough to belong. They argued that authenticity in the 90s often functioned less as a genuine artistic value and more as a social weapon used to determine who was allowed cultural legitimacy. In this way, authenticity became a performance; it became something to aspire to.
Love admits to giving into these pressures on Hole’s first record, Pretty on the Inside—leaning into noise, rage, and rawness partly because that aligned with what the underground scene valued at the time. She acknowledged how even the “rawness” can become strategic to project a specific aesthetic. Ironically, it was Hole’s second album, Live Through This, that both catapulted them into the mainstream and created a felt more authentic to their artistry.
Their third album, Celebrity Skin, leans a bit more into pop rock than their previous grunge-heavy sound. Billy Corgan actually collaborated with Hole to write some of the songs on Celebrity Skin. A fan of both can immediately recognize The Smashing Pumpkins-esque opening guitar figure on the song “Awful.” It was this album that became Hole’s most commercially successful upon release and gave birth to their highest charting song, “Celebrity Skin,” on the Billboard 200 (peaking at no. 9).
These albums demonstrate what happens when artistic authenticity and commercial success collide. They shed light on the fact that ambition as an artist is nothing to hide, and a band does not need to “sell-out” in order to sell records. The songwriting and themes of the music are fraught with emotion and clearly touch on personal experiences, while effectively connecting with a wide audience. Maybe Courtney Love and Billy Corgan were lucky in that way, or maybe an opposition to the social and artistic pressures of the alternative scene is what allowed their music to maintain its legacy and continue to influence musicians more than 30 years later.