Music: Love In Bloom

Teenage whores and broken dolls. Petals torn from flowers and baby's milk gone sour. These are her subjects. "I don't really miss God/ But I sure miss Santa Claus," she sings. "I'm Miss World, somebody kill me." And further, "I want to be the girl with the most cake/ I love him so much it just turns to hate/ I fake it so real I am beyond fake/ Someday you will ache like I ache."

Her thoughts, her words, her world. Courtney Love: rocker, movie star, Hard Copy moving target. She enters a suite at the Chateau Marmont. Tall, lean, with pale, muscular arms and bare, nicked-up legs. She clears her throat as she strolls in, clearing it in a louder-than-she-needed-to, public-announcement way. Courtney Love: head turner, showstopper, superstar. Her band mates in her group Hole--guitarist Eric Erlandson and bassist Melissa Auf der Maur--have been waiting, relaxing on couches. Hole has a terrific new CD out, Celebrity Skin, the band's third release. The group has gone through many changes since it formed in 1990--musical changes, philosophical changes, personnel changes. The band's last bassist, Kristen Pfaff, died of a heroin overdose in 1994. Hole's current drummer, Patty Schemel, is on leave for unspecified personal reasons. "If she can deal with her problems, she can come back," says Love obliquely. "I can't be responsible for that again."

Love's all about professionalism, maturity and responsibility now. Yeah, sure, sometimes she'll go on MTV and rattle on about Trent Reznor's testicles. But the old Love, the bratty, tattered tart, is so over, so early '90s. Love started her image shift when she became a rock mother (daughter Frances Bean is six). She continued it when she became a movie star. She drew raves for her role in the 1996 film The People vs. Larry Flynt, and is set to star with Christina Ricci, among others, in the forthcoming indie film 200 Cigarettes.

But you'll never hear a guy in a mosh pit yell, "This band rocks! They're so professional!" You'll never attend a concert in Madison Square Garden and hear a chant go up: "Responsibility! Responsibility!" Now that Love's focusing on music again, she needed a sound that fitted her new values while accessing her old passion. A sophisticated sound that still rocked.

And Love wants Skin to have an impact, a deep impact, a meteor-slamming-into-the-earth impact. She admits she has criticized other successful musicians in the past out of commercial envy: "I was pissy about Alanis Morissette because I was jealous that she got to sell so many records and make such a cultural impact."

So during the making of Skin, Billy Corgan, leader of the alternative band Smashing Pumpkins and the man behind this year's half-brilliant album Adore, was invited by Love to give Hole musical pointers. Corgan and Love later had a falling out over credit, but Hole's ragged punk sound was altered, patched up, rewoven. The group's new sound has the sharp, clean lines of an Armani suit.