Music: Love In Bloom

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Love calls Skin "a monument" and says it will "alter the skyline." She hopes it will show younger female musicians that they can aspire to more than coffeehouse acoustic strumming and that they too can be rock stars. "What we're really interested in is who we restart, who comes up," says Love. "Because the female musician, the girl that is, like, playing rock in the garage, she's not around anymore, she's been taken out, she's been killed, she's not encouraged."

Born Love Michelle Harrison in San Francisco in 1964, Love has led a rootless life. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother later gave her the new first name Courtney; she eventually started calling herself Courtney Love. She has lived in Liverpool and Dublin; she has slogged through reform schools and stripped in strip clubs. Skin starts off self-consciously, with Love reveling in her notoriety. "I'm all I wanna be," she wails. "A walking study/ In demonology." Certain images repeat: angels, stars, heaven. "I'm a cancer," Love explains. "I recycle." Death is on her mind. A number of songs mourn the failing spirit of alternative rock. She sings, "Oh the boys on the radio/ They crash and burn." Other songs are haunted by the 1994 suicide of her husband, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain. Love sings on Reasons to Be Beautiful, "When the fire goes out, you better learn to fake."

Love is still dogged by questions about Cobain. Earlier this year, filmmaker Nick Broomfield released a documentary titled Kurt and Courtney that portrayed Love as controlling and abusive toward Cobain and even suggested that his death may not have been a suicide. "I don't feel that anyone's in a position of saying Courtney was responsible for doing anything directly in terms of murdering or having Kurt murdered," says Broomfield. "I do believe that there's a lot that we haven't been told, and that all was not well in their relationship, and he was pretty much left to get on and do it."

Love refuses to answer any questions about the film. "You think it's important and I don't," she says. "This is America, so we can disagree." Love can also be testy about questions that concern her late husband. When asked about Cobain's unreleased songs, she replies, "I'm not the keeper of his f______ flame."

It's hard to blame her for wanting to move on. She's a rocker herself, with her own songs, her own band, her own life. And so she's getting on with them. She describes herself as "more together. I mean I don't take drugs." Instead, she's on a spiritual high: she says she's a Buddhist.

But makeovers are about surface; bleached hair has dark roots. Skin's polite production might win listeners, but Love's displays of rude beauty, of a sad radiance that seems to come from a place beyond contrivance--those are the moments that make this CD spectacular listening. Just hear her morose, lyrical ramble over Erlandson's spare guitar on Northern Star; or the line in the enchanting Malibu when she breaks the song's sweet spell, growling, "And I knew/ Love would tear you apart/ Oh and I knew/ The darkest secret of your heart." This CD has pop skin, but it bleeds punk.