Celebrity Skin

Love, Erlandson and Billy Corgan wrote the song in 1997, and Love has said that Corgan supplied the main guitar riff. The lyrics are Love's. They borrow "my name is might-have-been" from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem A Superscription and the pound of flesh from The Merchant of Venice. The title is also the name of a magazine that ran celebrity nudes and of a short-lived Los Angeles punk group. Love said that celebrity is stupid and ephemeral but that she saw no reason not to feed it, because it gives the art more power. The album opens with the line Oh, make me over.

Deen Castronovo played drums and Melissa Auf der Maur played bass and sang backing vocals, with Michael Beinhorn producing. The song reached number one on Modern Rock Tracks on 10 October 1998 and spent 26 weeks on the chart. It earned Grammy nominations for Best Rock Song and for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. NME described a balls-in-the-air guitar riff the size of Australia. Nancy Bardawil directed the video, in which Love and Auf der Maur lie in coffins and Patty Schemel does not appear. The song plays over the end credits of Captain Marvel (2019), and Doja Cat covered it in a Taco Bell advertisement during Super Bowl LVI in 2022.