My Body, The Hand Grenade - Artwork and Packaging

Artwork and Packaging

Most of the artwork featured on the album - as well as in the liner notes - was noted and debated by fans upon its release. In an interview with Melody Maker in 1997, Courtney Love revealed the significance of the choice of artwork included in the album.

Interviewer: "The artwork shows a dress you wore in the early nineties as a sort of museum piece. Is it really in a museum?"
Courtney Love: "The dress is still very current. People still design off that silly dress. The truth is I used to wear those dresses more than slips, but those dresses never got as famous as slips and I wanted them to have their due."
Interviewer: "The artwork also has a car wreck and a picture of Marie Antoinette. Why did you choose them?"
Courtney Love: "We actually show Anne Boleyn too. She was Henry VIII's wife who had her head chopped off. When I was little, I used to see these pictures of her with this necklace that had a B on it. I always had a fascination with ancient history, Roman especially, and early English, and I kept imaging her getting her head chopped off, for my whole life. Then, I told my friend Joe, who did the art. He always had an obsession with Marie Antoinette too. She was also decapitated. We also thought about Jayne Mansfield, just the idea of a woman having her mouth and eyes and ears taken away from her. And, hand grenades, the top comes off. You just pull out the pin and it explodes. So, if you take away someone's mouth and their eyes and their senses and their brain, they explode. I saw a grenade in my head, I saw taking out the clip, and then I thought of a human body and what happens if you take out the clip."

In 2010, Hole also reused the images of Marie Antoinette and Anne Boleyn from the My Body, the Hand Grenade artwork on their fourth studio album, Nobody's Daughter. However, both of the images were modified to depict both Antoinette and Boleyn as headless, which Love defines as "symbolic." The vinyl LP release of My Body, The Hand Grenade, also featured the headless portrait of Anne Boleyn on the back cover, the same as depicted on the back cover of Nobody's Daughter. The centerpiece of the vinyl LP on My Body, The Hand Grenade featured a full-bodied portrait of Marie Antoinette, as opposed to the headless version seen on the cover of Nobody's Daughter.