Quote:
Originally Posted by wounded
...overall bill has just flat out mismanaged the band and its brand.
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Billy's made a career of mismanaging the band/brand. His first official mismanagement failure was
Adore, while I like the album for what it is it was not the album that the buying public wanted. He blames himself for marketing it wrong, and while I'm sure that did him no favors, the truth is that the general public wanted something other than was Billy provided.
Billy very stubborn and impulsive. He clearly doesn't listen to advice and that clearly played into his falling out with Sharon Osbourne during the
Machina era. He wanted to pump out another double album with this weird, incoherent plot and weird image/style on the band that no one understood and clearly the album only sold to hardcore SP fans and almost no one else, while the record label and Sharon wanted Billy to go in another direction.
He couldn't admit to his failure/bad judgement so he blamed Brittany Spears and the boybands of the era for his failures and over-reacted and broke up the band. After failing commercially with Zwan, and probably seeing the writing on the wall that his solo career wasn't gonna take off a la Peter Gabriel or Phil Collins, he used the SP reunion as a vehicle to promote TFE as on the day of its release, Billy took out an ad and wrote that the album "picks up the thread of the as-yet-unfinished work and charter of The Smashing Pumpkins", and announced his plans to reform SP.
I personally liked
Zeitgeist, although I know it wasn't the album that many SP fans were hoping for. I love how Billy has constantly hid behind the notion that he still writes classic-era quality songs but chooses not the release them either out of some artistic notion or out of spite. Quite frankly that's complete and utter bullshit. Billy has clearly lost any magic/mojo that he had going for him in the mid-90s.
I'd equate Billy's decline to that of watching a super star athlete embarrassing himself by playing too long after his prime either for a paycheck or because he's unable recognize his diminishing abilities and let go of his glory years.
I think Billy would be best if he followed Bernard Butler's lead (formally of the group Suede) and became a producer. Billy worked wonders with Courtney Love on the
Celebrity Skin album and he's a known work-a-holic in the studio. Butler's had great success as a producer (with Duffy, The Libertines and Black Kids to name a few) and I could easily see Billy having just as much success as Butler working with new, upcoming rock talent.
But instead, Billy's fat, bald ass wants to think he's 20 years younger than he is.