Amish Hoe Fighter
Location: Humboldt, CA, USA
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[ARTICLE] I was a teenage Pumpkins fan
I quite enjoyed this article, it felt pretty true.
Quote:
I was a teenage Pumpkins fan
Friday, February 08, 2008
True life story by Jane Graham
Smashing Pumpkins have always been easy to hate. It was all the rage in the 1990s - like drinking alcopops, saying 'Wassup!' and crying at Titanic, hating Smashing Pumpkins was just what you did back then.
Everyone was doing it. Steve Malkmus sang on Pavement's 1994 track Range Life, when Pavement were the band to namedrop at London parties, that he " couldn't give a f**k" what the Smashing Pumpkins were singing about.
Wunderproducer de jour (circa 1994) Steve Albini, who has worked with the likes of The Pixies, Nirvana, PJ Harvey and The Stooges, disliked the Pumpkins intensely, labelling them "culturally insignificant" - just as their second album went quadruple platinum.
Kurt Cobain used to scribble libellous grafitti about frontman Billy Corgan in rock venue dressing rooms across America.
Even Corgan's own bandmates seemed to hate him, suggesting that he was a control freak who ultimately spilt up the band in 2000. Two of the original four members refused to forgive him and come back to the fold when he announced the reformation of Smashing Pumpkins in 2006.
Keeper of Pop Knowledge Simon Cowell is always telling us that you need likeability to get ahead in the music industry - so how the hell did Smashing Pumpkins ever sell over 20 million records and become one of the most successful bands of the last two decades?
The answer to that question is the same as the answer to why the band were so reviled; Billy Corgan - the great bald ego. From the band's beginnings in 1988, Corgan was a naturally awkward pop star. Prone to severe depression and famous for not trusting anyone, even his bandmates, to do what he could do better (rumours that he played most of the parts on the Pumpkins' albums were later confirmed - by Billy Corgan), the distinct absence of humour and presence of huge artistic ambition in his work made Corgan an easy target for accusations of pretension and vapidity.
The band were also victims of timing and the side-effects of press pigeon-holing. When their second album, Siamese Dream, was released in 1993 in the middle of a Nirvana-led grunge wave, Corgan's gloomy shaved head, silver trousers and melodramatic operatic vocal was unfavourably compared with the grit and 'realness' of scruffy, romantic Kurt Cobain.
The band's sleek mainstream sound saw them attacked by the leftfield community that the press often placed them amongst - in relation to Sonic Youth, Husker Du and the Pixies, the Smashing Pumpkins were contrived and commercial and thus, so it was deemed, soulless and phoney. The fact that Siamese Dream sold 6 million copies was ultimate proof to the opinion-makers - the Pumpkins were a sell-out, the worst example of an MTV generation victory.
It was all groundless, silly nonsense of course, but who wanted to be the guy who stuck his head above the pulpit to say that, even in the painfully authentic world of alternative rock, pomp can be wonderful?
Who would admit that after hours in a dark room wearing cheesecloth, a bit of grandeur, pantomime and even high camp might come as something of a relief?
And least of all, who wanted to say in print that Billy Corgan's songs were almost as good as he thought they were? Courtney Love said it, but no one listened to her ourpourings, especially after Kurt Cobain died and Billy Corgan seemed even more of an affront to the moral balance of the universe than he had before.
The truth is that Billy Corgan's epics are some of the best rock music had to offer in the previous decade and, listened to out of (grungy) context, they are wonderfully grand opuses, emotionally rich and lyrically intelligent.
Songs like Today, Tonight, Tonight and Bullet With Butterfly Wings are strong, stirring anthems covering all the classic themes - love, despair, pain and hope.
Corgan's dark and theatrical vision - displayed on album covers, song titles (Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Behold the Nightmare) and dramatic stage sets - has inspired everyone from Marilyn Manson to Muse, while his broken and bleeding approach to lyric-writing probably saw him inadvertently invent emo. There would certainly be no My Chemical Romance without the Smashing Pumpkins, kids.
There have been numerous line-up changes in the band since their first album, Gish, in 1991, and the line-up for the returning Pumpkins only includes two of the original members.
There's Corgan of course, and his old pal Jimmy Chamberlin, whose heroin habit caused the band huge problems during its 12-year existence, including an incident in 1996 when he and touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin overdosed in a hotel room in New York.
Melvoin died. Chamberlin was arrested and subsequently fired by Corgan but it seems that he has forgiven his old partner, unlike guitarist James Iha and bass player D'arcy Wretzky, neither of whom have agreed to work with him again.
Truthfully though, no one but the purists is likely to really miss them on the reunion tour this spring - Smashing Pumpkins has always been about Billy, as Billy himself is likely to tell you.
It's clear now that Corgan was no phoney; songs poured out of him like rain from a broken gutter (he is said to have come to the studio for the recording of the third album armed with 56 tracks).
While he has fallen out with many of his old friends and colleagues, he has never fallen out with music, obsessively writing and recording from the early Nineties to 2006, when he excitedly announced the reformation of Smashing Pumpkins.
Perhaps his greatest crime for rock critics was not that he was never beautiful or humble but that he refused to die young. If he had done, there is no question that his work would have long been championed as droplets of truth and beauty from a tormented genius.
Just because he is alive doesn't mean that they're not. Even Steve Malkmus had a change of heart in 1999, stating that he had never meant to diss Corgan's music, just his "status." By which we can assume he meant "success." See you at the after-show Stevie.
The Smashing Pumpkins play The King's Hall, Belfast, this Sunday, February 10. Box office 0870 2434455.
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