Je déteste les Potirons Fracassants!
(or, How do I tell my friends I hate the Smashing Pumpkins?)
Today is the day…
Merde!
With the release of “Atum: A Rock Opera in Three Acts” on May 5, there has been a sudden, or renewed interest in Smashing Pumpkins among fans and especially among my friends. They’re not calling or texting, or even emailing me, but it’s all over my socials.
And I fucking hate the Smashing Pumpkins! Je les déteste!
Yet people adore them. Quoting a social media acquaintance, “They’re the preëminent rockstars of the 90s!” (My acquaintance did not use the diaeresis.)
I want to say, “Please. Stop.” - but I don’t want to hurt my friends’ feelings or alienate them. They’re entitled to love and experience all the excitement and serenity available in the music they adore, however tepid, even if it makes me dry heave like a bulimic jockey.
In the 1993 cover story about the band, Jim Greer of Spin Magazine wrote, “Corgan, for his part, doesn’t really seem cut out for the role of rock god.” No shit. Ever since he shaved his head, Billy Corgan looks like someone got drunk and tried to explain Charlie Brown to a police sketch artist. Certainly not a “rock star” that holds any interest for someone who grew up loving Cheap Trick and Van Halen. He’s rockstar with no style. Yeesh. Boring.
When I first heard them, I kinda liked them. Thirty years ago, a friend of mine had a bootleg of a Pumpkins concert that has since been released on DVD and remains easily attainable online: “Live At The Cabaret Metro - Chicago 1993.”
But as they ascended to great fame, and the more I heard, I was turned off. I’ve thought about it a lot but what it boils down to is that I hate whiny singers. Like the Counting Crows guy: awful. If I had to sit through one of their State Fair concerts, I’d puncture my eardrums with a corn dog skewer. Guys like Corgan and Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction: they rock well-enough, I guess, but Holy Hell, the whining is excruciating (fittingly, both bands toured together last fall). What the hell happened in the 90s?
Most of my friends acknowledge this, if somewhat begrudgingly; they shuffle their feet a bit and look at the ground and say, “Yeeaaahhh…” And I ask them, “If you had a baby, and it was whining like that, you’d take it to a doctor, right?”
Still: I love my friends, and even my social media acquaintances whom I’ve never met but who somehow find time to “Like” all my photos. I long to have a discussion about it, but I’m so socially awkward I keep screwing it up .
Alluring but Platonic Female Friend: So, yeah, my sister just finished her first round of chemotherapy…
Me: I hate the Smashing Pumpkins!
Alluring but Platonic Female Friend: What? I’m trying to tell you about my sister’s cancer treatment. What’s wrong with you?
Me: I’m sorry. I’m not feeling well. What I meant to say was…
Alluring but Platonic Female Friend: And just so you know, her favorite band is the Smashing Pumpkins! And my favorite record is “Siamese Dream!” Asshole!
Lyrically, I can’t stand anything I’ve heard, though interpretation of any art form is as subjective as perfume. Perfume can be bewitching, mysterious or off-putting. It depends on your brand of self-loathing, I guess. But imagine putting all of Fran Drescher’s therapy sessions to music, and then adding a full orchestra: “Oh, Mr. Sheffield! The world is a vampire!”
There’s a lot of brooding, long-suffering, shoe-gazing crapola with Corgan’s lyrics. The were a bit more raw when they started out, if baffling. The lyrics to “Rhinoceros” are pretty cryptic.
Then Corgan moved into the realm of Baroque, magniloquent pretentiousness. One of their biggest hits, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” immediately sounds like the Happy Hour special at every Applebee’s in Colorado. Grandiose nonsense, filled with saccharin. And “Cupid de Locke?” Magnisonant scribbling to share with the troubled shy girl in your Romantic and Victorian poetry class.
The album title alone, “Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” is poetic overreach at best. Pouah. Off-putting to me, but then I don’t expect everyone to find salvation or transformation in “Smooth Up” by the Bullet Boys.
Maybe he’s no Leonard Cohen or Joe Strummer, but does that make him any less relevant or meaningful to people? I realize that Corgan makes a lot of people happy, but so does kimchi. I don’t know. I guess if I started a band it would be hard to come up with new and exciting lyrics to set to terrible music all the time.
It all comes back to the whine. I just can’t stand it. John Lydon, a singer with an occasional whine knows how to sell it. You can feel the hatred and disappointment in songs from the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” to P.I.L.’s “Seattle;” and those are just two examples. Bereft of fire and soul, what bleeds through is the kind of acrylic noise that Scratch Acid wouldn’t touch.
But my friends love them and I love my friends. I’ve told them that I once saw James Iha at the bar at the Mercury Lounge. Don’t remember who I was there to see, I just remember the annoying thrall he had over the Gen X hipster crowd: everyone looking while pretending not to look and no one moving. My friends asked, “What was he like?” I didn’t meet him, but he looked bored. At the time, I thought, “Yeah. Seems about right.” And he was the cool one.
(Also, I know that people were nuts for bassist D’arcy Wrestky - understandable without a doubt - but I happen to think her replacement, Melissa Auf der Maur was equally talented and charming and sexy. I hope we have not heard the last of her.)
So how do I tell my friends? Maybe I’ll write them a Haiku and tell them that as much as I adore them, I cannot stand their preening alt-rock Diet Goth Messiah and his band of Art School drop-outs.
The Smashing Pumpkins
How do I say this to you?
I fuckin’ hate them.
Also, you’re no longer alternative when you have the Number One album in the country, four Top Ten albums and move 17 million units. You’re a popular rock band.
My friends, in the end: it’s not you: it’s me.
Je me fiche que ce soit le 30e anniversaire de "Siamese Dream!"
I just hate The Smashing Pumpkins. Et alors? Au moins, il ne sont pas Steely Dan.
Atum: A Rock Opera in Three Acts is out now via Martha's Music/Thirty Tigers.
The 2023 North American “THE WORLD IS A VAMPIRE TOUR” starts in July.
-Fin-