Monuments to an Egotist – Thoughts on Billy Corgan

Photo Credit: Pitchfork

I’m a fan of Smashing Pumpkins. I have been since they first hit it big in the early 90s and I was a lackadaisical college student that had a lot more time to listen to new music and a lot less things to spend my hard-earned money on. Now I’m a married father of three with a house and car payments, so many trips to Kroger that I ought to own stock in the company, and a taste for music that generally requires more than a cool band name and a flashy video.

That’s not to say that Smashing Pumpkins weren't more than that. They were. They were loud, they were odd, and they created fantastic hooks that caught you up in their melodies even as their guitars and drum did their best to blow out your speakers. I remember cranking tunes like Cherub Rock, Today, Disarm, Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Zero, 1979, and The End Is the Beginning Is the End while cruising around Athens, Georgia thinking it didn't get much cooler than this.

But then Billy started firing band members. And he released lesser albums such as Adore and Machina/The Machines of God. He worked on side projects like Zwan, a solo album, and even a book of poetry. He abandoned the type of music that had earned Smashing Pumpkins their legions of fans and saw his sales drop precipitously as a result.

In the last few years he’s made several bizarre PR choices such as starting a wrestling league, hawking specialty teas, and conducting an 8 hour musical interpretation of the existential novel, Siddhartha. There might be a fine line between being eccentric and being completely incomprehensible, but often it feels as if Billy zigs over that line when he should have zagged.

Now Billy has a new album out under the SP banner entitled Monuments to an Elegy and is doing a round of interviews to try to create some enthusiasm about the project. I haven’t heard anything more than the first single so far, but based on that sample, I’m not overly confident it’s any better than his last several efforts. The only truly memorable song he’s produced in the past 14 years in my opinion was Tarantula from the 2007 disc, Zeitgeist. It’s a shame, but all the more curious when you listen to his recent conversation with Howard Stern. You can read about and listen to portions of that interview here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/10/billy-corgan-pearl-jam-foo-fighters_n_6301122.html

Billy takes the time to call out the groups Pearl Jam and Foo Fighters for being lesser bands. I happen to agree with him concerning the former’s lack of an impressive collection of material, but a man in his position might want to reconsider throwing stones. Claiming that Foo Fighters haven’t grown as artists feels like justification for the fact Billy is unable or unwilling to create more of the type of music old Smashing Pumpkins fans love. If he wants to claim stooping so low as to sell tea bags and fake wrestlers is more artistic than say, creating songs like the Foo’s Best of You, The Pretender, My Hero, These Days, and Rope, then I guess that’s his prerogative, but I hope he doesn't expect his dwindling audience to agree with him. He lost most of us a decade ago. The rest are still holding onto the hope he decides that maybe being true to the sound and vision that first brought him into the limelight might not be such a bad thing after all.