The Smashing Pumpkins are coming to town! Tomorrow! And I'm gonna go
see them! Woohoo!
This is really exciting for me. Although I was just the right age to
enjoy them in their heyday, for I too am a teen of the early 90's, for
some reason I didn't really get into them until I was in my early 20's
and they were already on a decline. What can I say, I was a dorky
teen, and I guess I'm still a dorky adult.
The Smashing Pumpkins were (I'll justify this past tense in a second)
very clearly a teen angst band. Their lyrics are essentially bad teen
poetry put to music. Billy Corgan has a very narrow voice spectrum and
his jarring voice is quite an acquired taste. So what's to like about
them? Well, partly is that they're from my generation, the 90's teens,
and part of it is that their angsty nonsensical lyrics still make
sense on some metalinguistic level. The emotions are very clearly
conveyed through the music and the scattered lyrics. Who would deny
that Tonight, Tonight is a soulful piece, or that Zero isn't some
form of twist sick love, both from Mellon Collie And The Infinite
Sadness? Their sound got heavier towards almost their last album
before breakup, MACHINA: The Machines of God, and in a way, a bit
more mature. Supposedly MACHINA has a story inside it, being a
concept album, but if I hadn't read online about the supposed story in it, I would have never discovered it.
Their newest album, Zeitgeist, is still an angsty album, but this time
it is more adult-like, the angst is political, and it targets objects
a bit more relevant than the petty concerns of adolescence. Still,
listening to it, it sounds almost like classic SP. It really is
them. Well, it really is him, Billy Corgan. He pretty much
was the core of the band all along, and even if right now it's only
him and Jimmy Chamberlain, it's still them, it's still SP. Pity that
James Iha and D'Arcy Wretsky aren't with the band anymore, for they
did add their touch (Iha's scant few tracks and lyrics in previous SP
collections are amongst my favourites).
Pity for me that tomorrow will be the first time I'll see SP perform,
because I came in late to the game. I started to care about the band
just as they were breaking up, so I never got to see them while the
four of them were together. Still, this is almost just as cool, and I
expect to see a good metalhead crowd in that mosh pit, and I expect to
be thrown around and rocked to their music, and proceed on living the
late adolescence I seem to be perpetually stuck in.
It's an all day music festival, with about twelve or so other bands
performing. The other big names are The Mars Volta, which seem to be
a taste I haven't acquired yet, and My Chemical Romance which seems
fun. There are other Latin American bands playing, like the
intentionally shallow and dumb-but-fun Mexicans Belanova and
Argentines Miranda!, others like La Gusana Ciega (probaly famous
for their Tornasol single).
A few things about the festival seem less than optimal, such as the
fact that they won't let me bring my own water and will probably sell
me their overpriced beverages inside. Well, that kind of greedy
behaviour is what you get when Coca Cola is the sponsoring
organisation.
But SP ♥! Tomorrow! Woohoo!