POLLcelina of the Vast Oceans - ILM artist poll #87 - SMASHING PUMPKINS (voting open until 2 April 2018)

lotta embarrassing confessions to come out of this poll imo

^^

the core, the heart music

that "Blank Page" verse really stands out for suggesting Billy has friends

https://i.imgur.com/nvlpEgY.png

At 15/16, I was definitely more taken with the Machina artwork than the music. I was taking a few hours of art classes every day in high school, and that album art definitely crept into some of what I was doing.

Seems kind of brown now that I look at it again.

he apparently wrote the lyrics to Porcelina in one sitting on a tour bus during Lollapalooza 1994. the words are beautiful, and without spoiling, I think that song more than any other captures nearly every side of the pre-Adore band: it's equal parts spacey, heavy, romantic, experimental, plus you get Billy's SD-era wisp of a voice along with the nasal bleat that runs thru most of that record. it's a towering achievement of a song.

someone pls scrounge up those old Pumpkins msg board posts from where Billy asked people to guess as to the "plot" of Machina and pointed out who got closest

At 15/16, I was definitely more taken with the Machina artwork than the music. I was taking a few hours of art classes every day in high school, and that album art definitely crept into some of what I was doing.

Seems kind of brown now that I look at it again.

― jmm, Monday, March 19, 2018 8:37 AM (twenty-six seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao

i looooooved the machina art. the "imploding voice" art with the androgynous figure seizing a single wave was my shit

someone pls scrounge up those old Pumpkins msg board posts from where Billy asked people to guess as to the "plot" of Machina and pointed out who got closest

― Simon H., Monday, March 19, 2018 8:38 AM (fifty-one seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

iirc i actually submitted to this at the time. i was very wrong iirc but who could've guessed the story was that dumb (j/k my idea of it at age 13 probably wasn't any more sophisticated)

tbh whenever I see the Machina cover art I think of Bobby Sands' cell walls in Hunger

Oh yeah, I can't believe I forgot this, but I even made a costume of this guy.

https://i.imgur.com/nvlpEgY.png

lmao that's awesome

brad I will now forever choose to think that billy read your submission and said "fuck that's actually better" and that's what precipitated the original breakup

my biggest literary influences at age 13 were billy corgan and sylvia plath, there's no way it was better

I just remembered Blinking with Fists.

i bought it! it's awful

but it is a book with a jt leroy blurb on it

ugh now that i'm hearing it i really want to put "innosense" on my ballot

it's like the gentlest song he ever wrote along with "luna"

but it is a book with a jt leroy blurb on it

lmao holy shit

I don't think I can not put "Go" on my ballot

ah fuck i forgot "the boy"

the problem of james

anybody considering pre-Gish material? it's minor work, though many great songs: There It Goes, She, My Eternity, Jennifer Ever, Razor...

xp if I were to include one, Blew Away would be my James pick.

Stand Inside Your Love is indeed fantastic, the production of that album is just an unfathomable mess though... and its not as if its aged badly, it sounded like some sort of mastering error at the time

i thought about the pre-gish material but none of it really stacks up with the rest. gish is a huge leap and barely any of it figures into my ballot :(

my James pick is Believe.

Blew Away will probably make my ballot, it's by far his best though The Boy is pretty good too

I don't know how he went from the vocals on Adore, by far his best singing on a record, to Machina, where so many of the songs have the vocals mixed way too high and not double tracked or effected in any way.

xxp it is amazing how much of a leap Gish is from the late 80s material. and yeah, most of the songs on that record are far superior live imo, save for a special few...

god, I can't believe how bad "Tales of a Scorched Earth" is. I will just pretend that I never loved that song.

i hate "tales" but it's really only over the "whores/f*g" lyric

where so many of the songs have the vocals mixed way too high and not double tracked or effected in any way

astonishingly this got worse and worse with zwan and zeitgeist and etc. etc.

One of my favorites. A song that rides the edge of a cliff. The most extreme the band got before Machina. The lyrics are such a perfect expression of frustrated teenage nihilism.

god "white spyder" is so badass. it sounds like garbage but that weirdly deepens its mystery (like "love")

xxp TOASE I mean...

and yeah, a lot of my issues with the post-2000 material comes down to the way the vocals are mixed. There are some great songs in there that are rendered near unlistenable because of the mix.

the acapella break in the everlasting gaze is still one of the weirdest moments in a sp song

goddammit i just revisited literally all of these songs a month ago, the timing of this poll, honestly.

the acapella break in the everlasting gaze is still one of the weirdest moments in a sp song

― ufo, Monday, March 19, 2018 9:01 AM (fifteen seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol i remember hearing this for the first time, they had a stream of the song on... amazon???? before the album came out, and when i heard the a capella part i was like "that is certainly a choice"

i love that song though, it is possibly my favorite sp track to air drum to

acapella break on Everlasting Gaze >>> acapella break on Frail and Bedazzled

pffft excuse me no

first half of "glass and the ghost children" is the weirdest most ambitious thing billy ever wrote i think, followed up only by "mary star of the sea" and then he generally stopped making songs like this

i'd also like to out myself early on as a real big fan of the delusions of grandeur/godhood interview tape warping over the piano figure. "spiders" half of the song is really lovely too

in other words "glass and the ghost children" is on my ballot

I love every part of Glass and the Ghost Children. a lyrical masterpiece. "and she counted the spiders as they crawled up inside her" is a beautiful coda. and one of my favorite opening lines ever: "to the center of the earth / or anywhere god decides."

you say i'm empty
we all know i'm full of shit

^^^ most self-aware dude ever got over the course of how many albums and comps and etc.

I may need to warm up to the 'spiders' section again. The psychedelic first half still sounds really cool.

lol xp

Chrysanthemum is the most self-aware and healthy song he's ever written imo...

oh lol i wasn't thinking about zwan but true

re: the bad vocals/mixing post-Adore, I believe he took voice lessons (lol) so I assume his thought process was along the lines of, "now that my voice is a PERFECT INSTRUMENT I'm not going to try to bury it"

lmao

"a flower's still a flower crushed to dust inside my hand"

as verbose and obtuse he can be, i'm just in awe of that line and how it so eloquently conveys the self-destruction of SP, how he drove it into the ground, and yet how beautiful it was and how beautiful it remains. "we were going somewhere." it's just a marvel of a lyric & song, the optimistic inverse of Jellybelly.

xxp

re: the bad vocals/mixing post-Adore, I believe he took voice lessons (lol) so I assume his thought process was along the lines of, "now that my voice is a PERFECT INSTRUMENT I'm not going to try to bury it"

― had (crüt), Monday, March 19, 2018 12:34 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he took voice lessons before Adore, and it shows. the vocals on every record after that are inexplicable, though I chalk up most of his inexplicable creative decisions to psychosis brought on by the relative failure and rejection of Adore. he hasn't made a truly thru and thru sincere record since then, with the exception of Ogilala.