Number of Good Songs Had By the Smashing Pumkings

a lot

But yeah, if you're able to filter out Corgan's voice (which I'm seemingly able to do), basically this:

almost every song they released up until 1998 is good don't @ me

― Simon H., Tuesday, February 20, 2018 7:36 AM (forty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, this.

I vividly remember when they debuted the first single off of Mellon Collie, and he started in with "The world is a vampire", and me thinking "he's can't seriously think that voice sounds good."
I was a pretty huge fan up until that moment, but I got off the bus in a hurry. The singing on the first 2 albums had very little hint of that adenoidal whine.

Pre-Bald Billy Punkins were okay, but the appearance of Nosferfat-u and the rat in a cage was the end of me ever wanting to listen to them voluntarily. Also, they were hot garbage at the Lollapalooza I saw them play. When a zitty Pavement fan thinks that your band can't "bring it" live, the whole enterprise is in trouble.

Counterpoint: they weren't good until he went bald

Mellon Collie is definitely where his voice begins to transition from weird to insufferable but I think it works well on "Bullet"

yeah that's a killer song. first time I heard it was a live broadcast and he really snarled that opening line. made the song. was a bit disappointed when i heard the recorded version but it's still a great song.

One of the many reasons Siamese Dream is their best record is that Butch Vig slathered enough reverb and processing onto his voice to make it tolerable, it's this barely human sounding wispy thing rather than this nasty weedly slimy thing.

you know, despite liking the Pumpkins through the nineties Siamese is the one that never really clicked too well with me. I like 'Soma' off that one.

In Spanish we refer to them as Smashing Pompis.

http://www.spanishdict.com/traductor/pompis

Corgan is pretty pompous ya

Pre-Bald Billy Punkins were okay, but the appearance of Nosferfat-u and the rat in a cage was the end of me ever wanting to listen to them voluntarily.

Technically Billy still had his hair in the "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" video, so there!

I find it funny that people are still arguing so vehemently about Corgan's voice in 2018, about 25 years after my classmates and I did the same thing during recess in 8th grade. I never thought it was that bad...

it would be a bit weird if he'd sounded like Sade

it's interesting how the 3/4 reunion announcement has made ppl talk about the Pumpkins and BC again for the first time in many years, IRL and on here it's mostly ppl that aren't fans or are casual fans. hence the voice discussion

and yea Billy sounds different on Gish and especially SD because Butch Vig made him do hundreds of takes, going so far as to comp individual syllables. on MCIS, not only did Billy record with a handheld mic w/o headphones, he didn't double track much, and Flood encouraged him to go for "passion rather than pitch," so... ymmv

I gave them 2.5 based on Gish alone, where I could 3, which were surely eroded to 2.5 by everything else they did.

which 3 tho

imo "good tracks" needs to be an integer. the line is set at 2.5 good tracks to set a clear threshold. so people claiming fractions of good tracks are misinformed rats in cages despite all their rages.

his voice is good, his commercial sell out songs from the mid-late 90s are awesome

that suggests he ever had any indie hangups about 'selling out' to begin with. are you talking about the soundtrack songs, "Eye" and "The End is the Beginning is the End"?

.5 is symbolic

it means i like a couple tracks but i don't buy their whole shtick

kinda like when you like one or two things in a song and then the singer messes it up

i didn't realize any of this wasn't symbolic. still, there are correct and incorrect ways to do things. going to flag your post, but note for the mods that it should only count as .5 a flag post. i disagree with the post's content, but i appreciate that you had the good sense to double space.

i would resist aligning their whole schtick with my music taste personally but think they certainly have more than 2.5 good songs, think billy corgan possibly had a deluded view of what he was good at but was nonetheless talented & applied his passion in ways that did result in good music, maybe semi-accidentally (or more accidentally than most artists) i almost feel like 'intent' for corgan couldn't possibly align with what makes him good, but at any rate, what symbolic answer is that? i voted 'a lot'

anyone saying 2.5 to me feels like they're really pushing against the grain of history or just have a distaste for their work idk

like 0 and 2.5 might as well be the same answer

I think his intent, at least early on, was to make emotional rock anthems that combined 70s prog/AOR with 80s/90s alternative rock? Which is what he achieved?

yes. he said this re: the band's conceptual origins in a 1995 MTV 'Rockumentary' that aired the week that Mellon Collie came out: "It seemed very obvious to me that if someone could somehow combine everything that they liked about music into a almost like a hodgepodge band, that seemed obvious to me where I wanted to go, so I just picked like my 7 favorite bands." ---which is a low number tbh. he was equally influenced by Boston, ELO, Zeppelin, Sabbath, Queen, The Beatles, and Cheap Trick as he was Joy Division, Bauhaus, Mercyful Fate, Metallica, U2, R.E.M., The Cure, Jane's Addiction... it's funny, writing that out, I realize how similar Billy's curated 'hodgepodge' mentality is to Pavement's record collector nerd mentality, but without any of the coy / pretentious pose.

i mean obviously Billy is pretentious, but he was always open about the process and his own grandiosity. familiarity breeds contempt

I Am One, Siva, Tristessa+(1979-Bullet w/ Butterfly Wings)
____________________________________ =2.5

"You Hurt Me Deeply In My Heart"

im sure he had more ideas about his music than reductive genre formula mathematics but ok sure

Obviously

Thread is super-illuminating in that it proves decisively that NV is the only one who makes funny jokes on this board

anyone saying 2.5 to me feels like they're really pushing against the grain of history or just have a distaste for their work idk

yeah, disliking the majority of a band's music pretty much means you have a distate for their work.

resist aligning their whole schtick with my music taste personally

"I realize how similar Billy's curated 'hodgepodge' mentality is to Pavement's record collector nerd mentality, but without any of the coy / pretentious pose."

wait, why are pavement pretentious? they were totally fun and goofy. i also don't get the coy part. they weren't shrinking violets.

There are probably about 5 songs that I like enough that I won't change the radio station if I'm driving, I guess that's worth about .5 good per song, none of these are their biggest hits though so I never hear them anyway.

Smashing PumpKing's X might be a tribute band that could do well w/a v specific demographic

"I realize how similar Billy's curated 'hodgepodge' mentality is to Pavement's record collector nerd mentality, but without any of the coy / pretentious pose."

wait, why are pavement pretentious? they were totally fun and goofy. i also don't get the coy part. they weren't shrinking violets.

― scott seward, Tuesday, February 20, 2018 2:37 PM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i don't really get that at all

or i should say i think flapz just wanted to talk shit abt pavement and drag em into the pumpking patch

post/username combinations I have enjoyed xxp

princesscarolyn.jpg

As someone who was a teenager in the 90s in North America, I had a lot of friends who were really into the Smashing Pumpkins so I heard a lot of their stuff, but never really got into it that much. Always seemed like it was never quite as good as everybody was saying it was.

All that being said, I guess I'd probably be defending this band right now if in 1995 I had put my limited funds towards randomly buying Melon Collie the month it came out instead of some other well reviewed or hyped album (Garbage?). That's just how these things go.

been meaning to relisten to garbage again

so have I. I keep listening to other stuff though.

that happy when it rains song is good

Really, I've been meaning to critically reevaluate (privately, in my mind) everything I've ever liked.

you should actually start a thread and chronicle this reevaluation in minute detail culminating in a poll

pavement had at least 8 great songs. and lots of good ones.

zero good smashing pumkings song forever

ty for this thread some of us who hate this fuckin band need it

despite all yr rage iirc

I'm struggling through Mellon Collie and it's basically just this sea of bad music with two toweringly brilliant epics in the middle - TTEOR especially feels like the work of a different band

my theory is that they didn't have enough collective energy to fully work through their songs, so they put a lot into a few of them and basically knocked the rest out without really thinking. like, Zero is a nice idea that could really go somewhere and...doesn't. and then again that's one of the rare good ideas to begin with. most of these songs don't seem to have had much put into the original conception

have you struggled through pisces iscariot