It’s all relative man (and inherently subjective of course) but I think there’s a big difference between Siamese Dream being your fave lp (no eyebrows raised here, it’s not my fave lp but it has great) and sp being your favourite band as (to my subjective ears) they’ve released so much dross post melon collie the proportion of great to not great is out of whack. Now you can hear a lot of things in machina and whatever the one with the long title and all the punctuation was called that I can’t and all power to you but from my pov there’s a massive gulf between Siamese Dream (or even mc at a pinch) being your fave and sp being your favourite band. Some of the other artists you’ve mentioned (and a lot you haven’t) have a much higher hit to miss ratio (p j Harvey for example) so I wouldn’t be as startled by someone saying pj was their fave artist. And it’s OK to have the consensus against you. My fave video game series is so revieled on the social board we’re banned from even mentioning it in the gaming thread. That’s fine, their loss you know?
i’m still not that convinced about the ‘fans abandoned me’ thing, if your fans have abandoned you then either a) the music isn’t as good, b) not doing enough promo for it or c) you’ve starting making music with less of a wide/mainstream appeal. if it’s the 3rd (i have no idea) then that’s fine and is often to be applauded but artists following that route generally have to anticipate they’ll lose some people along the way. can’t imagine all that many Walker Brothers diehards will have bought Bish Bosch.
to be clear i wasn’t using it as an example of billy being bad, just found it a hilarious exchange in my head as as others have pointed out, who knows what songs other people haven’t or have heard!?
I bet there are 1000’s of 1979’s from the past twenty years i wouldn’t have heard, and yes, that would be because i’ve been listening to other music. i could go and work with matt bellamy, or some other twat and could easily be in the same boat.
Tbh there’s provably a good argument that anything that followed MC&TIS was never going to live up to that because that kind of alternative rock was on the way out then.
But he chose to follow it up in a pretty obtuse way - I love Adore, but the idea that it was ever going to sell as well as the records that preceded it is ludicrous. I don’t believe large numbers expected it to be a “techno record”, but at one point it was an acoustic record, then it wasn’t, and Billy took to calling it “arcane night music” or something similarly OTT. Expecting everyone into the band up until that point was going to follow Billy on his personal artistic journey, that IS egotistical.
I love t s eliot. Favourite poet. Lots and lots of other poets use similar poetic techniques and devices and deal with similar themes but I don’t love them as much despite this. Pumpkins do a lot of the things that I love in my guitar music (or used to anyway) but that doesn’t mean that I or anyone has to love them as much.
I love angular guitars, politically incisive lyrics, dual vocalists and yet fugazi never clicked with me. Tried really hard to get into them, felt they were the kind of band that I could really get into but they never did it for me.
If you’re arguing that we should love sp because they “cover a lot of the same ground” as music we love I think you need to prepare for disappointment.
As I’ve said many times in this thread, maybe it’s not that our eyes are clouded by myth, media conspiracy and notions of cool, maybe the reason why other people aren’t as enamoured as you are is because tastes are subjective and what works for some people doesn’t work for others.
But if the longer one makes you happier then fair enough.
I don’t think I am happy to agree to disagree and I think I’ve finally put my finger on why that might be, so hear me out. I think, however you want to characterise it, behind a lot of your views is a ‘if only people weren’t blinded by media narratives and notions of cool they could see the truth of Billy’s genius like I do’ and frankly that’s patronising as fuck. It presupposes that people like me and the vast majority of Pumpkins non-beliebers on here aren’t musically sophisticated enough to form our own independent judgments about the quality of music and need to be rescued from our blindness. We’ve given sp a fair crack of the whip and the reason why we’re not that into 2000s sp isn’t because we can’t see past some narrative or notion of cool. It’s because Billy’s output this decade or so just doesn’t speak to us. I have no problem at all with how much you love sp. At all. Fill your boots. But what grates with me is the implication that we can’t see past ‘how unfairly he’s been treated’. We can. We’re grown ups and a fairly musically literate bunch at that.
There is a narrative around (the) pixies that they’re a bit of a spent force in recent days with their more modern post Kim deal stuff not hitting the heights of their earlier incarnation. It’s a story, a narrative, they’re not what they used to be. But it’s also true (to my ears), they’re not. There’s a reason why this narrative has sprung up, it’s cos it’s true. And the same, to me, is true of sp.
You will never ever ever convince me that if only I could listen without prejudice I would see what a great band they are. I believe that I’m capable of making those decisions and I’ve made them. It’s not because I’ve read some think piece on what a twat bc is that I don’t like shiny and oh so bright, it’s because I really don’t like the way it sounds and I’m capable of coming to that decision for myself.
I keep typing and then deleting replies to this thread because i can’t quite find the right tone. Also looking back on some of my posts I come across as quite antagonistic and fairly snarky…
I just thought that a few recent posts were along the lines of wanting the smashing pumpkins to be worthy of being a respected part of the musical canon. Just doesn’t sit right given earlier posts about dismissing the musical canon as a concept and rubbishing the beatles. But then it apparently mirrors Billy’s own attitude I guess - it’s a stupid club for dicks but I want to be part of it.
Anyway, really didn’t want to dredge up those earlier hot-take laden posts upthread but I just thought that this was worth highlighting.
Not read this thread for a long time. Surprised it’s still going to be fair. Thought we would’ve all agreed Corgan is a cunt and be done with it. Can we try and do that?
I think your mistake here is in thinking that this is a Smashing Pumpkins thread. Don’t think it’s ever really been that, it’s a ‘is Billy treated unfairly and does this cause an unfair prejudice against his music?’ thread. And given that fact you need people on the ‘no’ side just as much as people on the ‘yes’.
Martha, m8s, m8s, m8s… 
