Billy Corgan or: How I learned to stop worrying and love The Smashing Pumpkins

The past few weeks have been quite eventful for Smashing Pumpkins fans.

Not only will they be treated to a new record, Oceania, released in the coming year, the band also unveiled details surrounding the upcoming reissues of Gish and Siamese Dream, two albums that made the Pumpkins’ name in the early 1990s. Fans can now look forward to kicking it back with the new, while revisiting the band’s former glories.

Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan

Good times for all, then? Sadly not, for all is not well in the world of the Pumpkins. It remains to be seen exactly how many followers of the band are left to listen to the new releases. Since the band reunited in 2007, fans have become accustomed to grimacing as they watch their once-favourite group enact a slow-motion car crash.

Take, for example, the release of 2007’s Zeitgeist, perhaps better known as Shitegeist, which was met with a disastrous reception. Throw in a controversial tour, with Billy Corgan, the band’s lead singer and songwriter, continually berating fans from the safety of the stage, and things go from bad to worse.

But first let’s be honest: most articles about The Smashing Pumpkins will usually contain an obligatory, if somewhat unfair, reference to the megalomaniacal personality of Corgan. In a sense, I guess, this piece is no different: at 44 years of age Corgan may well be on the verge of becoming another deranged rock star disconnected with reality – just think of a white version of Michael Jackson, but with less hair, no visible plastic surgery and fewer kids in his bed. Or perhaps even the comically insane general in the 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

The last time Corgan hit the headlines was in 2010 after embarking on an embarrassing, childlike war of words on Twitter with Courtney Love, a crack addict and occasional lead singer of the band Hole in her spare time. Of course, this incident was some time after he released an excruciatingly bad collection of poems, Blinking with Fists (Corgan called it “the poetry of my heart”, Entertainment Weekly called it “both pretentious and confoundingly esoteric”) but it was well before he launched his own pro wrestling company.

What is happening here? The Smashing Pumpkins were the band of my youth. I still recall the countless nights spent listening to the euphoria of Siamese Dream, the musical schizophrenia that was Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and the melancholic moments that graced the lines of Adore. These still are wonderful records. Of course, there were other bands that I loved growing up, but they never had the adolescent quality attached to the music of Corgan and company. Radiohead were always going to be the five bookish guys from Oxford; Björk was always going to be weird-looking girl whose house kids avoided at Halloween; and Elliott Smith was always going to be, well… dead.

The Pumpkins were different. Like Nirvana, they were a 1990s phenomenon. Unlike Nirvana, however, they chose to fade away rather than burn out by means of a shotgun to the head. The band’s image is so ingrained in the era’s music, television and culture, that its albums almost remind one of a 1990s American suburban childhood you never actually had.

From the ice cream truck smeared with kaleidoscopic paint and desert dust in the music video for Today, to the kids in 1979 throwing toilet rolls into the tree and giving the finger to the world, the Pumpkins’ music captured a moment and offered a voice and outlet to a frustrated, alienated generation. Not that I was particularly frustrated or alienated for that matter; I’ve always just wanted to drive an ice cream truck.

Billy Corgan: unwittingly authentic strait-jacket impression

It was an outlet that lent the Pumpkins a huge fan base. After the success of 1993’s Siamese Dream – its grunge, artfully laced with inflections of shoegaze, finding critical acclaim on both sides of the pond – the band hit the musical mainstream with Mellon Collie two years later. The 28 track recording, home to Pumpkin classics like 1979 and Tonight, Tonight, was the band’s White Album; a miscellany of different genres thrown together and released into the world before record executives could think otherwise. No McCartney, Lennon and Harrison this time round; just a schizophrenic-as-fuck Corgan trying his hand at synth, heavy metal, pop, folk and piano balladry.

The mid-1990s would be the band’s high-water mark. From there, it was commercial decline – albeit a descent that certainly had nothing to do with the quality of the music. To this day, 1998’s Adore remains my favourite Pumpkins recording; its mature, honest and quiet nature contrasting starkly to the more angsty recordings that Corgan is renowned for.

True, Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie will always be albums flying the flag for the 1990s, but Adore’s sound is timeless. You couldn’t place a date on the sparse notes adorning To Sheila and For Martha even if you tried. Had the Pumpkins left it with the release of 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God, it is arguable that their musical legacy would be secure in the annals of rock history.

Fast forward to late 2011, however, and things aren’t looking so good. Corgan has always been controversial (read: irritating), but at least back in the 1990s the band was releasing quality music. With the upcoming release of Oceania, it’s no longer a given. Quite the opposite in fact; no doubt a song relating to pro-wrestling will make an appearance on the record, artfully blended with lyrics about God and the afterlife. We can only but hope.

There has been one upshot of Oceania’s announcement though. The past fortnight I have been revisiting my old Pumpkins-of-yore favourites, from the Gish era right up to Machina. At times it’s easy to forget this is the same man behind the likes of Pennies, We Only Come out of Night and Rhinoceros.

Perhaps it’s best to just stop worrying about Corgan and start loving the Pumpkins again?