As we reported yesterday, there is an ongoing article series at SP.com regarding the Smashing Pumpkins fan community.  They published Part Two today with an article written by Simon mostly prefacing a lengthy “collection of opinions” solicited from fans identified only by their first names.

He sets the tone of the interviews early on:

That being said, attempting to examine the dynamics that exist between a band and their fans is no small task, especially at a time when the band’s “integrity over comfort” practices are interjected with the additional challenges of the ever-changing music business. From eternally grateful to infinitely irate, everyone has an opinion on how the band should have or ought to move forward.

He’s right - even those of us here at HipstersUnited.com are not unified in opinion.  The responses to Simon’s questions mirror similar issues we grapple with at HU on a daily basis: “Billy Corgan the Businessman,” the evolving nature of the Pumpkins’ music, the origin of the pervasive negativity that exists on forums.  “Cathy” cheekily summed up I’ve been thinking a lot about lately when she was asked about internet negativity in general:

I’m aware that the Pumpkins have managed to operate in very hostile and unforgiving barren wasteland that calls itself the current popular music scene.

I think there’s something to this idea.  The concept of hit-of-the-minute iTunes tunes is really at odds with loving a band through and through.  Even celebrities hawk their personal playlists rather than their favorite albums.  Yesterday, Pins asked in the post comments whether or not the “band is somewhat responsible for the attitude of its fanbase” — but could it also be stemming from an even greater source: the music industry itself?

Alex Crisafulli of the music blog There’s Nothing Quite Like the Blinding Light… offers a wise and lengthy essay on the cultural significance of Siamese Dream. I find this segment to be particularly resonant:

Today, someone who lives in Missoula, Montana, has nearly as much access to the independent music scene as someone living in New York City. It wasn’t like that in 1993. Growing up in Central Illinois, bands like Guided by Voices and Pavement meant nothing to me. They weren’t on the radio, weren’t being written about in Rolling Stone, and they didn’t have videos on MTV (Pavement did actually have videos. I remember those hoodlums Beavis and Butthead taking in “Cut Your Hair.” But they were very [sparse]. Same goes for Guided by Voices, if they actually had any videos.) Those bands mean something to me now, but I’ll never have a connection with them like I might have if I could actually remember what I was doing when Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was released. And that’s what some people who never lived outside the bubble of a huge city with a thriving underground music scene will ever understand. There was once a segment of the population who needed good music to be accessible if they ever wanted to hear it. And this is where the Pumpkins came in.

UPDATE (7/31): Crisafulli’s essay (go, read it!) has received over 100 “Diggs”.

SmashingPumpkins.com writer Sunky today taps the SPFC.org tour history for a countdown of the band’s “Top 10 Most Performed Songs”. We join him as he reaches the end of the list:

1. Bullet With Butterfly Wings
Performed: 457 times, from 1019 known shows, that is a 44.8% chance.

So now while you line up you can pull out the stat that states you have a 44.8% chance of seeing Bullet With Butterfly Wings performed that night. People will either applaud you for your knowledge or look at you like you’re a massive statistics geek.

I believe there is a third possibility…people might look at you like you’re not very wise about using statistics. Consider the following troo fact: Out of 307 band news articles on SP.com, five were written by Sunky; that is 1.6%. So should we estimate that there is a 1.6% “chance” that the next article on SP.com is going to be by Sunky? Uh, no, for many reasons. One of those many reasons is that 254 of the 307 total articles were posted before he was even hired. Similarly, several hundred* of the 1019 Smashing Pumpkins gigs in the SPFC database took place before “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” was written.

One may also note that “Bullet” was performed at every one of the 38 shows on the band’s spring tour. Past performance is of course no guarantee of future performance, and that alone is a valid reason not to claim with certainty that they’ll play the song 10 days from now in Davenport. But if anyone wants to bet at even money that they won’t play it, please drop me a line (just click the CONTACT link above!).

*Normally I would get the exact number, but the Japan-based SPFC server is being very uncooperative at the moment.

This is so great, and so central to what (for me) HU is all about, that I am going to blockquote six paragraphs of it right here, unhidden behind a jump. This much is still not quite the whole thing, so do yourself a favor and go read it all on the music blog Thirteen Birds vs. The Record Desk:

If you throw a rock at bunch of shaggy kids in American Apparel gear, you’ll likely hit someone whose band *totally* has an ambient My Bloody Valentine thing going on. Of course, this claim is likely complete bullshit – this kid’s band probably sounds like U2 or the Cure. However, My Bloody Valentine is a much more acceptable band to talk about as an influence. They signify a certain kind of cool – cool that is decadent and European and detached from issues of pop and commerce. In short, invoking My Bloody Valentine means that you have the *right* idea of what is cool. Your sensibilities are in order. You are not some kind of “rawk” obsessed meathead. Basically, name dropping My Bloody Valentine proves that you are the sort of person who should be forming a band.

Some bands (like My Bloody Valentine, Television, the Fall, and even the Velvet Underground) provide a shorthand for musicians who want to discuss aesthetics and rule out the wrong kind of collaborators, but who don’t wish to appear snooty or discriminatory. And because fans of and dabblers in popular music are pack animals, pretty soon everyone learns the new codes and starts prattling on about how Loveless and Marquee Moon changed their lives – giving rise to a process of I’m calling inflation of influence.

For instance, a 13-year-old kid in 1993 might have bought a guitar because he was really into Siamese Dream. However, by 2002 this kid is out in the great wide hip world telling everyone how he wants to form a band that sounds just like Loveless. He doesn’t want to fess up that it was the wholly cornball Smashing Pumpkins who rocked his world. Instead, he uses his influences’ influence as a cover. Our imaginary kid doesn’t want folks to know that he once got his kicks from the corporate FM radio monster – an admission that might peg him as some kind of possible Nickleback sympathizer. So, our imaginary kid bites his lip and pretends to worship Kevin Shields instead of uncool Billy Corgan.

I’m not saying that no one loves Loveless or Hex Induction Hour based on first-hand experience. I’m just saying that most people lie about how much they love these sorts of records. I know because *I’ve* lied about loving these sorts of records. I mean, I like Loveless and I actually really do love Marquee Moon, but not in that crazy, bloodied teenage way that you *really* love your favorite albums. These smartipance albums are a fine diversion after you’ve memorized every blip of “Baba O’Riley” and every squawk of “Heart Shaped Box,” but they aren’t the sort of things that you love deep down in the your adolescent gut-pit. Loveless and other “important” records like it present interesting ideas and new twists on the possibilities lurking about the fringes rock and roll.

Of course, I too am using Loveless as shorthand – in this case for a certain kind of album that everyone has decided to treat as a classic despite the fact that it was never super popular or embraced on a massive scale. I’m not saying that it isn’t an interesting or, hell, even an enjoyable album. I’m simply admitting that I almost never listen to it, and I almost never hear anyone else listening to it either. Loveless strikes me as a piece of “required listening,” not too different from so-called “classics” that you are expected to read in literature class.

Which brings us to our thrilling conclusion – I’m not sure if high school literature class is the best model for pop music appreciation. The wrong teacher or the wrong syllabus can ruin reading for many people. By extension, the wrong tastes or the wrong standards being forced on pop listeners and pop participants can kind of make pop music less fun and more like a never-ending struggle to keep up with what sorts of things make for proper listening.

So, a little back-of-the-envelope arithmetic:

• Expected $150 million gross for what may be the biggest opening in Hollywood history;
• I’ll conservatively estimate the average ticket price at $10;
• And I’ll guess that a third of the tickets are going to people seeing it for the second or third time.

If most everyone is in their seats in time for the Watchmen trailer — and if that trailer is indeed on every Dark Knight reel across the country — that would put the admittedly cut-down Smashing Pumpkins track into the ears of 10 million Americans this weekend.

Could that many different people ever have heard lesser Pumpkins singles “Rocket”, “Thirty-three”, or “Tarantula” on the radio? Or consider that the band’s bestselling 1995 album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness hasn’t quite moved five million copies in the U.S., and that album tracks like “Jellybelly” and “Stumbleine” would be lucky to have been heard even once by each of its buyers (although perhaps siblings, two parents and several roommates could be counted for many of those), so…

Seriously, has “The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning” just become one of the most-heard Billy Corgan songs of all time?!

UPDATE (7/20): While the Watchmen trailer was not on every reel, I was too conservative in estimating the number of tickets sold. I guessed 15 million, but the Associated Press reports:

Box office tracker Media By Numbers estimates today’s average movie prices at $7.08, which means “The Dark Knight” would have sold 21.94 million tickets.

If I still guess that one-third of the tickets go to repeat viewers, then the Watchmen trailer would need to be shown about 70% of the time to reconstitute the 10 million figure.

In praising Mission of Burma’s performance of a 25-year-old album at Pitchfo*k Music Festival last night, venerable Chicago Sun-Times music critic Jim DeRogatis drops two comparison points:

It’s easy to take shots at Pitchfork’s opening-night “Don’t Look Back” concept of bands performing one of their classic albums in its entirety and to dismiss it as a gimmick or cheap nostalgia. But as with everything else, it all depends on the music in question.

A long since gone-Hollywood Liz Phair performing “Exile in Guyville” or the reunited sorta-Smashing Pumpkins rendering “Gish” arguably are as sad as any state fair act. But a band like Mission of Burma is a different story: Its music was always far ahead of its time; it ended the first round of its career prematurely, in part because of guitarist Roger Miller’s tinnitus, and the new albums it has recorded since 2004 have been every bit as good as “Vs.” (1983), the subject of Friday’s retrospective.

The reformed Pumpkins haven’t actually yet performed Gish, but now many of DeRogatis’s Sun-Times readers (particularly those who know that Liz Phair recently did perform Exile in Guyville) are going to assume that they have. But hey, since he already knows it’s going to suck, no harm done!

VH1 just got through airing their five-hour doculist “100 Greatest Songs of the 90s”, online content from which is accessible through their “Greatest” series page via the link pictured below:

Despite this hyping blurb, there is no mention of the Smashing Pumpkins…

• In the list of the “100 Greatest Songs of the 90s”, or…
• In a video playlist titled “50 That Almost Made It”, or…
• In an accompanying “90s: Alternative” playlist, or…
  
• In an accompanying “90s: Lollapalooza” playlist, or…
• In any of the “Extras”, including discussions of “What songs are missing from the list?” and “What is the quintessential ’90s album?”

So, I have given up on trying to find exactly where the Pumpkins were mentioned. If anyone saw a mention of the band in the TV broadcast or finds one that I missed in the online package, please comment about it and get VH1 off the hook!

Stop the madness, please!

In his introductory post on sp.com, simon makes reference to his hometown of Vancouver having played host to one of the best Silverfucks of all time.

It’s a form of a statement that I see far too many times, regarding the glory of the 1/8/97 Mellon Collie show at GM Place. The reality is, there is nothing awe-inducing about the concert. The deification of this show needs to be brought back down to a more respectable level.

First, I get why people do laud the show. Due to the FM broadcast by CBC two months later, it’s the best recording representation fans have of the tail end of the Mellon Collie era. And Billy and co. seem to be in genial moods, as the show is the 4th after a 2-week holiday break and they’re just gearing back up for the final month. On top of that, it is a solid performance with a good crowd.

Now that that’s established, is there anything that makes this show stand out above any of the countless others from the Mellon Collie tour, or even more detailed, the Matt Walker era? Other than that impeccable sound quality?

Sound quality does not equal performance quality, people. And the performance is not legendary in the least.

The run of Southern California shows a month earlier had the band firing on all cylinders, with some of their strongest performances since the restart of the tour. Even the Seattle show from 2 days before is at least as good a performance, with the exact same setlist. Vancouver is good, but it’s entirely Pumpkin paint-by-numbers if you focus on the performance and not the strength of the recording. (more…)

Kerrang! claimed on Friday that Pumpkins co-founder James Iha will make a “guest appearance” on the next album from Brian “The Space Cowboy” “Marilyn Manson” Warner and Jeordie “Ratso Rizzo” “Twiggy Ramirez” White:

[Marilyn Manson], who is clearly reeling after the commercial and critical failure that was 2007’s Eat Me, Drink Me, says tracks for his eponymous band’s seventh studio album are “very ruthless, very heavy, and very violent.”

The Double M has also revealed that Slayer guitar god Kerry King and The Smashing Pumpkins’ James Iha will be making guest appearances on the record.

There is essentially no original content in this Kerrang! blurb, as the information – including the “very ruthless, very heavy, and very violent” quotation — has been part of a Wikipedia entry since February.  Just days after that Wikipedia entry was created, an extensive discussion of the entry took place on Manson fan board The Hierophant Council.  One fan taking part in that discussion, Tim “Litso” Hessel, recognized that the Wikipedia entry was a copy of an entry on his MansonWiki site:

It’s nice to see wikipedia takes information from the MansonWiki, it used to be the other way around. Everything in the article is true for as far as I know, we try to stick to the facts (as presented in interviews and other reliable sourdces) as much as possible.

Another participant in the Hierophant Council discussion wrote:

I recognize almost everything in that [Wikipedia] article from posts here [on the Hierophant Council site] of live concert reports and other credible goings-on of information gleaned over the past year, but for Wikipedia that isn’t (and shouldn’t be by principle, even though we know better) good enough for it to remain unsourced and intact there. It is just about all true, though.

So the Kerrang! blurb is (effectively) sourced from Wikipedia, the Wikipedia entry from MansonWiki, and the MansonWiki entry from the Hierophant Council discussion boards.  Based on a Google search of those boards, it appears that the James Iha information can be traced to a September 27, 2007 post by Heather Wiewes, who told of her experience at a Manson concert in São Paulo the night before:

After the show, I met Manson, talked a little bit with him. I asked to him about a new album and new single… he told me that a new album coming soon :D and it will be a participation to Slayer (sorry, I can’t remember the name of guy), James Iha from Smashing Pumpkins and someone else (I also can’t remember)

Also cited on the boards is a November interview conducted with Manson by David Saavedra of Madrid newspaper El Mundo.  The interview is in Spanish, but here is the Google Translate rendering of the section where Saavedra tries to get clarity:

[Saavedra]. - is rumoured that could assist in that CD Slayer and Smashing Pumpkins.

[Manson]. - It’s definitely a possibility. Obviously, I had the opportunity to meet many people during these years. I have made very close friend of Kerry King of Slayer, I have had enough contact with Smashing Pumpkins and recently I also worked with Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who has made a remix for me. All of them can become part of the disc.

Where does that leave us, or the truth?  I’m not really sure, but I almost have to question the rumor purely on plausibility grounds. I don’t have any personal knowledge of the “failure” of the last Manson album, but I daresay that anyone who calls in James Iha to further a plan for heavily ruthless violence is reeling at best and may rather like the drugs.  Uhm, so, maybe it IS true…

Last note: the MansonWiki is now citing Kerrang! (in the mistaken belief that Kerrang! conducted a new interview with Manson) as evidence that “the Smashing Pumpkins’ James Iha would still be making an appearance on the album.”  What goes around, stays around?

On Thursday, industrious Pitchfo*k newsman Dave Maher located the official website of the Smashing Pumpkins, using information found there to snark out a report on a two-week-old interview.  All links are Maher’s:

Not letting their music get overshadowed by their typically dramatic activities from earlier this year, Smashing Pumpkins revealed their plans for the rest of the year to ArtisanNews.com (as reposted on their website.)

…

Thanks to reader Keith Beshwate for the tip.

Maher added value to his reposting of the Artisan News Service interview by misspelling Jimmy’s last name, saying that the Pumpkins’ “best songs are behind them”, and suggesting that a reunion with James and D’Arcy would be desirable.

Patrick S. Pemberton of the San Luis Obispo Tribune today includes “For Martha” on a Mother’s Day mixtape plan. Emphasis is mine:

Corgan, who has performed “For Martha” onstage with his musician father, has been known to break out in tears midway through the song, which asserts, “Someday I’ll follow you and see you on the other side.”

I have not known him to do that, nor do I remember hearing about it, but it’s not like I know everything. Has anyone ever witnessed this happening, or (much better) have hard evidence of it?

More than seven months later, the distressing game of telephone continues. Here’s Emily Friedman of ABC News, in a “Mosh Pit or Death Pit?” scare piece:

“There is no way to crowd surf or stage dive safely consistently,” said Paul Wertheimer, president of Crowd Management Strategies Inc., the only organization that tracks concert crowd safety incidents…

At a 2007 Smashing Pumpkins concert in Vancouver, a 20-year-old concertgoer collapsed in a mosh pit and later died, according to Wertheimer’s records.

Though the coroner told a different story, you can hardly blame Ms. Friedman for taking at face value the “records” of a guy who sells crowd-safety consulting services.

Stereogum today highlights two quotes from the new Spin magazine article on Death Cab for Cutie. Out of an article that is presumably (yeah, I don’t subscribe to Spin) full of actually Death Cab-related material, Stereogum chose to reproduce only a pair of controversy-provoking-type remarks about other artists. Even less surprisingly, one is…oh, let’s just get to it:

[Chris Walla:] I sold my copy of Siamese Dream the day after seeing Smashing Pumpkins at Lollapalooza because Billy Corgan yelled at D’Arcy onstage.

They played right after the Beastie Boys, who were awesome; they were the Beastie Boys, they ruled it. And when the Smashing Pumpkins came on, the reception was a little icy, so Corgan said, “You guys want the Beastie Boys to come back out?” and everybody went crazy. He spent the rest of the night yelling at people. The next day, I sold my Siamese Dream and bought the Breeders’ Last Splash and a Shudder to Think record and Mars Audiac Quintet by Stereolab. All because of the experiences I had that day.

This guy sold an album because the singer expressed anger? As if there’s no anger expressed in Beastie Boys songs or on Last Splash. But Corgan did it IRL, dude! Uh, yeah, and Kim Deal is all sugar and spice.

If Corgan’s…error?…is being a bit too real, Walla’s mistake is being too fake. Reading between the lines, I see a story in which “the experiences [he] had that day” informed the then-18-year-old Walla about what the preponderance of the hip Lolla crowd thought was cool and what they thought was not cool. The crowd was “icy” for the Pumpkins and “crazy” for the Beasties (and that before any “yelling” started), which were the important things to pick up on for any status-conscious teen, who, man, really needed some Stereolab. The “omg, that guy once yelled at a girl” rationalization was developed simultaneously and later could be applied to score chicks whenever useful.

See here for important disclaimer.

Pumpkins’ tour of the world, January 30 to April 19, 2008, by the numbers: (more…)

Semi-governmental wire service Notimex provided a “Coca-Cola Zero Fest” wrapup to several newspapers and other outlets. The article carries this block of misinformation:

“Disarm”, “1979″, “To nigh to night”, “Tarántula”, “Stand inside you love”, “Home”, “Muzzle” y “Nerverlot” fueron los temas que inundaron de nostalgia el Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez…

Nervermind the spellings — four of those eight songs were not played, according to…anywhere one might think to look, such as smashingpumpkins.com or the more-accurate-but-less- known spfc.org.

Reporter Elizabeth Murphy today gets used to push product in the (Penn State University) Daily Collegian. Emphasis is mine:

When searching for the word “Siva” in the Google search engine, Internet users are more likely to find a link to a YouTube video of The Smashing Pumpkins than information on the god that more than one billion Hindus worship worldwide.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, pointed this out in his speech, “The Googlization of Everything,” Friday morning to a near-capacity audience in the Foster Auditorium. The University Libraries Colloquia Committee sponsored Vaidhyanathan’s speech.

Vaidhyanathan displayed a screenshot of the results showing that The Smashing Pumpkin’s [sic] 1991 music video for “Siva” tops information Web sites on the Hindu god of the same name.

That’s right, the professor choosing this example has the first name “Siva”. And when I went to run the search he suggested, the first item that came up was neither Pumpkins- nor god-related — it was a listing of the professor’s own books!

Fact presumably not mentioned in his talk: a search on the more common god-name spelling, “Shiva”, yields nothing on the Pumpkins but plenty on the god.

I predict that Vaidhyanathan’s next written effort, Using Google to Sell Books That Criticize Google, will hit infomercials this fall.