The Best Album You Never Bought 4.07.08: Billy Corgan, All Grown Up

Posted by Dan Yates on 04.07.2008

A look at Billy Corgan's forgotten solo album and why we cry when he smiles.

Hi. My name is Dan. I'm new here. I'll be writing a column. If it sucks, let me know.

The title and format is still a work in progress, but what I'd like to try and do every week is take a look at a couple of albums — one being more popular than the others — give a few of my thoughts, make a few points and offer a recommendation. I have an internet column. That makes me an authority and gives me the right to preach.

To open, let's take a look at Billy Corgan — the often-mislabeled grunge all-star and the frontman of the Smashing Pumpkins, Zwan and the face of one failed solo album. Corgan's career has been marked by some huge commercial successes and a few high-profile duds. He's consistently met a certain critical and creative standard, but some of his best work outside of the early to mid 1990s has been ignored by audiences or held to an unfair standard.

Billy Corgan's music will forever be haunted by two things. One, he's getting old and with every passing year the general public's interest in watching a grown adult, wearing some variety of gothic trench coat, snarl about life, love and suicide in his three-octaves-of-nasal voice decreases. Two, in 1995 he released Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.


Ah, the 1990s — when homages to Fernando Cortes were cool.

With Mellon Collie, Billy Corgan and the then Smashing Pumpkins had the good fortune to release an album which both resonated with an audience and sold a ton of records — building upon the Pumpkins' already established fanbase and making them super fucking rich in the process. Mellon Collie, and the singles it berthed, are to me, and I can only assume a large mass of other people, 1996. "Bullet With Butterfly Wings," "Zero," "1979," and "Tonight, Tonight" are the kind of perfect pop songs that linger in the back of your head, pop up on occasion and, in the most cliche way possible, take you back to a certain period of time. It's like Foghat, but for a different generation.

It is under the massive shadow of Mellon Collie that the rest of Corgan's work will be judged. This isn't a new assertion, but it's worth repeating. After the dissolution of the Pumpkins in 2000, Corgan would embark on two new projects — the improperly labeled "supergroup" Zwan (which I'll be ignoring today for the most part) and his 2005 solo album The Future Embrace. Both projects would get mainstream attention, but neither would sell particularly well. Both stand as a departure from his previous work and both would set up Corgan to revisit his past. A change in sound and direction may have played a part in the public's general distaste for Corgan's new releases, but something else may have been happening in our collective conscience.

To illustrate this point, let's compare Mellon Collie with The Future Embrace and the newest release of the sort-of Smashing Pumpkins — 2007's Zeitgeist.

The Future Embrace was Corgan's first full-on release of solo material. Sharp-tongued critics will joke that all of the Smashing Pumpkins catalogue, and indeed Zwan, were solo outlets, but one has to believe that this was the first time Corgan had complete control over a project. How else can you explain (or justify) the shirtless Corgan striking his best vogue pose on the album's cover? James Iha never would have let that slide.


You better work it, cover girl

Having reportedly sold fewer than 100,000 copies, The Future Embrace is a misunderstood — if not largely completely forgotten — album. Its failure can largely be blamed largely on one thing. This was a different Billy Corgan. Yeah, he that same voice was there, but gone were the doom and gloom guitars, the gothic garb, and the bombastic musings on an apathetic life. In their place was a new sound that was, in part, a throwback to some later Smashing Pumpkins songs, but which was now fully emerged in a new layered electronic sound built around keyboards, electronic drums, and an unrecognizable and heavily-distorted guitar.

While Corgan couldn't have expected The Future Embrace to be fully embraced by a mainstream audience and rock radio, it wouldn't have been foolhardy for him to expect a larger, hardcore collection of Smashing Pumpkins fans to latch onto his new sound. Only, the biggest single change on The Future Embrace isn't Corgan's sound. Rather, it's his emotion.

Corgan's lyrics in some of the best-loved Smashing Pumpkins songs fall into the "keep the knives in the drawer while listening" category and could have meshed well with his new musical direction. Throw the lyrics to Mellon Collie's "X.Y.U" over the electronic rhythms on The Future Embrace and you'd have Corgan's most disturbed work to date and a million dark-eyed teenage girls would love him.

Instead, on The Future Embrace, the guy who made his name singing lines like "The world is a vampire," and "Love is suicide" now professes "I'm ready / Oh Lord I'm ready / I'm ready, ready, ready to roll / Ready to leave / I'm ready / Oh Lord I'm steady now / I'm ready, ready, ready to flee / Ready to turn" before deciding that he is in fact "ready for love." Billy Corgan was happy and this new persona made people uncomfortable. It was sappy, sentimental stuff, but it was a refreshing change from a guy who, I don't know, might have grown up.

The Future Embrace isn't the kind of album you like right away. You'll hate it the first time, but upon repeated listens it can grow on you. You're not going to throw it on in the background, have a party and do some barbecuing, but if you give it a fair opportunity to prove itself, there's a lot to like.

The failure of The Future Embrace seemed to have an effect on the public persona of Corgan. It's as if he lost a certain degree of confidence. While touring the album, there were reports of fans heckling Corgan while on stage with him once responding "Can I live my life for today?" Well, a couple of years can make a huge difference, because in 2007 Billy Corgan brought back the Smashing Pumpkins brand, along with former Pumpkins and Zwan bandmate Jimmy Chamberlain, with a boring rehash of yesterday called Zeitgeist, a German word meaning "the spirit of the times."



Billy Corgan brings the Smashing Pumpkins into the new millenium ... with clothes ... from space.

The album itself is as misguided as the title it was given. Receiving mixed reviews, Zeitgeist is Corgan's most commercially successful work since the breakup of the Pumpkins. Going gold in the United States, it didn't set the world on fire, but it was certainly on most music fans' radar upon its release. "Tarantula" was a promising start, sounding enough like the Pumpkins of old to grab my attention and, indeed, my interest, but the album didn't warrant more than a few listens. It's not a terrible album by any means, but it's like getting a gift for Christmas this year that you wanted 5 years ago. You get all excited for the unveiling and once its there, it's all fine and nice, but not what you want today.

At its best, Zeitgeist can inspire a listener to pick up some of the band's older material. At its worst, Zeitgeist comes off as a lame imitation of the very best on The Future Embrace. Upon the album's release, Corgan said it was meant to serve as a "reintroduction to the band," which is a kind of cop-out. We didn't need an apology for Zwan and The Future Embrace. Fans who gave Corgan's post-Pumpkins work a chance, weren't ripped off. While his intentions were good, Zeitgeist feels like Corgan pandering to an audience, asking "Am I relevant now?"

The 2000s have been a productive, but unkind decade thus far for Billy Corgan. In the span of only a few years, he broke up his old band, formed a new one, released an album, broke that band up, released a solo album, re-formed his original band and launched a comeback. I'm guessing that the current Smashing Pumpkins will have some legs and that Corgan and Chamberlain probably have a few more albums left in them — perhaps even some good ones. But Zeitgeist wasn't it. Here's hoping Corgan can find a balance between honoring his past, moving forward and aging gracefully. Wait — he did that already. It was called Zwan and it was great.

But that's a topic for another column.