Regularly voted one of 4th edition's worst characters, it's the one man brave enough to bring spectacles to a dragon fight: the Priest!
We're back here again. The Pumpkins was where this ludicrous series of posts began, a hair over a decade ago.
The two tracks could hardly be more different. Imperial phase Smashing Pumpkins were nothing if not eclectic, or expansive. I don't know what's more notable - that this shift occurs within just four songs on Mellon Collie... or the fact that stretch constitutes just one seventh of the collection as a whole.
Anyway. Difference. I assume I don't have to justify why these tracks couldn't be much further apart. We slide from a lone piano with accompanying woodwind, and a synthesiser that's more haunting the piece than contributing to it, to a veritable orchestra of overdriven guitars and Jimmy Chamberlain drumming out the end of days. The Ragna-rock, if you will.
I want to talk about a much more important difference between the two tracks, though. "Zero" has words.
Billy Corgan is not a technically accomplished writer of verse. His poetry collection, Blinking With Fists, is something of a chore. About the best thing I can say about it is that occasionally, you'll read a entry and find your brain can almost hear the Pumpkins song it could have been the lyrics to.
And Corgan is a good lyricist. Or at least, he's a very effective one. Certainly, his work is an extremely strong demonstration of the difference between lyrics and poetry. On paper, Pumpkins lyrics are leaden doggerel. They're hardly shy of imagery, sure, but all the charcoal teeth and bumblebee mouths and machine-gun blues float unconnected; random adjective, random noun.
As part of a song, though, they shine; hidden diamonds suddenly sparkling in a new light. There's a theory - I forget where I saw it - that Corgan's genius is his ability to gift any song with a thematically perfect guitar solo. There's a huge amount of truth to that, not least demonstrated by the howling outbreaks of what loosely constitutes a "solo" here. I want to extend the idea, though. It's not just the solos that perfectly match the broader composition, it's the lyrics, too. Corgan's hyperbolic Rorschach bombs suddenly make total sense when they detonate against the music's emotional landscape. "Zero"'s central riff is an absolute avalanche of fissile material, collapsing again and again into harmonics that chop and buzz like the hornets of Hades. In that context, unmoored references to fashion victims, enchanted kingdoms, and sinking ships make more sense than making sense ever could.
There's another theory, that says "Zero" is a song about Corgan's reaction to fame after Siamese Dream started doing silly numbers. He feels like a fraud, a "zero", replaced as an actual human being by the millions of people who saw themselves reflected in his lyrics - the faces in our dreams of glass. And I don't think that reading is wrong, but I mean that in the exact same sense that no-one is wrong when they describe what they see in cloud formations, or tarot cards, or inkblots. "Corgan is terrified he's become a reflection of the listener", ultimately, is just another reflection of the listener. Which is to say, another route by which the music burrows into our souls, ultimately no different from Corgan's uncanny knack for a thematically appropriate solo.
If I wanted to summarise the Smashing Pumpkins project - if I wanted to tell you about the face in my dreams of glass - it would be about this synergy. This refusal to see it as a meaningful distinction when people say "music AND lyrics". To commit totally to what a song needs to say, without second-guessing or undercutting or, horror of horrors, a sense of irony. It always seemed ridiculous to me that Pumpkins were seen as a grunge band. Grunge, to me, is the idea that disaffection is the only sane response to the world. That feeling nothing is better than feeling the wrong thing. To put it in modern terms, grunge saw just about everything as cringe, and so defined cool as an almost total absence.
The Pumpkins took a different path. They saw what roamed the dead highways. They saw the face of the king of the horseflies. They saw where boys feared to tread. And they rejected it totally. Cringe is cool. What's better than feeling nothing? Feeling fucking everything.
"Zero" is about how being at zero is the worst thing a person can possibly be. At least, that's what I see in my reflection.
What do you see in yours?
B-Side
I went looking specifically for an acoustic cover, to see if it could be done. QUESTION ANSWERED.
The Vines had an oddly rocky introduction to the music world, given how desperate everyone was to talk about them. This is easily, if not happily, explained: the band owed an obvious (though ludicrously overstated) debt to one of the 90s better rock bands, and had was fronted by someone who was struggling to balance the stresses of touring with their neurodiversity. Back then, it simply wasn't possible for music journalisms to recognise that description, and to comport themselves accordingly.
They probably also didn't know what neurodiversity was.
Undervalued in all this was the fact that The Vines' first three singles, released between April and November 2002, are all indisputable bangers. "Get Free" might be the best; a snot-nosed ascending spiral of rejection-sensitive teenage apoplexy. A call-and-response bludgeon of a song, an opening number for a gig in hell.
All of which made the endless comparisons to That Other Band not just tiresome, but unconvincing. There's none of the too-cool-for-school exhaustingly cultivated air of disinterest here. Craig Nicholls might as well be screaming "Never mind? Are you shitting me, mate? Have you actually seen this fuckery we got right here?". Teenage confusion isn't disaffected, it's a white hot fury, quenchable only by the actual fucking sun. She doesn't love me; why should anyone? Nothing to do but charge towards the freedom of death, in the most extra way humanity has to offer.
It's massive, and it's dumb, and it's impossible to deny. It completely embraces the stupidity of one's teenage years without glamorising them. Can you believe we shits had to go through that shit?
Once a year or so, I get together with a bunch of old uni mates to play games, drink beers, and take stock of how far we've come. Oftentimes, we'll break out various iterations of Rock Band, for the concatenated nostalgia of both the songs themselves and the game that lets us pretend to play them. Sooner or later, we'll spool up "Get Free", and it's glorious, four men in their increasing years just devouring a song two decades old about being barely two decades old. And once we're done helping Nicholls scream and thrash and bark at the sun, we turn the game off to do something else.
Because how the fuck are you going to top this?
B-Side
I went through dozens of videos of covers of this song, and absolutely none of them stray far from the original. This is the most divergence I could find, by virtue of including a female vocalist. That to me is a mark of a brilliant song - there's just no other way to imagine it existing.
Right, then. My prediction. Feels unusually tough this year, because I'm not sure how much can be gleaned from the O'Sullivan collapse.
Still, it is what it is. Gonna go Xintong 18 - 16 Williams.
You know what? I decline. We're not going to do this.
I mean, I know I do do this, all the time. Rating acts of cultural appropriation is all but unavoidable if you want to talk about music. Next up is Springsteen, for God's sake, an artist I love, but who I couldn't possibly doesn't owe a huge debt to the music Butterfield rifled through for this platter.
But an album which gets picked as important because of how wildly successful the thievery involved was - "Where American white kids got the notion they could play the blues", to quote the Rolling Stone article this series is based on - it becomes something different. The theft is no longer just some awkward, unavoidable fact about the "how". It becomes the "why", too. The applause isn't for something that has been stolen. It's for the act of stealing itself.
Are the songs good? Sure. They've taken from the best. Those lads who nicked the Mona Lisa from the Louvre knew what they were doing, too. And one can perhaps admire the competence, even the audacity of how they pulled it off.
I'm not going to be calling them painters, though, am I?
Ten creeping tentacles of white supremacy.
At last! The miniature I was born to paint! Four years after I first started her base, the Black Kraken is done.
A double helping of Trek stuff from me this month. First, my essay on the first episode of Lower Decks is up on the other blog (along with a link to buy my first book in paperback, if you live in the UK).
Second is a podcast I was invited to do with the hosts of Pedagodzilla, an awesome site which uses sci-fi and fantasy stories as a starting point for discussions on pedagogy. I got to chat to them for a while about why the Kobyashi Maru is an absolutely wretched test from a pedagogical standpoint.
Go check all that out!
Happy March! New month, new blog post. I take some time out from charting the progress of 21st century Trek by looking at maps of a rather different kind.
Forgot to put this up, like some kind of chump. I've started the dispiriting process of picking apart Picard.
Spacesquid's "White Boy Rap-Noodling Corner" returns. Sorry.
The Score was fucking everywhere in '96. In the UK at least, though, it'd be fairer to say "Killing Me Softly With His Song" was fucking everywhere. "Fu-Gee-La" had done decent numbers, and "Ready Or Not" would be the Fugees' second UK number 1, but "Killing Me Softly..." was just inescapable.
In many ways, it seemed an odd advert for the album. I mean, it clearly worked; the song was never released separately in the US, meaning people had to buy the album entire if they wanted to buy it. That's a move even Billy Corgan might label as overly arrogant, but the platter want platinum seven times over there, so: point proved.
But the stripped back, almost barren arrangement of a straight-up cover (they'd wanted to take more liberties with the source material, and end up doing so on the album, but technically they only had the rights to a cover version) are a world away from the fast beats and faster wordplay of the broader work. It's really just - "just" - a showcase for Lauryn Hill's phenomenal voice, Jean's occasionally interjections feeling less like actual contributions, and more like a naughty brother objecting to big sister's song getting her all the attention.
Which of course means the single is actually a perfect ad for the album: Hill will dominate, Jean will try to keep up, and Pras will be smart enough to mostly just stay out of the way.
One of the most illuminating comments on the making of The Score comes from producer Jerry "Wonder" Duplessi, who told Complex that:
If I remember correctly, that song was the last record we did. Everybody was rapping, rapping, rap, rap, rap. And we’re like. “Hold up, man, we have to have a song on this shit.".
The big joke here is that there are two songs on the album. Either Duplessi didn't really think Jean's "No Woman, No Cry" rewrite really counted as such (though it certainly isn't a rap), or - the funnier option - Jean insisted on getting his own song after Lauren recorded hers, and Duplessi simply completely forgot that this was a thing that had happened.
Not that Jean disgraces himself here. The first side of The Score ranks among some of the best rap I've come across in this project so far, and Hill isn't the only reason why. Ambitiously dense rhyme schemes, a constant flow of references that are clever, funny, and expansive, and all in the pursuit of making its point, it'd all feel like showing off if they weren't making it seem so easy. Lyrically, the album is less distant from the prevailing hip-hop concerns of the time than others have made out. The Haitian seasoning here is certainly tasty, but ultimately we're still presented with stories of surely fictitious felonies and extended treaties on how every other rapper in existence sucks in comparison to the ones currently holding the mics.
But then, you can't master a form if you're not going to work within it. And masterful seems the term here. Hell, the record does more with Hill's laugh than most can manage with anyone's voice. True, the momentum doesn't quite keep up - holding the two ballads for the back half helps hide the fact that the trio were running out of steam after the headlong charge through to the end of "Fu-Gee-La" (though Hill never really stops shining). At its best, though - and The Score is frequently, effortlessly at its best - it's hard to imagine how anyone could do this better.
Except it turned out that Hill could.
Eight tentacles.
It's the guy who never skips the first half of arm day: The Possessed.
Halfway through the big ships, lads! Grimnir's Thunder, reporting for cannonades and chunder.
Happy New Year, everybody. I'm delighted to announce that IDFC is back on its bullshit. I'm going to be covering the first seasons of Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds over the next (sigh) six years. We kicked off yesterday with "The Vulcan Hello": check it out!
