Zero review
The War Against Silence #82, 22 August 96
If the six more new titles listed on the back of this single were merely six more outtakes, this would be just more evidence for the section of the Smashing Pumpkins expose that argues that Billy Corgan must be receiving contraband sheet music from a race of overworked aliens. It's much too hard to explain the sheer numbers any other way. And five of the six are just more Pumpkins songs. They aren't of a theme like the ones on Tonight, Tonight, or remarkable in any other new way, so either you have enough Pumpkins songs already, or else you don't, and there's not much to be gained from my describing these.
The last track, though, is a twenty-one-minute medley that includes fragments of sixty-nine more Smashing Pumpkins songs you've never heard, and now probably never will, followed by seven straight minutes at the end during which a three-note Sabbath-ish riff is repeated over and over and over and over again. I say all that calmly, but only because I've been sitting here for half an hour typing sentences that attempt to convey what listening to this makes me feel, and then erasing them. After about the eighteenth fragment, or the third minute of that endless guitar line, my mind locks up. I can't process it, the scales are too overwhelming.
They are defying us to listen to the whole thing. They are defying us to believe that they can write songs so effortlessly that they can afford to throw away sixty-nine of them just to hear how big a crash it makes. I can't put myself into a mindset in which you do this for any reason other than to express how little you care what your listeners think, or what they struggle with in their own lives. I can't understand how a person could stay in the frame of mind necessary to make this medley without killing themselves, or opening fire in the nearest public space.
I can't understand how the impulses are different. I think this is most contemptuous and nihilistic thing I have ever heard, and I think I will never joke about being a nihilist ever again.