Shut Up, Dude: This Week’s Best Comments

And Flying Up The Modern Rock Charts On Its Way To Peaking at No.4… it’s “Today” by The Smashing Pumpkins, a cheery little jingle about how today is the greatest day that Billy Corgan had ever known, and if that feels a little too chirpy, a bit too cheesy, for the world of grunge-nihilism, please feel comforted by the fact that, on that day, the greatest day Billy Corgan had ever known, he was considering suicide.

Billy considered suicide a lot back then. Seemingly every day. He was “completely obsessed with killing (him) self.” Until one day he decided, he could do that, or “work and live and be happy.” He decided to live. Whether or not he succeeded in being happy… whether or not Billy Corgan ever succeeded in being happy… is another matter entirely. Although I keep on seeing interviews of him being interviewed by Tom Morello pop up on my feed, and he seems content with things. And he owns a cat cafe, so that must cheer him up a bit.

“Today” may therefore be the most misunderstood song in the discography of alternative rock’s most misunderstood artists.

“Today” is all about the riff. The riff that starts off sounding like an ice-cream truck (has anyone ever heard an ice-cream truck playing “Today”? I don’t think my life will be complete until I do) before suddenly plummeting headfirst into a face-full of noise. A noise produced by Butch Vig, who seemed to be quite good at making distorted noise sound almost pretty.

The video, what with its ice-cream truck, the orgy of paint, and the yellowest fields you’ve ever seen, introduced kids to the cast of Smashing Pumpkins; between Billy’s effete whining that he’d love to turn you on - ew, good luck with that Billy – Japanese-American James Iha, and D’arcy’s Heidi-hair-braids, The Smashing Pumpkins looked nothing like any other alternative rock band – no-one was ever going to confuse them with Alice In Chains - and with the catchiest of pop songs, they sounded nothing like them either.

“Today” is a 10!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=xmUZ6nCFNoU

Columns like this are why Tom is the GOAT music critic.This was hard to get through (in a complimentary way), I can't imagine how hard it was to write.

I don't know (*edit*) about y'all, but I'm getting a bit tired of billionaires and their government funded space toys

O Im the Fool

I clicked on another Grimes article

And read every word

And every comment

But didn't listen to the songs

And now I'm a few minutes older

It’s a 10. I think I have seen Juliana Hatfield in concert more than any other artist (most recently last fall doing this LP in full with JH3). ‘Become What You Are’ was a huge discovery for me, but ‘Only Everything’ is even better – incredible album.

I also like Phil Collins and Juliana once asked to take photo of my tattoo lol:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BTXhFMwFqhM/

He's absolutely right and it extends outwards to the entirety of Britain's arts & culture sectors right now.Two decades of cuts, scrapping of government funding, attacks on the benefits system which allow working class people to pursue their artistic visions, a continued increase in rent and food and the cost of living in general whilst wages stagnate, the collapse of many local venues where young artists could get their start thanks to soaring overheads and COVID after-effects, and of course Brexit.Meanwhile, the Culture Secretary of our nominally left-wing government is penning op-eds claiming that it's actually "protests and boycotts" killing off the arts and schmoozing up to AI companies, rather than providing any real support.

It's fucking bleak, is what I'm getting at.So no wonder working class artists like Fender are the unicorn exception right now.

I expected more out of this DJ Khaled Smurfs song

That was far bleaker and sadder than I was expecting and I was expecting it to be pretty bleak. So just going to keep it easy by saying what lots of people are probably thinking again: this is some top level music journalism and the world is so lucky to have a publication like this and a writer like Tom.

Halfway through reading this, a casket labeled "RIP Your Brain Cells" was mysteriously delivered to my house.

You know how you normally get more informed the more you read? The opposite effect happened to me here.