Dear Billy Corgan: please stop.

As much as I worry about it happening, artists who have created classic works of art years ago and are well past their prime can't seem to destroy their legacy, no matter how hard they try. The first three Star Wars movies are still great despite the much-discussed inferiority of the new ones (I still liked Episode III and II wasn't all bad, but that's for another post), Paul McCartney's Beatles work and first few solo albums are still great despite pretty much everything he's done since then, Michael Jackson's entire life after 1991 or so hasn't changed the fact that he was the single most important musician of the 1980's, and you get the idea. But I still have a request to make:

Billy Corgan, please stop. Stop making music. Stop taking out publicity-grabbing ads claiming you're reuniting the Smashing Pumpkins. Stop giving pompous, infuriating interviews. Just stop it. Stop everything.

Billy Corgan may be the exception to the above-stated rule. He hasn't made a good album since 1998, when the Pumpkins released Adore. He hasn't made a true classic album since 1993, when they released Siamese Dream*. So what's he been doing? All the drama within the Smashing Pumpkins provided them with much more publicity than they really deserved, to the point that it almost comes as a surprise to realize that they released five albums (not including the b-side comp Pisces Iscariot), and that only three of those are good. They finished up with MACHINA: The Machines of God, which was an unmitigated mess of industrial sludge and is every bit as pompous and overblown as the title suggests, and the first sign that Billy Corgan's well was running dry. Corgan returned with Zwan, which turned out to be much better on paper than in practice (who'd have thought that Corgan, Jimmy Chaimberlin, Matt Sweeney, and David freaking Pajo in the same band could be so uninteresting?), and now he's finally venturing into the world of solo albums, with The Future Embrace.

The obvious joke to make is that a solo album shouldn't really be any different for Corgan, since he's so notoriously controlling. And that's not really too far off, except now he's mining the Joy Division and New Order catalog for his music. This would seem like a significant change, except... that's pretty much what everybody is doing these days. New Wave is in. Post-punk is in. Whatever it is, if it sounds like the early to mid 80's, we love it now. Some may be name-checking Gang of Four, some may be name-checking New Order, but there's no denying that's in vogue right now.

And this is where I start turning my cynical eye toward old Billy Corgan. He played loud guitars in the early 90's when loud guitars were in (remember Nirvana and Pearl Jam?). He turned to pseudo-electronica and over-processed industrial grit in the late 90's and the turn of the century after The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers made that big. And now he's layering fuzzy sawtooth synths and slick, sterile drum machines. Is he evolving artistically or cashing in on another trend?

I don't know, and that's why Billy Corgan needs to stop. He hasn't done anything worth hearing since 1997 (even though he hasn't really made a really bad album either, other than MACHINA), and he shows no signs of even acknowledging that he's ever made a subpar album, let alone getting himself out of his funk (judging from the interviews he gives, he still seems to regard himself as the most singular and amazing talent in the world of popular music). The more he does, the more I start looking at him as an opportunistic phony (especially in the wake of his announcement that he wants to reform the Smashing Pumpkins THE SAME WEEK HIS SOLO ALBUM CAME OUT), and I'd hate not to be able to enjoy Siamese Dream someday because of that.

If there's a silver lining for Billy in all this, it's Jimmy Chamberlin. Chamberlin has stuck with Corgan through the Pumpkins, and through Zwan, and apparently has played a couple solo shows with Corgan too. When Billy Corgan finds a bandmate that can stand his presence for two minutes, let alone for more than 15 years, he should hold on to him for dear life, for that's something truly special.

*A lot of people will consider 1995's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness to be a classic, but I don't equate audacity with quality. I remember that album more for providing enough hit singles between the throwaway tracks to make up an entire box set, and for being, despite its eclecticism and heady ambitions, ultimately much less satisfying than its predecessor.