Great Fucking Albums #24: Siamese Dream

Well, I said it was probably time to do this and so it looks like I’m a dude of my word.

The 1990s were a good time to listen to rock music, because the radio actually managed (on occasion) to play music that was good. In Oregon, we had Portland’s 94.7 KNRK, the station that first introduced me to the Smashing Pumpkins. That introduction, crucial as it was to my transition from person who owned Hysteria on vinyl to person who owns albums of which he’s unashamed, came in the form of “Today,” the hit single (I believe the first among many) from Siamese Dream. I was all of thirteen years old and living with the first of two alcoholic step-dads that would make Hamm’s-swilling appearances in my adolescence. I still listened to my music on cassettes back then, and a friend of mine copied Siamese Dream onto a blank cassette for me (he had the CD and it can be safely inferred that he therefore had the better childhood); I promptly wore the cassette out (a disadvantage of the format. Come to think of it, portability was probably the only real advantage of cassettes). I must confess that, at first, I pretty much listened to “Cherub Rock” and “Today” over and over.

But I’m older and wiser now, and I can safely say that Siamese Dream was one of the best albums of the 1990s (yes, I know about Nevermind. I know. Settle down). For one thing, few albums of that decade announced themselves with the authority of “Cherub Rock,” a song that should be included in every video game that dares to place the word “guitar” anywhere near the word “hero.” That riff burned its way into my psyche when I was a teenager and it’s one of the few things I like to remember from that time in my life.

Like many of my favorite rock albums, Siamese Dream sounds better the louder you hear it (assuming you don’t push your speakers to the point of distorting the sound) and the one thing my sad little thirteen-year-old self managed to get right was listening to this album with the volume cranked up in my shitty Walkman headphones until I was practically swimming in Billy Corgan and Jame’s Iha’s über-distorted guitars. I didn’t know it at the time, but Siamese Dream got its dynamics from the Pixies and its guitar style from Dinosaur Jr.. That combination is as winning today as it was back then, although the modern incarnation of the Pumpkins doesn’t seem to be able to pull it off.

Was Siamese Dream pretentious? You bet your ass it was pretentious! Two songs approach seven minutes in length and one (“Silverfuck”) gets dangerously close to the nine minute mark. Length alone doesn’t make a song pretentious, but if a band is willing to linger that long in a tune, it suggests to me that said band may be overestimating the importance of their art. Billy Corgan definitely overestimated the importance of his art (to the point that he was deeply, apparently permanently offended when Pavement made a half-hearted, one-line crack about the Smashing Pumpkins in “Range Life”) and he continues to do so to this day. But that doesn’t change the fact that Siamese Dream is fucking awesome.

There’s the aforementioned guitar tone; I mean, holy shit. Yeah, it’s J. Mascis-aping, but it also somehow turns Mascis’s frenetic, furious playing up to eleven while giving it a lot more focus. Even at its wildest (like, say, the guitar solo on “Cherub Rock” or the one on “Geek U.S.A.”), there is not a single note on Siamese Dream that hasn’t been fussed over, largely by Mr. Corgan, who frequently overdubbed James Iha and D’arcy’s parts with his own playing (and then overdubbed his parts with himself – between forty and one hundred times, depending on the song and who you ask). According to some sources, Corgan and producer Butch Vig could spend hours working on one 45-second section of a song.

And, though I don’t have much interest in looking up the lyrics that I can’t understand on this album (and there are many), Corgan’s vocal melodies are uniformly excellent on Siamese Dream. They’re catchy but not overly simplistic, possibly because Corgan controlled nearly every second of the recording process with an iron fist.

The result of all this fisting and fussing (sorry, couldn’t resist) was a bloated, pretentious, $250,000 over budget masterpiece. Though the 1995 follow-up, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was quite well-received, I don’t think the Smashing Pumpkins ever made an album as completely great as Siamese Dream. It swung for the fences on every single track, and the number of home runs it managed to hit in 62 minutes is astounding. In a decade that would see a steady and precipitous decline in the quality of Big Rock Records, Siamese Dream was a brilliant Big Rock Record, which was exactly what Billy Corgan wanted it to be.

In a week when massive lead singer ego has been on my mind, Siamese Dream forces me to consider the possible benefits of having a self-obsessed, tyrannical asshole for a vocalist. There’s little argument that Billy Corgan’s ego was the driving force behind the album, but was it worth it? As a selfish listener, I’d rather have Siamese Dream in my record collection than have Billy Corgan be a nice person, but I don’t have to deal with him. As a musician, I’d definitely be the kind of guy to get in fist fights with someone like Corgan; I like bands that I play in to be democratic and Corgan, like Axl Rose, seems like a musical fascist. After Siamese Dream was released in 1993, Corgan, in a move that must have been deeply inspiring to a young Julian Casablancas, told Spin, “I’m surrounded by these people who I care about very much, yet they continue to keep failing me.” Fortunately, the most Siamese Dream-like band I’ve heard in 2011, The Joy Formidable, shares Corgan’s desire for an epic rock sound but not his flagrant disrespect (bordering on seething disdain) for their fellow band members. At least, I haven’t read any interviews with Ritzy Bryan where she’s shit-talking the rest of the band.

So, bands like The Joy Formidable and friends, take Siamese Dream as a cautionary tale: naked ambition (which is the name of my Madonna cover band) and a lot of ego can get you far, but if you follow Billy Corgan’s swan dive (or is it a Zwan dive?) from awesomeness since making this album, you might do well to stop and consider whether or not it’s worth it. Performer discretion is advised.

Life is Just Totally Not at All Like a Box of Chocolates

I’m not sure I understand the concept of the mixtape. I mean, I know what one is, but I don’t know why it’s something that musicians release. Perhaps they function much like EPs, as a sort of “hey-here-ya-go” for the fans between full-length albums. At the very least, I suppose mixtapes and EPs are a good way to let the people know you’re still making music.

In the case of Shareese Renée Ballard – Res, to her hopefully growing legion of fans – that sort of reminder has special significance. After all, those of us who have been following her since her 2001 debut (How I Do, which was largely co-written with Santi White, who I’m hoping will release her second album before 2016. Oh shit, I guess I better hope she gets it out before May 21st!) had to wait eight years for a follow-up (2009′s folky but fine Black Girls Rock), largely because of industry bullshit.  So giving her fans the sense that the interim between Black Girls Rock and whatever her third album is called (rumors abound of an album called Reset, but I’ll believe it when I can listen to it) will be relatively short makes her free mixtape, A Box of Chocolates, all the sweeter, if you’ll pardon the pun (I wouldn’t).

Res gave us A Box of Chocolates on Valentine’s Day and if you think that’s as cutesy as it gets, wait until you realize that the first thing you hear on the mixtape is Forrest Fucking Gump saying his pithy little line about what life is like. Apparently Mr. Gump, a retard of infuriatingly vague (read: no) diagnosis, has never actually seen a box of chocolates; you see, most of them come with little cards that tell you exactly what you’re gonna get. And let’s face it, even if you get the shitty boxes of chocolates that don’t tell you what’s in them, sometimes in life, you know exactly what’s coming. Like when your wife/husband/significant other says, “We need to talk.” You know what’s coming – your ass is in some kind of trouble. I realize that has nothing to do with Res but I really really don’t like Forrest Gump. It’s Baby Boomer Nostalgia Bait at its absolute worst.

Anyway, you can download A Box of Chocolates here if you wanna check it out. I’m sure you can also download Forrest Gump plenty of places too, but I don’t want to link to any of them. It’s not an anti-piracy thing so much as it’s a not-wanting-to-steer-my-readers-toward-crappy-things thing.

A Box of Chocolates features new versions and/or remixes of songs from Res’s two great albums, a couple songs I’ve never heard before, and a cover of Harry Nilsson’s “One.” The whole thing is just about a half an hour long and I think it’s safe to say that Res’s fans will find a lot to like about it. So if the intention of this particular mixtape is to let us know that Res’s creative juices are still flowing just fine, thanks, then mission accomplished. It certainly doesn’t hurt to have a brief reminder that Res is one of the best (and by far the most underrated) Soul/R&B/Pretty Much Whatever Else She Does vocalists of the last eleven years.

Both its intense brevity and my lack of experience with mixtapes make A Box of Chocolates kind of hard to judge like a conventional album. Don’t get me wrong, there is stuff to criticize here, chiefly the use of Auto-Tune on “Say You Will.” I get, for the millionth time, that some people use it as an aesthetic choice. But I still hate it. Auto-Tune makes everything sound awful, especially awesome voices. Res’s voice is way too awesome for Auto-Tune and that’s final (honestly, the Auto-Tune and the presence of his Gumpitude are my least favorite things about this whole album. You can file those under “minor grievances”). Plenty of people disagree with me about Auto-Tune, by the way, but I didn’t start doing Bollocks! because I thought everyone would (or should) agree with me. I started Bollocks! because I was tired of masturbating.

Conceptually, A Box of Chocolates flows kind of like a flashback episode – there are new versions of old songs (the stuff from How I Do still sounds fresh as hell), and a few spoken-word bits about Res’s career up to this point. It may seem premature to do that after only two albums, but remember that Res fought for years to get her second album out (and Black Girls Rock is really only her second released album. According to her website, she recorded an album for Geffen that never saw the light of day. Nobody knows how to fuck up good music quite like the music industry). So yeah, the sung/spoken/rapped “Industry Diaries” might seem a little obvious but overall, A Box of Chocolates shows that Res is still excited to make music (and plenty playful at making it too) at a point when a lot of people would’ve thrown in the towel and gotten a job mucking out the video booths at an all-night porn arcade (Official Bollocks! Fact: everyone who quits or is forced out of the music industry is immediately offered a position as All-Night Porn Arcade Video Booth Mucker-Outer. What do you think the guys from Semisonic have been doing for the last ten years?).

The new songs – at least they’re new to me – indicate that Res Album #3 might have more of the funk/hip-hop vibe of How I Do, which is just fine with me. I like Black Girls Rock quite a bit, but How I Do had a real swagger to it that I kind of missed on the second record. “One” seems to split the difference between the two albums, to extremely pleasant effect. Regardless of which album you prefer, Res, like her pal Santi White, has a real potential to make awesome, genreless music and if A Box of Chocolates is as much a mixed bag as it is a mixtape, it still offers compelling evidence of that fact.