Melon Collie and The Infinite Playlist of Boredom

Tattoos are often monuments to past glory. But glory fades, while tattoo ink lasts. This can be particularly true when it comes to having a band tattoo. There’s a good chance your favorite band fell short of having a perfect discography — I bet that their eighth studio album just does not hold up. While getting a tattoo of the art from their first, classic, genre-defining album may be a solid choice, no one is rushing out to get the cover to the reunion LP tattooed on their chest. There is perhaps no career in the history of music that epitomizes this worry more so than that of Billy Corgan.

Young Corgan rose to fame in the 1990s fronting the alt-rock juggernaut that was The Smashing Pumpkins. Corgan and company cranked out tasty radio hit after tasty radio hit, and then his career shit the bed about as hard as any rock star’s before him.

Post Melon Collie, the Pumpkins discography is a wasteland of self indulgence and half-finished ideas. Can you name a song the Pumpkins released in this century? There’s over 100 to choose from, and they all suck. As did Corgan’s solo record and his post-Pumpkins supergroup, Zwan.

What the fuck happened? How do you go from writing “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” and “Zero” to performing an eight hour synth jerk off session based around Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and then peddling a recording of the underwhelming black hole of sonic “art” for $375?

If that’s not bad enough, Corgan is also an ardent Trump supporter and recently appeared on Alex Jones’ show to discuss, among other things, weaponized zombies.

We look now to the past, to the glory days of the Pumpkins, through the magical lens of fan tattoos. Let us try to forget what Corgan has become as we gaze wistfully at these monuments to his former glory.

We don’t mean to snap you back to this harsh reality, but how do you feel about the fact that the guy that wrote “Tonight, Tonight” and “1979” was recently the president of TNA wrestling? Truly, the world is a vampire.