This is about a week old, but it was brought to my attention only yesterday. Seattle’s venerable weekly, The Stranger, published this amazing “open letter from Billy Corgan” last Tuesday, the release date of his new solo album, Zeitgeist. Nosh on these highlights:

My Dear Friends,

Today is the greatest day you’ve ever known.

Seven years, seven months, and ten days ago, the clock struck midnight, 2000, and the world began turning faster. Back then, I disbanded the Smashing Pumpkins because the new millennium demanded it. A new age needed a new start—cleanliness and unity, not the confused, confusing wreck I let the band become.

We were once the most important band in the world, and everyone—me, you, Courtney Love—knew it. The Smashing Pumpkins drew the line between Black Sabbath, the Bee Gees, and the Cure, and that line caught a generation like a leash around a wayward puppy. We founded Alternative Nation, and the kids and advertisers flocked around. But because the band had become bloated, overbearing, headstrong, because it grew beyond my control, it had to die. I killed it before it killed me.

And now, after all those years of self-imposed obscurity, of forced poetry, of side projects mired in mediocrity and too many guitarists, I bring us, together, here, to the corner of Future Avenue and Now Street. This is our moment! This is our day! This is Zeitgeist! (That’s “Spirit of the Age” in German. Trust me: I’ve read Hegel.)

* * *

As for the music, the critics won’t get it. They never have. My old fans—the ones whose lives were changed by Gish and Siamese Dream—won’t get it. They will complain that the sound is too dense, too severe, too, yes, overbearing. But the New Generation is the one I’m speaking to, the one that needs to know that My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco couldn’t exist without me. Whether they want to know doesn’t matter. This Zeitgeist is not consensual—it’s here, whether you understand it or not.

Here is what you must understand: Nothing has changed since 1999, except my budget. And Pro Tools. I am still the same alt-rock messiah I was. You are still my teenage flock.

Actual letter, or perfectly-executed farce? Well, if it were a real open letter, wouldn’t Corgan have written it to Chicago, in the same manner in which he always subjects his poor, embattered home city? My guess it that it’s fake.

Viva la Stranger. Your parody muscles are well-toned and sinewy.

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