Dear readers: I heartily apologize for the tardiness of this review. My excuse is that Billy Corgan, like the proverbial homework-eating canine of yesteryear, broke my iBook. Actually, that’s not true, my iBook sort of broke itself–but it’s repaired now, so, on with the show!

Because Smashing Pumpkins always make me think of high school, it’s somewhat weird to be writing a review of their “reunion” album a week before I miss my ten-year high school reunion.

Nerdy and fourteen, I was a skinny, straight-edged Lutheran chick in my first year of Catholic school. You Reformation nerds out there (there has to be at least ONE Reformation nerd reading SSC, right? right?) can infer that this was a bit of culture shock for a strict constructionist. Incense. Holy water. PRAYING TO THE SAINTS?!?! I’d gone from the fishbowl of my K-through-8 Lutheran school with folksy chapel services to a shark tank in which students were asking St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle to intercede for them on behalf of the soul of Kurt Cobain. Yes, you read that right–the day after Kurt Cobain died, Peter Hoey, who was generally not devout, raised his hand during the prayer at the beginning of biology class and requested an intercession.

It was social overload, but I was loving every minute of it.

The first time I ever heard of the Smashing Pumpkins, I was riding on a bus from Sacramento to San Francisco on a field trip to the DeYoung Museum for my freshman history class. I was doodling in my sketchbook, likely sitting next to my new friend Abby (I still didn’t know what to make of her: unlike the snotty girls at my junior high school, she’d been friendly enough to come up to me and introduce herself; further unlike the junior high girls, who’d bought into the empire of Guess Jeans, Abby was a self-proclaimed anarchist) or Diana, who was big-time crushing on the aforementioned Peter, who was fiddling with his Walkman (yep, those were the days).

Overseeing this trip was Mr. English, our history teacher. From assigning pages upon pages of “supplemental material” about King Assurbanipal for reading and synthesis, to forcing us to reconstruct a scale model of the Great Wall of China out of Legos, he was, as an instructor, both formidable and involved. Considering the latter, it was really not terribly surprising when he asked my classmate, with genuine interest, “Peter, what are you listening to?”

Peter replied, “Smashing Pumpkins–”

(It being autumn, I thought to myself that it was a horrible idea to name a band after an act that destroyed the sanctity of the jack-o-lantern–but hell, who knew what counted as sacrilege amongst the Catholics?)

“–wanna listen?”

Mr. English accepted the offer, listened to a few minutes’ worth on Peter’s Walkman, and then returned it. But for some reason, the image of my teacher leaning across the row of the bus to borrow his student’s headphones and take some new music for a test drive has stuck with me for years. Maybe it’s because it suggests that education is a two-way street; maybe it’s because I find myself in the same situation at my day job when I lend an album to a higher-up, or explain to him/her some element of pop culture that they missed while spending twelve hours indoors. Speaking of which, <I>Zeitgeist</I>. That’s what we were talking about, right?

So, back to the story of my acquaintance with Smashing Pumpkins. A folk, country, and blues-rock lover in my early teens, I didn’t actually listen to much Smashing Pumpkins myself until about two years later, during junior year of high school. My angst had become something even the Indigo Girls could no longer address, so I found myself flipping over to the alt-rock station with increasing frequency when my parents (still staunchly Lutheran, remember?) weren’t around, or were asleep. I could take or leave “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” but “Disarm,” being, at its thematic core, a louder, less coherent, male (if Billy Corgan is to be considered a pillar of masculinity) version of the Indigo Girls’ “Kid Fears,” was right up my alley.

One of the things that I think made the Smashing Pumpkins work for me back in the day was the way in which their lyrics were completely associative. Not a lot of what Billy Corgan was saying made much <I>sense</I>, but Smashing Pumpkins’ lumping and layering of allegories way made their songs seem–to my teenaged self, at least–somewhat deep because lines like “graceful swans of never / topple to the earth” were completely open for interpretation.

Fast-forward ten years later. Though Smashing Pumpkins have lost most of the band, they still have Billy Corgan’s nasal droning. Corgan, in turn, seems to have decided that said droning is best employed for the purpose of hitting the listener over the head with mundane, overly constructed metaphors. Possibly still smarting from Pavement’s assertion that

Smashing Pumpkins [are] nature kids
They don’t have no function
I don’t understand what they mean
And I could really give a f***

Corgan has decided to tell the listener exactly what the Smashing Pumpkins mean… and it’s pretty disappointing. Starting with the most obvious apocalypse imagery ever in “Doomsday Clock” and not improving much from there, Zeitgeist is chock-full of overdrawn political musings set to a guitar background that makes my ears bleed. And when Zeitgeist strays slightly from the political, it becomes even worse. Lines like “The stars that shine, stars that bleed / silver seeking destiny“ in “Starz” (I’m waiting for Corgan to explain the misspelling; I’m surprised he didn’t) makes “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” sound, comparatively, like a philosophical treatise that might have been written by Bertrand Russell himself.

Speaking of Bertrand Russell… wow, that takes me back to high school philosophy class. But it also takes me back to one late night at the food court in college (the reader will be happy to note that university learning, coupled with some mysterious additive in Thai food, had loosened me up considerably). After reading aloud to a friend from The Problems of Philosophy over an order of curried this or basil that, we got into a discussion of whether Bertrand was high when he realized that the table looked different when viewed from different angles.* I think I giggled so hard that I had to drop the class in question… but you know what? Russell was right. The Smashing Pumpkins look different in retrospect–and, upon hearing Zeitgeist, I think that retrospect will remain my vantage point of choice.

*Bertrand Russell does not use cocaine.

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