I have a thousand things on the backburner at the moment. There's that one article on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts that I never finished, where I talk about sampling until I sound like a dick who doesn't know shit about sampling, that Frusciante article that will probably get done when I'm up in New York taking dissociatives until I'm fingerpainting Chuck's rug (sorry about this ahead of time Chuck), this article on Peter Brötzmann's Nipples that I will probably convert into an article about actual nipples, because sex > free jazz, or at least sex = free jazz, or something of that nature, and I'm going to use that "looking into the eyes of a serial killer" image at least three times because as cliche as it is, it is truer than the blood of your favorite deity, but I probably won't use it now because I told y'all about it and it's no fun to know how you're gonna exquisitely die from my fantastic writing before I actually go in for the kill.

But a few things have been plaguing my mind - mostly it's just been this Lester Bangs book, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, and it's one of those moments where you read something so great that it retards your ability to the point where it can't retard no more. You're in [bad word removed]ing Sunday School drawing penises on Mary's cheek while the real [bad word removed]ing deal is delivering sermons about living and not really living and hell, mostly dying in the holy embrace of rock 'n' roll, real [bad word removed]ing dirty, shit-faced, sort of "I am going to [bad word removed] you and hate you and hate everyone and [bad word removed] everyone and this is all there really is to life" with a simultaneous smirk and gasp of utter horror and ecstasy, and man, I can't do that, I'm still adding the wrinkles to the balls on Mary's blush, I mean, no, no, no, I ain't cut out for this.

Also, the one band I've been excited about lately is nigh IMPOSSIBLE to write about. They're these Japanese dudes (and, recently, one guitarist who happens to be a girl, Hisako Tabuchi, someone who has so much [bad word removed]ing raw talent with the instrument that videos of countless variations on her solo to a single Number Girl song are entirely necessary on YouTube) that call themselves bloodthirsty butchers, and they've been around for 17 years and they've NEVER. RELEASED. A. BAD. ALBUM. They're like the Fugazi of Japan, except they sound nothing like Fugazi. I want to compare them to Sonic Youth with the melodic sense of Paul Westerberg, but this is so off the map that I am currently plotting points in Guyana, not that I know a goddamn thing about Guyana except for the fact that it is nowhere near [bad word removed]ing Japan! Whatever, they released a split record with +/- last year, and if you like +/-, you should check out that split, and then import every bloodthirsty butchers record, and join me in abject poverty.

Well, as long as we're in the land of digression, where beer does flow and men desperately search for words that rhyme with "digression" while still remaining in meter, let's talk about the whole reason why I'm forcing myself to write this after about roughly two weeks of no writing whatsoever, whether it be about my lone fruitless obsession or bad stream-of-consciousness about "girls I like" (oh man, that's never gonna stop, is it): Hey, lookee here, the Smashing Pumpkins have a new song out.

It was a 30-second sample a few days ago, but before that it was a bunch of photos (oh man, if you guys didn't see these photos and only read the press releases, let me tell you, they are [bad word removed]ing horrible, overblown pieces of art-political bullshit, and the sad thing is that it's pretty much Corgan to a T, except for the political part, which is mostly new to him, but Christ, Corgan was a whole lot more tolerable and possibly even brilliant when I was 12, and now he's coming off like the kid who brought his dog to school to seem really cool to all the other kids, but his dog's a chronic-pisser, and now Little Susie's crying because her new white shoes have donned an exquisite shade of dog-piss yellow, and we all have to live with the consequences, because, seriously, Paris Hilton posed in front of a bomb exploding? Toby Keith didn't pepper his album art with pictures of him giving it to Osama rough in the butt. Why you gotta have two self-centered [bad word removed]s on your album, Corgan? (Believe me, I am very proud of that one.)) and even before that, it was a tracklisting (which, at Netphoria, which is the worst place on the internet, even worse than goatse, they have briefly fallen into my graces by turning each song title into its own porno movie. "7 Shades of Black" = "7 Inches of Black." "Doomsday Clock" = "Doomsday Cock." Am I wrong to be more excited for their version of the record? Sex > free jazz but is sex > a new Smashing Pumpkins record? The sexually inactive angsty adolescent fanboy in me issues a defiant "no!" The sexually active yet effortlessly lonely and incredibly current me is wondering how I could've been such a dumb mother[bad word removed]er when I was younger. But I digress.)

I didn't really care about the announcement that James and D'arcy wouldn't be involved. Or rather, the statement that James wouldn't be involved, and all the [bad word removed]ing common sense it took to figure out D'arcy wouldn't be, because she wasn't even in the band when they broke up. Whatever, the Smashing Pumpkins has never been anything but Billy and Jimmy. Zwan was also Billy and Jimmy, but it was Billy and Jimmy desperately trying to NOT sound like the Smashing Pumpkins. (It was also Pajo and Sweeney, who are amazing and never deserve to get sidelined in a "supergroup" like that.)

But the rest of this was straight depressing! I mean, Zeitgeist isn't near as bad an album title as TheFutureEmbrace, but, seriously, how do you get worse than that? So, admittedly, I went to the 30-second sample with more than a little trepidation.

I was ready to put all my fears aside when what I thought to be the chorus came out of my speakers. Jesus Christ. Catchy shit. I mean I was humming the chorus for the rest of the day from hearing a mere 30 seconds of the 3 minute song and I was just in a state of, "Jesus Christ, how does Corgan do this to me?" because it doesn't make sense - I don't try to paint myself as a fanboy, and I certainly won't eat up every piece of shit he tries to feed me, but when his shit is good, it's utterly impossible for me to stop listening, and it is almost entirely pathetic as I am so often the dog to his Pavlovian bell, but I suppose that is the push-and-pull with any artist you really admire, recognizing and recoiling slightly at the every misstep but still really being their [bad word removed]ing dog the whole way. I mean, after all, you're still paying attention to them, right?

But [bad word removed], who knew the full song was going to be this great? I mean, it is cliche as hell, but is cliche in that amazing way where it hits all those nostalgic points, from the distorted harmonics in the intro which are there on purpose to suggest there is rockin' ahead, to the actual dawn of the rockin', and man, it is pretty rockin'. Everyone's talking about the slow pretty part at the end, which is great and, to paraphrase my friend Chuck, echoes deeply of Siamese Dream's softer edges. But the part I want to talk about enters after the "Holiday" shuffle post-first-chorus, where everything just enters the sweetest breakdown ever ripped directly from some Iron Maiden record, and Billy just softly whispers "close your eyes and see... the angel dust" and I am [bad word removed]ing 7 years old listening to Mellon Collie again (and hey, nostalgia's been a big factor in my last few pieces, hasn't it?) and I am doing my homework and I am stupidly skipping over "Tales of a Scorched Earth" because while I am slowly moving from being totally obsessed with RnB (I had a TLC phase, don't be hatin') to [bad word removed]ing rawk, I started off with Green Day and Weezer, okay, and I wasn't quite ready for a blast of hawt distorted riffage. But regardless of my inadequate taste, my mind is being shattered and I am starting to consider the idea that there is music beyond Michael Jackson and "Tootsie Roll," and while this song can't begin to hold a candle to anything on that record (and it would be unfair to hold it to that standard to begin with), it brought me back there, and that is well enough to acclaim it.

And see, this is why I think this turned out a thousand times better than those backburner ideas that I'll probably never write at this point - the Nipples piece has one image going for it, and it's "saxophones with teeth," and now that I've revealed it there's no [bad word removed]ing point in writing it, and, once again, the Bush of Ghosts piece is basically me pretending I have some sort of authority over music and culture, and well, [bad word removed] that, I don't. In this past year I've somehow managed to write pretty regularly about the music I've loved and hated and felt indifferent about, and it's felt good, and I feel I've gotten a lot better at it as I've gone along, to the point where I actually want to go out there and get some of this shit published before I hate all of it and start sacrificial bonfires for it. And, in retrospect, the best pieces I've written were just me listening to something new and getting way, way overexcited about it, almost to the point where I was suffocating you (the reader) with the idea that, "THIS IS GOOD! THIS IS SO GOOD!" but I didn't do it so hard that you came out of it all white and dead, no, I managed to tether that line, which I think I did again here, which I think is all Lester Bangs really did, and what I think I'm trying to say is this:

There's a new Smashing Pumpkins song. It's good. Listen to it.

"Tarantula"