SMASHING PUMPKINS
Oh, Billy Corgan, with your bald pate, your Zwan, your pumpkins smashed and your never-ending inferiority complex. Google Corgan today and you'll still hear him kvetching about how difficult the '90s were trying to "compete" with Nirvana and Pearl Jam, et al. Just last year, he told The New Zealand Herald how HE, BILLY CORGAN, was really the "weird one," and how Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder weren't really outcasts at all compared to him: "They were parts of those people, but they weren't the people they were projecting them to be," the tortured-soul millionaire said. "When you get picked out in a line in school and you're the weird one, I'm the weird one, and I'm still here." Corgan's "rock as competition" outlook continues to obscure the fact that the Pumpkins made a couple of okay records (Gish, Siamese Dream) before his supernova ego took over. The group morphed from an interesting blend of low-fever psychedelia textures and atomic stoner riffs into a rock-star vehicle of art-rock and prog-rock pretension primed only for the pump of youngster angst. The bloated self-indulgence of the double-disc Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness has set the tone ever since, and Corgan's still confusing being a jerk with being an iconoclast. And the fact that he's still picking at Cobain's desiccated corpse for inspiration - well, that's infinitely sadder than his music. With Awolnation. $30-$65. May 8, 7:30 p.m. Time Warner Cable Uptown Amphitheatre, 1000 N.C. Music Factory Blvd. 704-916-8970.
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