The iconic singer lines up her annual charity concert. More »
Earlier this week, speculation that the Smashing Pumpkins had found a brand-new, pretty young drummer–19-year-old Oregonian Mike Byrne of the mathy outfit Moses, Smell The Roses–made its way around the Internet, with a couple of errant Tweets and MySpace messages from Byrne and his Pacific Northwest associates fueling the flames. The band’s official site has decided to put rumor mill to rest, and let people know just why, exactly, Byrne has flown the coop to “pumpkin camp” for the next few weeks: More »
Billy Corgan’s Internet-wide search for a new drummer has apparently ended, and according to Smashing Pumpkins fan blog Hipsters United a (pretty) young man has emerged victorious: Mike Byrne, the 19-year-old drummer/”demoralizer” for the Oregon band Moses, Smell The Roses. There’s been no formal announcement yet, but Byrne did say that he was “off for another couple of weeks at pumpkin camp” on his MySpace page yesterday, and Moses collaborator Ben Spees referred to him as the “drummer of the future” on Twitter. That’s practically a confirmation, right? More »
Billy Corgan has turned a snippet of the Smashing Pumpkins‘ alt-rock staple “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” into a spoken-word bit that will serve as the intro to this Sunday’s Total Nonstop Action Wrestling pay-per-view Lockdown, which will feature a bunch of matches confined to a six-sided cage. (Yes, the lyrics have been altered to fit the cage’s dimensions.) Honestly, the most surprising thing about this development is finding out that Kevin Nash is somehow still able to move around a wrestling ring, despite tearing his quads approximately 53 times over the course of his career. The promo—and a recut video for the song featuring wrestlers appearing in the PPV—after the jump.
Fresh from the inbox, an e-mail entitled SMASHING PUMPKINS UPDATE: “Auditions will be held Friday, April 10 in Los Angeles for drummers who are looking to play with THE SMASHING PUMPKINS. They should send their background info, photos and performance web links via e-mail only to pumpkinsdrummerATgmailDOTcom.”
In other music-related Super Bowl news, the Hyundai-commissioned new song by the Smashing Pumpkins, “F.O.L.,” made its debut right before yesterday’s big game in an ad that featured many careening turns and some sort of “make your own ad” contest that takes about five minutes of Flash animations to finally get to. Billy Corgan completists out there can grab the track, which is only 3:05 yet sometimes feels like it’s about double that length (perhaps I need to, as Corgan instructs over and over and over and over again, “feel our love”), at the car company’s site. Clip of the ad after the jump.
Well, the ad with the new Smashing Pumpkins song “FOL” did, anyway. Last night the Pumpkins fan blog Hipsters United broke the news that “FOL” would be in an ad for the Hyundai Genesis airing during the big game, part of a campaign that will also use serial finger-syncer Yo-Yo Ma. But tough economic times and the recent woes besetting car companies resulted in the spot getting moved to the pregame show. Here’s hoping Billy will take some solace in the fact that said programming block will also include an interview with our still-sorta-brand-new President!
A concert that ends with the performer trying to connect with this audience by wondering aloud, as they might, “Did I pay for this shit?” is probably a show that’s beset with problems. So it was with the Smashing Pumpkins’ show in New York City last night, Billy Corgan et al‘s first performance in the NYC metro area in nine (!) years, which ended with Corgan baiting the audience with that very taunt, according to Matthew Perpetua, who was in the United Palace audience last night. There were also “at least 40 minutes of formless prog-metal dirges and artless, atonal drones,” and lousy setlists that eschewed the depths of the Pumpkins’ catalog in favor of the track from the trailer for The Watchmen and other new songs. (Also, he wore a “Zero” shirt but didn’t play the song in question, which just seems cruel, you know?)
ARTIST: Smashing Pumpkins
TITLE: “G.L.O.W.”
WEB DEBUT: Oct. 13, 2008
Surely I’m not the only one who thinks that, at this point, the whole “band releasing a new song through Guitar Hero and/or Rock Band” angle is kind of played out, even if other media outlets are willing to lap it up like it’s a dish of slightly melted vanilla ice cream. I mean, the seal has been broken. People are going plastic instead of going platinum. Big whoop. If you really want to get creative with your distribution methods, why don’t you go back to the wax-cylinder route? Or 8-tracks? Plastic guitars are almost… quaint at this point. Now, that’s not to say that I’m not interested in the newest song by the Smashing Pumpkins, which comes out next month in a bundle with “1979” and “The Everlasting Gaze.” (You know–it’s what us olds used to call a “b-side.”) It’s called “G.L.O.W.,” after all, and anyone who had a TV that pulled in crappy syndicated channels 20 years ago knows that those letters can only stand for one thing.
• Simon & Schuster has sued both Foxy Brown and Lil Kim for not coming through on books, despite being paid advances. In 2006, Foxy was paid $75,000 in hopes that she’d write an autobiography, while Kim was given $40,000 in 2004 for a novel. (Fiction still gets no respect, even when it’s penned by a famous-ish person.) [Bloomberg via ProHipHop]
