Smashing Pumpkins, “Hello Kitty Kat”

by Alexandra Molotkow

As long as we’re talking nostalgia: Smashing Pumpkins are eternally tacky in some ways (while totally great in others; they rejected all that indie rock shit and stuck to the dick-swinging ’70s stuff they loved best), and I reject Billy Corgan’s persecution complex and I reject his corny self-absorption but man those were some… plump, juicy riffs? and that shiny, rangy goblin will stay in my heart until the day I die, no matter what sort of fool he makes of himself. “At the risk of self-aggrandizement,” he told the Globe and Mail in 2012, “I’m a pretty good songwriter.”