50 Greatest SP Songs of All Time

[afrobutterfly]

Hey All,

I'm new to the board but a long-time Pumpkins fan. I write for a sports blog out of Gainesville, Florida, and just cranked out this massive SP post... Needless to say that it's not going over real well with the college football crowd. So I was looking for feedback from some knowledgeable fans. Feel free to debate, send hate mail, ask WTF? or ignore it all together.

bit.ly/cwuEnZ

Enjoy.

Robbie

[sunky]

Oh, look forward to reading it

[afrobutterfly]

Thanks a lot, Sunky. I would appreciate it. I think it's pretty good, but I've had a lot to drink tonight...

[SPchick]

Great article, I really enjoyed it. It's been a while since I listened to a lot of these songs, maybe I'll go through the list and listen to each song in order.

[the viper]

Well Robbie, that is a pretty solid list - thank you for posting it here! And very well written with many of the same sentiments I think of sometimes. If not all of those songs would be in my list, albeit in a different order at times.

But what I can say, is that you're No. 1 is fucking spot on.

Edit: You have totally hit the nail on the head with your comments around the inclusion of "Vanity". Why songs like Innosense, Let me Give the World to You and Dross were left of the studio release of Machina will continue to amaze me.

[afrobutterfly]

Thanks a lot for reading guys. And, Viper, totally agree - the order's always changing.

"Ruby" will always be my No. 1, though. God, what a song.

[foxy]

I was pleasantly suprised by your number one... It's always been up there in the conversation for me... Overall I enjoyed the read, but disagreed with several of your choices. Particularly Love, Beautiful, Once Upon a Time, Bodies, Luna - I always thought these songs were a bit weak in comparison with some others on the list and their respective albums.

But that's merely a difference in opinion. I'm going to try and provide some constructive criticism.

Some of your criticism is a bit off.
Eg on Thirty-Three. Admittedly it was chosen as a single because it didn't feature Jimmy, but it was actually one of the first songs written for MCIS - so it doesn't really herald the adore sound, it was just a coincidence... Besides TEITBITE was in between there too.

Disagree about the over produced sound on Machina, it was just before it's time... You can here those kind of guitar tones all through modern music.

Zero spawns much more than a classic riff and t shirt (the shirt spawned from BWBW as you mention later) - its all about character development... Just like june from the early days

overall, a great read...

[afrobutterfly]

Thanks a lot for the feedback, Foxy. A couple things: I did point out the irony of 33 in that, like you say, it was the first song written after the Siamese Dream tour. Yeah, coincidental maybe, but there must have been a little "oh s***, what now?" when Billy saw, first hand, the difference between Jimmy and Matt Walker, right?

(random aside: anybody ever wondered about how the next few years would've played out had Corgan scooped up Matt Cameron from the Soundgarden ashes? Is Adore a rock record? Does JC come back? I remember reading something about a version of Pug with Cameron that was described as an "electric death march" or something to that effect. This is the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night...)

As for Machina, I think some of it sounds pretty great - SIYL, I of The Mourning, Dross, Glass, CCS, for instance - but a lot of it is just too much for me. I think of some of those great acoustic demos that are just really mucked up by that thin buzz. I do agree that the sound was a precursor to a lot of what's on the radio today... I don't think that's a good thing.

Big Zero fan. I guess, to me, it just seems a little slight because I played it ad nauseam from roughly 4th grade to 9th grade. But we agree. Don't know if I've ever considered the character element angle - some of the Pumpkins' lyrics just seem too cheesy or obscure, IMO, so I tend to view them more as vehicles for melody. But this hasn't stopped me from singing that "cleanliness is godliness" break a million times.

[Insanity's Horse]

Overall not a bad list - many of the usual suspects made it in with quite a few random ones to display your personal tastes

I can't help but stop and think what songs would make my top 50, then i think of the insane amount of work i would have to go through before i came up with a top 50 that i was absolutely happy with, let alone be able to write it up in such a concise and informative manner like you have done.

All in all a job well done and thanks for sharing