The Smashing Pumpkins

On stage, it's fire. That's how you can recognize The Smashing Pumpkins, an American alternative rock band that got everyone to agree in the nineties. Today, Billy Corgan and his band continue to make their big sound, between raging storms and passages bringing a welcome calm.

From that time, several phenomena have emerged. Above the pile, three groups : Radiohead, Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins. Let's talk about the last one. In Chicago, where Lake Michigan rests all the time, angry youngsters decide to put on the guitar, tame the drums and spit into the microphone to draw a sound as powerful as lightning. Yes, these American suburbanites have energy to spare, being almost ready to break the ambient noise to impose a strange, nasal and hoarse voice, variable as one pleases.

They make fun of their detractors and enemies. Instead, they are there to swing their torn melancholy, their millennials of despair and their hymns of muscular witchcraft that scare off the meek pop lovers. The Smashing Pumpkins are heavy, big, like eternal kids who grow up but don't care about becoming adults. Their lives are furiously grungy, and that's what counts. Nothing seems to be able to stop them, not even internal quarrels that could have decimated them for good.

For they are a permanent paradox: music lovers love to hate them, their rock is sometimes tamed by a few rough sweets, and their inability to find their place in contemporary society seems to establish their domination over the world. So on stage, it's all that explodes intelligently into our eardrums, and god forbid, it's an intense and imperishable joy.