O SOM DA MÚSICA 2.0: A SONG FOR A SAILOR SON

It took me a little time to write about the newest The Smashing Pumpkins’ album. At first, it happened because the full “Teargarden by Kaleidyscope” hadn’t been released up to now and the second reason was because I was willing to write a proper review about the album’s concept as a whole thing, especially because I’d already known that every artistic work signed by Billy Corgan is something to read carefully… Listening is also reading, you know… But the band – those idiots who say that “the real” Smashing Pumpkins is the “classical” line up with James Iha and Darcy don’t deserve my respect, sorry, you bunch of corporative pop cocksuckers – has recently released the first EP of their epic “Teargarden by Kaleidyscope”, entitled “A Song For A Sailor”, and things are getting clearer for me about this artistic enterprise by Smashing Pumpkins’ frontman.

This first part of the conceptual “Teargarden by Kaleidyscope” is a four-piece work, a compilation of songs like “A Stitch in Time”, “Widow Wake my Mind”, “Astral Planes” and the first single “A Song for a Song”, calmly released for free on the Internet – as once it was “Machina 2: The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music”. And only after this releasing of Teargarden first EP last month on “global” Record Store Day I thought I was able to write some lines about it. So I’ll start my review focusing on the song “A Song For a Son”, which one of its verses has entitled the new EP.

It’s a beautiful song especially when you have in mind the nautical allegories and implicit references to universal literature classic books like Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and Homer’s “Odissey” – by the way, I might say that the so-called “Homer” represents the first collective artistic effort centralized on just an entity that, although baptized with a name, hadn’t actually ever lived, which give us the opportunity of thinking about the importance of oral tradition in times when entertainment and pharmaceutical industries are in a REAL WAR concerning to copyrighs, something that might make you a slave in an hypothetical future...

And as a flower power generation’s son, whether you like it or not, Billy writes about the historical linkage of the archetypical teen spirit of liberty being revitalized generation after generation. He drawls textual allegories related to his musical mates that had once inspired him: I mean “the blown out bird”, “the dove”, “the star” or the “Space Invaders” (related to Orson Wells, games and to the modern age of radio, this one which now is progressively transformed on the Information Revolution on cyberspace via Cognitive Radio) are implicit metaphors to remarkable people in his sentimental remembrances that maybe we even can recognize, once we give the lyrics a proper attention with such a taste of imagination that let us submerge on the suggestive matters of this song in particular and why “A Song For a Son” honors to be “Teargarden by Kaleidyscope”’s first single to the point of giving it the title of the album’s first EP.

It’s an acclaim to the children of revolution of a hypothetical new age in the future (note that Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” is just another example of how collective unconsciousness is expecting the world of tomorrow with hope as much as it is possible…) and also to people like us – I mean “uncommon people” like us, not that assholes that repeat ridiculous religious mantras as zombies “trying to save” who doesn’t need or even care to be saved, instead of saving themselves from corporate ignorance based on false beliefs of religion institutions. So I might say that “A Song For a Sailor” is an advert to people like us, uncommon people that share the need of having particular aspirations “of our own self” – because the free spirit of the humanity is made of the sum of the individual contributions of all of our “single us” to build a better world brick by brick. And it refers to people like us that navigates through real and especially VIRTUAL life without maps, fakes avatars or ridiculous rules regarding to morality, because the only way we can deal with religious and political oppression is being what we really are, not what the pope, your priest, the Mother Superior or whoever dares to not mind their own business are expecting of us to do only because of GREED…

I know that Billy Corgan has said in an interview that “A Song For a Song” reffers “to the son that he had chose not to ever had” although being in particular baby boom happening around his intimate circle, but I truly believe that the semantic matters of this songs reffers to something broader than his personal affairs. It’s about me and you and all the humanity of the future, a song for the new day that rises every morning with as much hope as possible… And this kind of artistic aspiration is what makes ART eternal… This is what makes art something really universal…

And it is for this hypothetical better world of tomorrow that I’m working hard everyday fighting against the oppression around me, hoping that my son Benedito grows up in a planet with a little less of ignorance and generosity disguised as hypocrisy…

Text written by Marcus Marçal in Abril, 21st , 2010.

PS: I had listened to this song constantly two weeks later before my son was born walking on the streets trying to understand the world around me. Thank you, man!