Rambling on about music and remembering Keith Flint...

Turns out Mellon Collie really is a good album. With a not-so-good half-album interspersed between the good bits. Which, I think, is what we pretty much said at the time. I saw a video of Billy Corgan going on about how no less a person that Marilyn Manson had said that Corgan was the better musical artist, whilst claiming that he (Manson) was the better visual artist. Well, maybe. Corgan is probably one of those people who are easier to get on with through their art than they might be in person, but there certainly is some great art in there. He wrote the lyric 'love is suicide', as well as 'youth is wasted on the young', and although the thought can't claim to be original in either case, I think the expression is. Courtney Love (like MCR, known for her subtle understatement) claimed that lyric from Bodies as being about her. Hmm. There was clearly some sort of relationship between them (it is supposed to be the case that Heart Shaped Box is about something Kurt Cobain found that had been given to Love by Corgan). But I don't think so. I think, given the timing and the subject matter of a lot of the other stuff on the same record, Corgan was not in the mood for a black joke like that one. 
Those of us who lived the 90s cannot fail to remember the subject of today's news, Keith Flint. His image (and his performance in the video for Firestarter in particular) made it cool for rock kids to like dance music. Another suicide, according to at least some of the news reports, and the detail that he had beaten his best in the local park run just a couple of days ago does make that just a little bit sadder. I wouldn't have been especially interested in the Prodigy at the time, because I think in my desire to be purist about all things alt. rock I would have rejected their dance-influenced music as being somehow selling out, specifically to those folk who were interested at their core in dance music as a genre. That's the sort of kid I was, I suppose. Obsessed by a load of things which actually don't matter at all. I would not have allowed an REM album into the house, for example, dismissing them as dad rock. Some irony then in the fact that now, as a dad, I think they're actually quite alternative... Yikes. 
So let's leave it to Billy Corgan to play us out, then...

Sleep will not come to this tired body now 
Peace will not come to this lonely heart...