Man, let me tell you about trying Billy Corgan’s madness. Total disaster at first. Figured I’d dive right in since that guy makes mountains outta musical molehills. Grabbed my dusty acoustic guitar—strings felt like rusty barbed wire under my fingers.
Step one was sheer brute force repetition. Billy talks about playing riffs into the ground ’til your hands beg for mercy. So I picked this dumb chord progression, simple stuff. Played it fifty times straight. By number twenty, my fingertips screamed. By thirty-five, it sounded worse than when I started. Felt like hammering nails with my forehead.
- Tried “obsessive lyric scribbling” next. Billy writes on everything—napkins, walls, probably his cat. I carried a notebook like a security blanket. Filled three pages with garbage about my neighbor’s yappy dog. Pure cringe.
- Then came “embracing discomfort.” Dude says creative magic happens outside cozy zones. So I wrote song barefoot in my freezing garage. Spent two hours shivering, came up with two lines: “Cold floor sucks / My toes look like raisins.” Deep stuff.
Failed so hard it drove me straight to Ben & Jerry’s. Chunky Monkey therapy session. While wallowing in cookie dough, remembered Billy’s weird interview rant about “channeling fury.” Figured hell, why not? Yanked the notebook back out.
Wrote angry. Real angry. About the garage floor, the yappy dog, my stupid fingers hurting. Didn’t rhyme, didn’t care. Just dumped it all raw like Billy does. Words spilled out like a busted fire hydrant—messy but alive. Recorded a messy voice memo growling those garage-rage lyrics over those butchered chords. Sounded terrible… but human.
Here’s what stuck:
- Brute force alone breaks tools first. My hands tapped out before progress came.
- Discomfort’s useless without something real to scream about. Cold floors ain’t it.
- But channeling that hot mess inside? That notebook rage-dump? That finally felt like Corgan’s core. Ugly truth over pretty lies.
Guitar’s back in the corner. Notebook’s half-burned in the BBQ pit. But that voice memo? Still on my phone. Proof you gotta suck spectacularly before anything honest crawls out. Billy’d probably laugh his ass off. Mission accomplished, sorta.
