Video: Smashing Pumpkins: "Tarantula"
Let me get this straight. Smashing Pumpkins paid an accomplished music
video director, P.R. Brown (Death Cab for Cutie, James Blunt,
Buckcherry), to make a video
where Billy Corgan rocks a Messiah-style robe in front of various
random green-screen backgrounds. Then Smashing Pumpkins held one of
these trendy fan-made video contests, so fans could come up with different
random green-screen backgrounds for the same footage of Billy and the
band looking kind of silly. The economics, and the aesthetics, seem
pretty simple: Lose the dude in the robe, right?
That said, contest winner Levin Ahmu's "Tarantula" video-- which sets Corgan & co. in a futuristic city of whizzing lights and other action-- is pretty impressive. The whole thing culminates with a smoldering, awesome-looking meteor falling from the sky and causing the city to crumble. Like Planet of the Apes, we're pretty sure it was Earth all along. So does that make Corgan the star child from 2001: A Space Odyssey? Check out the other finalists' videos over at Smashing Pumpkins' MySpace blog.
Video:> Smashing Pumpkins: "Tarantula"
[from Zeitgeist; out now on Martha's Music/Reprise]