Billy Bares All

Online confessionals havebecome the medium of choice for celebrities looking to commandeer public attention. So it's no suprise that thin-skinned Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan has turned to myspace.com to air his dirty laundry and promote his upcoming soloalbum, The Future Embrace (June 21). Venturing into the public eyefor the first time since his last band, Zwan, imploded in 2003, the chrome-domedguitarist has been quietly keeping a diary on the site for the past several weeks.His intimate postings range from musings on the Pumpkins’breakup (“I went from being in one of the best bands in the world to somefuckin’ nightmare”) to drug use (“Occasionally we’d takeLSD and try to practice until the strychnine or acid itself would creep intoyour brain and melt all your senses”) to the indie-boy angst that comeswith selling out (“I fell rapidly from pride at my early accomplishmentsto shame that I didn’t deserve them”)....

Online confessionals havebecome the medium of choice for celebrities looking to commandeer public attention. So it's no suprise that thin-skinned Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan has turned to myspace.com to air his dirty laundry and promote his upcoming soloalbum, The Future Embrace (June 21). Venturing into the public eyefor the first time since his last band, Zwan, imploded in 2003, the chrome-domedguitarist has been quietly keeping a diary on the site for the past several weeks.His intimate postings range from musings on the Pumpkins’breakup (“I went from being in one of the best bands in the world to somefuckin’ nightmare”) to drug use (“Occasionally we’d takeLSD and try to practice until the strychnine or acid itself would creep intoyour brain and melt all your senses”) to the indie-boy angst that comeswith selling out (“I fell rapidly from pride at my early accomplishmentsto shame that I didn’t deserve them”). The suprisingly intimate diary also delves into darker territory, like Corgan’s father’s cokeaddiction and his mother’s suicide attempt. (“All anyone ever saidto me about it was that she had taken too many diet pills,” he muses, ever the romantic.) To accompany the diary, MySpace is streaming songs fromCorgan’s album.