Smashing Pumpkins Release New Video For “Being Beige”

Billy Corgan and company have released an artistic video for a track off of their looming new release, Monuments to an Elegy.

The dark and emotional brain-scape of Billy Corgan, also known as The Smashing Pumpkins, have in the past been lauded for their “striking and memorable video clips”, and for having “approached videos from a completely artistic standpoint rather than mere commercials to sell albums”, and the video for “Being Beige” certainly resides in this vein.

The palate is dark and drab, and the frequent return to Corgan’s emotive close-up and tight head shot leaves the viewer in limbo between the flashing shots of line drawings and patterns formed from metal shavings, mixed in with cloudscapes meandering past watery shots and girls embracing and moon craters and floating icebergs. It seems as though the fact that in this song, the world is on fire, has driven Corgan, who is usually heavily involved with the conception and creation of his music videos, to create a new world that exists outside of the one that is burning, where perception is bent and reality is malleable. “Flowers made to fade” seems to speak to the color choice of lots of grays and blacks; as he addresses his lost love he calls her “cherry blossom”, which incepts the idea of flowers as they fade into the mind of the listener, and everything about the aesthetic backs that up. A particularly interesting shot involves the back of a woman as she passes through many doorways at a high speed, which may suggest the repeating process of love and loss that Corgan has addressed throughout his discography. Another interesting directorial choice was the close up on each woman’s eyes, which are extremely different which leads to a shot at the end where the woman floating in the water has different colored eyes, one being white and one dark. She is clearly not drowning, but remaining afloat, which suggests that the union of the two throughout the video has created a new and more powerful existence where they are both one.

Check out the video below, and stay tuned for two new albums by Smashing Pumpkins to be released this year.