Smashing Pumpkins

What’s In A “The”?

originally published November 7, 2007

There’s been a lot written about the Smashing Pumpkins’ reunion album Zeitgeist: how it’s a blatant cash-grab by an aging alterna-rocker whose solo career has proven less fruitful than expected; how it’s not really a reunion, since only two of the four original Pumpkins are involved; how Great Pumpkin Billy Corgan is cheating fans by selling different versions of the album through various big-box retailers. But there hasn’t been much said about the most important aspect of this revival: the “The.”

Smashing Pumpkins’ first two albums, Gish and Siamese Dream, were credited to Smashing Pumpkins - no The. The 1995 double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, however, bore the name The Smashing Pumpkins on the cover, and that appellation persisted through 1998’s Adore and the band’s 2000 swan song, MACHINA/The Machines of God. And now, in 2007, the band is back, but the The is missing from the cover of Zeitgeist.

What this absent article indicates is that this new Smashing Pumpkins isn’t just The Smashing Pumpkins: it’s the Smashing Pumpkins you like. It’s not the band that made the drum-machine gloom-pop of Adore or the turgid, overly processed epics of MACHINA. It’s the band that made the songs you loved when you were maybe just starting high school, just figuring out what it was that you really did love: “Today” and “Cherub Rock” and “Geek USA” and about half of Mellon Collie. That missing The is almost a confession, an apology for the synths and the drum machines and the Nosferatu costumes and for making brilliant drummer Jimmy Chamberlin sound like a drum machine on MACHINA. Billy Corgan’s sorry, folks. Now let’s rock like it’s 1993.

Hey, Nostalgia!

And I don’t know about you, but a big part of me is ready to rock like it’s 1993. Siamese Dream is one of those albums that is beyond critical assessment for me - it’s been a part of me for too long. Saying it’s “good” is like saying my arm is good; I suppose I could live without it, but I don’t really want to. That distinctive Pumpkins sound - psychedelic-metal guitars, pummeling drums, and Corgan’s strangled, androgynous whine - produces a Pavlovian response in me. And as much as I love Mellon Collie, I’d almost rather hear an entire album that sounds like “Zero,” that album’s big Awesome Traditional Pumpkins song. That’s exactly what Zeitgeist is: an album’s worth of “Zero.” And yeah, the part of me that’s still 15 years old thinks that’s awesome.

Zeitgeist is an album for 15-year-olds - specifically, the 15-year-olds inside those of us just to either side of 30. Even the name Zeitgeist is the kind of thing a kid studying SAT vocabulary words would come up with. And that’s what’s interesting about the Smashing Pumpkins revival. It’s all about nostalgia, but it’s presented as progress. When Pixies reunited in 2004, frontman Black Francis didn’t even pretend that it wasn’t about the money. (Sidenote: I’m a staunch supporter of the permanent majusculated ordinal The, and I wish Pixies would get with the program.) The band, all four members now older, balder and heavier, just went out on tour and bashed through the same set they probably would have played in 1992. They recorded two new songs, but rumors of an album have been popping up and getting shot down for three years now. There’s not going to be an album. Pixies aren’t going to try to be relevant to today’s listeners, because here’s the thing: they already are relevant. They are relevant because they made the music that they made in the time in which they made it. If they want to come back now and play the classics for mortgage money and so the kids who were 13 when they broke up can see them, more power to them.

Most bands have a brief window of time in which they can matter. A decade is the upper limit for all but the best bands; usually a band only has a few years to engage an audience beyond an obsessive core. These are the years when a band’s sound converges with the fickle cultural tradewinds; for the Pumpkins, they were the four years or so between “Cherub Rock” and “1979.” The Pumpkins were lucky enough to hit just after the beginning of the grunge explosion. Even though they had little in common with, say, Pearl Jam beyond the combination of heavy guitars ’n’ angst, that was enough to land them on the Singles soundtrack and MTV. The early 1990s were simply the right time for a band like Smashing Pumpkins (or Pearl Jam or Nirvana or Soundgarden or Alice in Chains): the world was ready for heavy music with lyrics about something other than Sunset Strip hedonism. Corgan made the most of this window of opportunity, but by the time Adore came out, minus alt-rock heroin dropout No. 1,742 Jimmy Chamberlin, he was no longer speaking to the greater culture; he was just speaking to fans, which is a different prospect altogether.

Nostalgia for the grunge years can be pretty intense in those of us in the right age bracket, and it’s only going to get more widespread as people get sick of ’80s revivalism and move on into full-blown early-’90s retromancy (to borrow a term from the comic book Phonogram). Corgan’s smart enough to realize this, and also smart enough to realize that Smashing Pumpkins are basically the only band who can reunite and provide that hit of nostalgia. Nirvana’s obviously not coming back; Pearl Jam never left; Alice in Chains did reunite, but without Layne Staley it’s strictly a state-fair affair. I suppose a Soundgarden reunion would do the trick, but even at their poppiest they seemed like the weird older brothers who lived in Pearl Jam’s basement, doing bong hits to Sabbath all night. No, if any band was going to bring back the heady days of 1992-1994, it was going to have to be Smashing Pumpkins.

Hey, Nostalgia?

Corgan’s ambitious (or obsessive, or selfish) enough to bring the Pumpkins back with a new album and not just a reunion tour. But he’s also smart enough to know that another album of Depeche Mode pastiches isn’t going to cut it. Bringing back the Pumpkins means bringing back Smashing Pumpkins. Did Corgan consciously decide to make an album that sounded like old-school Pumpkins because he thought it would be more successful? Or was he writing music with Chamberlin and felt a little of the old spark and decided to revive the old name? I don’t know. Probably a little of both. But the album is here, and it sounds a lot like the old Pumpkins, and it’s kind of a rush listening to it the first time.

But that’s really all it is - a rush of nostalgia. Some of the songs on Zeitgeist are very good, but they’re never going to mean something to me the way “Today” does. And I imagine they’re not going to mean much for the 15-year-olds of today either. Smashing Pumpkins’ time has passed; Zeitgeist could literally be Siamese Dream II and it wouldn’t matter. Take, for instance, Bruce Springsteen’s new album Magic. It’s a pretty great album, largely because it’s his first in a while that sounds like Born to Run. But that’s also why it’s never going to matter as much as Born to Run. A large part of what makes that album great is its status as a time capsule, an archive of Springsteen in 1975. It’s the combination of that huge wall of sound and really shitty mastering. In trying to recapture that sound, Springsteen has made some great, impassioned songs, but Magic is not of its time (musically, at least). The 2007 Born to Run isn’t Magic, it’s Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible (there’s another band who needs a The). The 2007 Siamese Dream isn’t Zeitgeist, it’s My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade, which is just as overblown and dorkily sincere as Mellon Collie but sounds like now instead of 12 years ago. (MCR’s Gerard Way even looks like Billy Corgan, if Kirsten Dunst played him in a movie.) As much as I want Talking Heads to reunite so I can see them live, there’s no need. We’ve already got LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver, the 2007 version of Remain in Light. Let the past remain in the past - stuff from your youth is almost never better as an adult. We should all just let go.

Hey, Nostalgia…

Still, though, letting go isn’t always the best path. I did go see Pixies in 2004, and it was incredible. And I bet seeing Corgan, Chamberlin and whoever else is a Pumpkin today (it doesn’t even really matter that D’Arcy and James Iha aren’t involved - they always seemed like the world’s luckiest high school yearbook staff anyway) would be pretty great too, if you never got to see them the first time.

This Pumpkins 2.0 is kind of like Live Free or Die Hard: completely unnecessary, a blatant attempt to cash in on lingering affection for a relic from 15 years ago, and all the principals are different except for the creepy bald guy out front - but it still could be a lot of fun.

Gardner Linn

Liner Notes is Flagpole’s music opinion column.