Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream

It's that time of the year: back to school. This doesn't really mean much to those of us in the workaday world, but most public schools in the US will resume classes next week, assuming they have the federal funding to do so. In the un-air-conditioned hallways of my alma mater in Grinnell, the first day of school was, by my calculation, either today or this past Monday. Since I work year-round now, summer and fall only differ in terms of weather. But it was actually just today that I had a strange, and infinitely geeky, thought: I miss back-to-school time. And maybe you do too.

Think about it: the new shoes. The new clothes. The perfect outfit for the first day. New haircuts. New girlfriends. Marching band practice. The unproductive first day of classes, when no homework is given. That new-textbook smell. (Don't pretend you didn't love the new-textbook smell.) Feeling a certain guilty thrill at the prospect of seeing everyone again, even the people you hate, even the vapid hot girls and the brainless jocks. You needed those people to define your own exceptionally intelligent, subversive, endlessly clever clique. You needed bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam and the Pumpkins to speak for the disaffected, middle-class, angry young man/woman within.

It's easy to look back and smirk at our na�vet�, but that's cheating. That's not allowed; it's like peeking at the answer key. For all the posturing and anxiety that goes into being an American teenager, US high school students are some of the least self-conscious, most sweetly hopeful people in the world. Give any one of them the chance to talk about something they really love, some great new band they've just discovered. They seek out their own amazing new shit and become rapturous about it; it knows no context or moderation or refinement; it's pure unadulterated joy. And then they seek out the other kids who feel the same way they do, and they celebrate. Is that what "Cherub Rock" is about? Is it about high school kids on the first day of school? Ushered in with a sexy, perfect drum fill�one of the most easily-recognized beginnings to an album, ever�and a mounting intro that crashes anthemically into the main theme like a call to arms? "Hipsters, unite / come align for the big fight / to rock for you." Of course. It's so obvious, now.

But maybe it wasn't so obvious eleven years ago, in the thick of it. Another school year, my junior year, halfway through high school. As summer ended, I was still recovering from a bad breakup with my Fundamentalist Christian girlfriend. I thought I'd seen the worst and had the emotional scars to prove it. Rather than cringe at that kind of na�vet� now, I smile, grateful that I was once so green and gave impulsive, melodramatic emotions such a wide berth. The last week in August, right before school started, my band played an outdoor show at the gazebo in Central Park. The turnout was impressive and ranged from our friends to college students to our parents to the senior citizens who showed up expecting the usual bluegrass or Dixieland fare. Silly as it all seems in retrospect, it was one of our first bona fide gigs. Playing up there on an absurdly high drum riser, I had that indubitable, hopelessly hopeful feeling we got at the beginning of every year: "This is it. Great things are going to happen. I'm going to do something powerful. I'm going to rock out with my friends and we're going to have the time of our lives and I'm going to get hung up on a girl and start dating her when the leaves start to change color and it's going to be perfect." Nothing sophisticated, nothing profound. I started that school year with at least two new pairs of Converse All-Stars. They'd come back into vogue the year before, along with grunge and the Singles soundtrack and "Beavis & Butthead". I wore what was essentially, I realize now, a skater cut, even though I didn't skate: Long hair hanging down around close-shorn sides. Big cargo shorts. Huge shirts. Flannel shirts. The obligatory piercing (left lobe, of course).

Literally the day before school started, I did a very uncool, unrebellious thing and went to the mall in Marshalltown with my mom, ostensibly to get new school clothes. But I also picked up the new Smashing Pumpkins album. To this day, there isn't a better album to capture the optimistic rush you get from early autumn, the perverse feeling of renewal that comes during a season when so many things begin to die. Fitting, then, that Siamese Dream so consistently and successfully marries the euphoric to the melancholy and mines rock's adolescent sex/death dichotomy for all it's worth, again and again, in "Cherub Rock" and "Rocket" and "Silverfuck" and "Soma". Even treacly, inescapable radio staples like "Today" and "Disarm" don't sound mawkish when they're placed back into the context of the album: they're majestic again. "Spaceboy" brought the Mellotron back into fashion. "Silverfuck" still works, even if it's overlong and the title is a puerile ploy and Billy insisted on the "bang bang you're dead" line during the middle section. "Hummer" is the perfect makeout song, especially the coda. The languid and then cathartic "Soma" was the first thing I listened to every day in the winter when I got up at five-thirty for morning swim practice. This album was absolutely everything rock music was supposed to be, and I hazard to say that it's the first such album that was released at a time when I could finally appreciate such a thing. I didn't drink or do drugs, and wouldn't for another few years, so rock & roll was the best high I could possibly imagine.

Musical scholars can talk all they want about how doom-and-gloom grunge was (and the Pumpkins weren't technically grunge, I think everyone agrees) but it strikes me now as a predominantly optimistic, even celebratory genre. Maybe that's going to be true of anything that was eventually commodified with astonishing quickness and sold directly to a demographic at whose core I happened to be residing at age seventeen. But I still don't think it's as cynical as all that: like the best music, Siamese Dream (and yes, Badmotorfinger and Vs and Nevermind and The Downward Spiral) was empowering rather than discouraging. It didn't get me down; it didn't anesthetize me. It made me say Fuck Yeah. It made me say This Is Awesome.

Earlier tonight, I drove past a Best Buy and decided to stop and see if they had the new Ali G DVD. The parking lot was a clusterfuck of cars waiting to exit, and the store itself was a zoo of mostly young people wearing dark clothing. I later learned there was a promotional event for the band Linkin Park, that tickets and other LP merchandise had been given away and/or sold. Reeling from sensory overload on my way to the DVD section, I winced as the in-store music rose to a volume level that would be obnoxious even if it were playing music I liked, much less generic aggro-rock pap. I watched swarms of young people walk past and suddenly felt really, really old. These kids were barely born when Siamese Dream came out. But I also realized they were probably experiencing the same youthful cultural epiphany as I did when I discovered Siamese Dream eleven autumns ago. Sure, I could get in their faces and try to deliver some passionate harangue about how the Pumpkins circa-1993 were a gazillion times better than Linkin Park circa-Ever. You and I both know that's the truth, but it's not fair. I don't have the right to take that away from them. I can't begrudge them their moment, just as I can't rightly sneer at that seventeen-year-old version of myself, strutting around my small town in my Chuck Taylors with "Cherub Rock" my theme song, on the cusp of September 1993.

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