Siamese Dream at 25
Recollections from the 90s Authenticity Wars
For Gen Y, the culture vampires portrayed in “Cherub Rock” preceded our own notions of what hipsters or irony even were. We were taught about sellouts, though, insofar as they were subjects of suspicion and scorn. No sooner did I receive my copy of Siamese Dream, mail-ordered from the 10-CDs-for-a-penny BMG catalog, than the kid at the locker next to mine informed me that Smashing Pumpkins were a sellout band — that I’d been duped by sinister machinations of capitalist greed. Before I would come into contact with DIY culture, it had already been imparted to me that cynicism was the oral tradition of Alternative-land; and traitors were to be reported with Maoist vigilance.
Just as Nirvana taught Generation X that their pain could translate to pop songs, the Smashing Pumpkins showed that, through uncool retrovalues like sincerity and idealism, pain could be transcended. Released at the Alternative movement’s apex, Siamese Dream rejected postmodern deconstruction in favor of upholding rock and roll’s grand tradition — proving that, even in the most cynical of times, success on one’s own terms was possible. Twenty-five years ago, Smashing Pumpkins used the architecture of their generational confusion, listlessness, and rage to create a multi-platinum ladder of optimism towards the unknown future.
Now as Gen X ascends to the corridors of power once occupied by their oppressors, it’s surprising to see how two decades of Internet culture have all but erased the value systems that propelled the Alternative movement. Their social crusade has been reduced to oblique references and fetish objects, their music revolution to a chord progression and a T-shirt. Gen X’s reluctance to set the record straight suggests that their childhood wounds cut deeper than most care to recall. As for the Pumpkins, they now stand as a living monument to this forgotten war. Despite three decades of sold-out tours with platinum records piled to the sky, the band’s trials with public misperception and hipster antagonism play on unabated.
Those who remember the mosh pits of yesteryear can testify that sellout authoritarianism, while flawed in many ways, was more than an arbitrary roadblock to what now seems a tacit entrepreneurial demiurge. As the machinations of the Internet Age continue to obliterate relationships, attention-spans and time-space, Siamese Dream remains both a link to a vanishing cultural heritage and a roadmap through the digital chaos that lies ahead. For those who don’t believe that today’s gross material reality is our final destination, we salute the veterans who served bravely in the nearly-forgotten Authenticity Wars and acknowledge that the fight is not yet over.
Geek USA
The Pepsi Generation’s ideological legacy lies in the Authenticity Wars that undergirded the 90s Alternative movement. Nearly half the size of the Boomer and Millennial cohorts that preceded and followed them respectively, Gen X walked a lonely journey through a rapidly-changing American landscape. Their social revolution would have to navigate the minefield laid by a capitalist system that used their own symbols and icons to exploit them, a general public who dismissed them as “slackers,” and the cycles of recrimination spun from their own integrity witch hunts.
The roots of the Authenticity Wars can be traced, at least in part, to Gen X’s cognitive dissonance. In the generational lottery, the Baby Boomers had lucked into being the rebels who hung up their hippie robes and gracefully transitioned into the American fabric. As surely as the Silent Generation before them, they forged a path to the American Dream. But the steep economic and social shifts of the 70s and 80s distorted that dream’s trajectory. Two-income families became the norm just to keep the 60s dream on life-support, and from that struggle emerged a generation of latchkey kids. Gen X had to reconcile their inherited Boomer optimism with their bleak and lonesome material reality.
The childhood of the Latchkey Generation was marked by the mainstreaming of birth control, divorce, and institutional child care. Television was Gen X’s bad babysitter, a simulation where family values and middle-class pride were the subject of situation comedy, where the well-meaning but foolish patriarchs were targets of ridicule. Postmodernism built the language of modern television marketing; rebellion was the car you drove and the brand of soda you drank, a reason to belong (see: OK Soda [1]). David Foster Wallace reflected on how, for his generation, “early television helped legitimize absurdism and irony as not just literary devices but sensible responses to a ridiculous world.” Television created a hazy atmosphere of meta-narratives that all led back to the seat in front of the set — this was the suburban trap.
A song like “Geek USA”, with its sideways references and furious pace, represented the time in all its aggressive ironic glory. In a 2011 interview with Matt Pinfield, Corgan would make allusion to the song being a binary to Cobain’s “Tourettes,” how the worldview of Gen X’s youth created in them a free-associative twitch. The schizophrenic imagery of postmodern society would raise a generation who could understand this language intuitively.
Corporate Magazines Still Suck
Nirvana was the gold standard of Grunge-era authenticity. Counter to their rolled-out-of-bed nonchalance, Nirvana’s aura of unassailability was carefully crafted; an intricate web of indie credibility². Through their masterful deployment of symbolist simulacra, they established a widely-adopted blueprint for what scene-credibility looked like at the highest levels. Intent on destroying hipster codes, the Smashing Pumpkins would reject the grunge blueprint — and consequently pay the political price.
Seattle grunge and the midwestern underground were both descendants of American punk rock³. Though borne from the same DIY ethic that fueled the American underground, the Smashing Pumpkins were punished on the local level for not sharing in the stylistic legacy of hardcore punk. Their punk leanings instead came by way of its British offshoot, neo-psychedelia⁴. And despite a pronounced strain of classic rock in grunge music, the Pumpkins’ affinities for bands deemed unhip, like ELO and Cheap Trick, would stigmatize them as phonies — by the punks and Pavement and Kim Gordon alike.
Rocket
Their first album Gish was, by the band’s admission, an American shoegaze album — vague, minimal vocalization; washes of distortion; a focus on vibes over songs. Released in May of 1991, Gish became the biggest selling independent album of all time. But this triumph would be quickly eclipsed when Nirvana’s Nevermind became a surprise hit in the fall of 1991. Simultaneously, Pearl Jam, who had previously opened for Smashing Pumpkins, had a mainstream breakthrough with their debut album Ten. Just as the Pumpkins reached the highest echelon of DIY success, underground music had broken through the glass ceiling.
Hoping to capitalize on the rising tide of Grunge, Virgin Records proposed re-releasing Gish as their mainstream debut — the next Nevermind. As Billy Corgan came to understand it, from heroes like the Cure and Echo & the Bunnymen, a lasting legacy in the public canon could only be predicated on solid songwriting. With his band’s secret music world — their loves, influences and inside jokes — all about to be laid bare on the operating table of mass scrutiny, Corgan declined Virgin’s offer and proposed a new album, with songs ready for radio airplay. The Pumpkins didn’t want to simply tag along with the Alternative revolution, they wanted to be the tip of the spear.
This opportunity was the Pumpkins’ do-or-die moment — since the indie world had rejected them, it would be their only ticket out of town. But with the exception of “Rocket,” which had been on their setlists as a jam during the Gish era, the final thirteen songs had yet been written before the album was promised. Stunned by writer’s block, Corgan sank into a suicidal depression. Only upon discovering The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron did he begin to piece together the courage to face destiny. Since hipster posturing and oblique cool-referencing yielded only mixed results on the indie level, Corgan would attempt an honest and confessional approach in hopes of setting his songwriting free. From there, with his demos of “Today” and “Disarm,” an eight-month dry spell would finally break.
Siamese Dream would be as ambitious as it was antithetical to Alternative’s “slacker” perception. “This was where there was maximum pressure…This is where things went wrong,” recalls Corgan. Recording was set for Triclops Studios in Marietta, Georgia⁵. Twenty miles outside of Atlanta city limits, the isolated location was a conscious choice for keeping distractions away from the band and bad influences from finding drummer Jimmy Chamberlain. Riding shotgun would be producer Butch Vig, who, coming off the success of Nevermind, had just as much to prove.
The compression surrounding the recording sessions would push bassist D’arcy Wretsky to quit the band, then later rejoin. Jimmy would disappear on week-long benders and at one point would reemerge in rehab. And a fissure would form between Corgan and guitarist James Iha, due to Iha’s diminished role in the recording process. Corgan would later confess, “I became very intense. There was a feeling of walking in a room and thinking, if things don’t go right here, my dream will never come true.”
The stress and scope of the major-label production would impel Corgan to record most of the guitars himself. That somewhat innocuous practicality of the studio would become distorted in the media, fueling speculation over the band’s integrity: were they really a solo project dressed up as a band, perhaps with session players responsible for their sound? The Milli Vanilli lip-syncing scandal still lingered in the public’s cultural memory.
The wary circumspection that followed them through their indie days had now spread to the mainstream media — who had ironically come to internalize Alternative’s sellout politics. With the mainstream bought in, the Alternative gold rush circuit was completed and MTV and Hollywood rolled in the mosh pit to the sound of ringing cash registers. The cultural stasis created from the mainstream walking lockstep with the underground held the authenticity storm clouds over the Smashing Pumpkins — through Siamese Dream’s ultimate success, and through the band’s many albums and incarnations thereafter.
As Y2K approached, the Authenticity War gradually loosened its grip on pop culture’s throat, allowing a collective sigh of relief. Gen X began abandoning the integrity watchtowers to join the new enlightened global party on the other side. But upon realizing the party was a motionless sea of blue-lit social media inventory, the Alternative crowd checked out. Two decades on, they have yet to resurface. When the Grunge tide finally receded, sellout authoritarianism’s impression would be the high-water mark it left on the banks of culture.
Today
Like other war veterans, Gen X now walk among us, trying to relate between the world they fought for and the reality they live in. Though irony proved somewhat effective in diagnosing the long-denied diseases of the ailing American Dream, it did not have the capacity to cure. As Lewis Hyde observed, “(i)rony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” Circuitous sellout accusations only contributed to the feeling of a dog chasing its own tail — the mosh pit could never achieve escape-velocity. Ultimately, Gen X’s war didn’t end in a ceasefire; rather, they simply ran out of firepower, with the most prudent saving the last bullet for themselves.
Today Gen X is increasingly regarded as some extended detour through the pre-Internet Dark Ages. As the first generation of Internet purebreds, history is being rewritten with Millenials as the direct descendants of Baby Boomers: a favoritism of some tidy narrative of continuous middle-class bourgeois ascendency. Recent sociological dives into the Millenial mindset have removed Gen X from culture’s evolutionary timeline altogether⁶ — undermining the direct influence Generation X’s legacy of politics, sexuality and technology on current progressive thought. Standing on top of their mass grave, the modern social Internet lauds itself as a bastion of free speech, LGBTQ rights, and governmental transparency, claiming to have delivered on the new world that Gen X strove for.
The mainstream vs counterculture binary that began with the 60s is, by nature, a progressive model for social assimilation. The belief in gradual cultural assimilation and integration, as both desirable and achievable, remains foundational in society’s ongoing pursuits for social equity and civil rights. But with information flying at light speed from every direction, the voices of both the progressive and regressive seem to occur all at once; disembodied and flattened into the Internet’s infinite scroll. With its part and parcel socio-political thrusts disembodied, all that remains of Gen X’s cultural legacy is Grunge fashion and chord progressions. And as music’s cultural import continues its descent from revolutionary catalyst to sonic wallpaper, we see that Gen X’s ultimate erasure from the history books well underway.
Marginalized by society’s collective memory, the Smashing Pumpkins and Alternative culture now ideologically exist in the tiniest sliver, just beyond the reach of the Internet’s vacuum hose. Commemorating Gen X’s accomplishments is not just about acknowledging the great Authenticity Wars or reclaiming dignity for its veterans. It reminds us that, as we now travel at lightspeed, a generational legacy can vanish into digital oblivion and that a bottomless well of collective data is no replacement for time-worn wisdom. Siamese Dream, and the grand rock and roll narrative, is a belief in society’s larger story — its triumphs and failures alike. It is an acceptance of past pain and a refusal to wallow in defeat. It is a protest, that we have not been sold the bill of goods we paid for and we’re willing to fight for what’s ours. We never had a chance to mourn the dead because, though the tattoos have faded, Generation X’s war is not over yet.
[1] From Wikipedia: “OK Soda was intentionally marketed at the difficult Generation X and Generation Y markets, and attempted to cash in on the group’s existing disillusionment and disaffection with standard advertising campaigns; the concept was that the youth market was already aware that they were being manipulated by mass-media marketing, so this advertising campaign would just be more transparent about it. “
[2] Kurt Cobain wore a homemade Flipper t-shirt on Saturday Night Live and namechecked the Melvins and the Pixies, their cultural forebears, at every opportunity. They performed covers by the Vaselines and Shocking Blue, showing that pop song craft had deep and gnarled roots below record shelf sea-level. They played televised shows alongside members of the Meat Puppets and Fear.
[3] The Touch & Go/Steve Albini noise-rock axis, repped by the likes of Big Black and Jesus Lizard, and Waxtrax, with the likes of Ministry, dominated Chicago in the late 80s into 90s. To the South, there were the flanneled/beer-soaked likes of the Replacements and Soul Asylum who stemmed from the Husker Du branch of the SST family tree.
[4] The monolithic guitar blur of shoegaze acts like My Bloody Valentine and Ride.
[5] Clarity was the mission and so reverb and delay were nearly absent on the recordings — save the Eventide harmonizer, used to create a doubling effect on the vocals. Recorded on a Neve console, once blessed by John Lennon at A&R studios in New York, the completely analog setting required hand-splicing reels to assemble Siamese’s mountain range of guitars. “Soma” was assembled from splicing together 40 guitar tracks. Tracking would eventually span 96 days and run $100,000 over budget.
[6] See: The Next America: Boomers, Millenials and the Looming Generational Showdown — Taylor, Paul, Pew Research Center, PublicAffairs 2016 and Generation We: How Millennial Youth are Taking Over America and Changing Our World Forever — Greenberg, Eric H., Weber, Karl, Pachatusan 2008.