The Meaning Behind the Song “1979” by Smashing Pumpkins

Billy Corgan is not a subtle man. He fronts one of his generation’s loudest and most bombastic bands, whose masterpiece is a double album called Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Smashing Pumpkins’ third album is their creative and commercial peak, and it represents the apex of the ’90s alt-rock that defined Generation X. 

Make It Rhyme

“1979” is Smashing Pumpkins’ coming-of-age song. Reflecting on high school, Corgan remembered juggling school with responsibilities like owning a car and having a job. He told VH1 Storytellers of a vivid memory when he was 18, stopped at a traffic light, and the analogy of waiting for something to happen. 

Turning 18 in America comes with significant responsibilities, like voting or joining the military. Kids deciding on college and planning what to do for the rest of their lives carry levels of anxiety greater than high school’s most challenging moments. 

Shakedown, 1979
Cool kids never have the time
On a live wire right up off the street
You and I should meet
June bug skipping like a stone
With the headlights pointed at the dawn
We were sure we’d never see an end to it all

The only significance of the title’s year is the easy rhyme scheme. Corgan’s cool kids never having time rhymed neatly with 1979. 

That we don’t even care as restless as we are
We feel the pull in the land of a thousand guilts
And poured cement

Rebellion is the primary tool of restless youth and is nature’s built-in mode to progress. Past mistakes are glaring with hindsight, and the tendency to try something new brings about new ideas, music, or political activism to change what a younger generation perceives as wrong. But first, the kids try to fit it.  

Justine never knew the rules
Hung down with the freaks and the ghouls
No apologies ever need be made
I know you better than you fake it to see

Alternative bands in the 1990s rebelled against the ’80s party bands, raising social consciousness or at least singing about what the disaffected youth were feeling at the time. Generation X didn’t relate to the rock bands ruling MTV as they were coming of age, and the non-stop party and glitz reality escape wasn’t believable. Socially conscious bands like R.E.M. were no longer underground, and alternative rock became mainstream. 

The melancholy of “1979” wasn’t a lament for a better time; it was a call to action. The restlessness of Billy Corgan and Chicago’s Smashing Pumpkins was a shared experience of youth across the country, and it’s the reason why alternative music came to dominate radio and MTV. A new community of outsiders took these bands from the club to the arena because the people singing these songs looked and sounded like their friends from high school. No one in Middle America looked like Nikki Sixx or Axl Rose, but Corgan was the type of rock star who might have been your suburban neighbor. 

Freaks and Geeks

Smashing Pumpkins weren’t just rhyming with 1979. Nineties alternative bands also drew musical inspiration from ’70s rock. Soundgarden sounded like the connection between Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Pearl Jam echoed The Who, and Smashing Pumpkins are the result of Corgan’s love of David Bowie, Cheap Trick, Queen, and the Electric Light Orchestra. Like the ’70s bands he idolized, he played big guitar solos too, but his solos weren’t solely for flash. There was angst in his guitar solos, and Corgan used his Fender Stratocaster and Big Muff fuzz pedal as weapons against apathy, boredom, and depression. The wallflowers were taking over, and the kids picked on in high school—the weirdos without a date to the dance—were now selling out arenas and kicking pop stars from the top of the charts. 

The sound of “1979” wasn’t your parents’ nostalgia—that reflection on a romantic and mythical better era. Instead, it’s the sound of tearing up what’s sacred because the kids are struggling, and they need to talk about it. The alternative rock bands made it acceptable to communicate dark feelings and swept emotions; the façade of a perfect family, house, or student was no longer sustainable. The cultural damn was breaking, and it sounded like “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Alive,” and “Cherub Rock.” 

Like his idols in Queen, Billy Corgan made his own rock opera, and sadness was the theme because that’s precisely what he and millions of others felt at the time. Contrary to the toxicity soon to dominate the emerging internet, this generation did care about feelings. 

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