Bit of a different piece this week. This is a new version of a long out-of-print piece I wrote about US rock band The Smashing Pumpkins. The original appeared in the 2013 ‘Music Issue’ of The Lifted Brow.
I wrote parts of this in a barn in regional France. That was nice.
SIAMESE DREAMING
On Billy Corgan, The Smashing Pumpkins and Pro-Wrestling
I
When I was eighteen my father took me to a department store and bought me a compact disc stereo. This was a moment of sorts. In our family, we were always waiting for the new technology and never buying it. As such, the compact disc stereo — an old Sanyo boom-box styled thing — was a luxury item. A true testament to my insistence that this was what I wanted.
On the way out of the store, my father stopped:
“You better grab something to play on it.”
I spotted what I wanted in seconds.
“You sure?” he said, looking at the album cover. My father was a bookkeeper. He once spent a week looking for seventeen cents in company records.
I was sure. I had a pirated copy of Siamese Dream by the Smashing Pumpkins on cassette. In my teens, it was a weirdly colourful album. Heavy, but also slow and pretty as well. At home, I unpacked the stereo and wired it in. I took a chair from the kitchen to my room, sat down in front of this black plastic box and pressed play. In crisp digital, everything about the album was better than I remembered.
II
There are only three things I know about wresting: in the eighties, wrestling was an extremely popular type of mainstream entertainment. I’ve watched Beyond The Mat from the late 90s, a celebratory --but also quasi-revisionist-- documentary about the sport. Lastly, I’ve read French cultural theorist Roland Barthes and his work on wrestling in Mythologies. That’s the three.
I was a child during the mid-1980s. It’s recalled differently now, but it wasn’t all pastels and video grain as it was happening. You couldn’t see the grain back then. It was a time in which Hulk Hogan and Taylor Dane were both bona fide celebrities, an era that seemed to focus on size. Big things were in vogue: big yachts, big drugs, big money, shoulder pads. Largeness and spectacle were completely embedded in ordinary life. It was a decade very aptly summed up by Michael Jackson’s Thriller, something Greil Marcus once described as a ubiquitous spectacle about spectacles, something massive that just floated through ordinary life. Marcus writes that Thriller was:
…there, part of every commute, a serenade to every errand, a referent to every purchase, a fact of every life. You didn’t have to like it. You only had to acknowledge it - but somehow…to acknowledge it was to like it.
That was the tone of the time. The mainstream seemed all-encompassing but also benign, desirable even, like a warm blanket spread evenly over all of us. It’s easy to forget that in the 80s, the present-day veneer of media cynicism coating huge pop music moments (think: the art school wink of Gaga, the navel-gazing of Kanye) did not exist. It was a time when these huge things were still ‘really happening.’
The 80s were the perfect incubator for wrestling. Formed in 1979, the World Wrestling Federation’s (WWF) midwifed a transition within wrestling, taking it from localised sports and vaudeville to the world of syndicated televised entertainment. Spearheaded by a young Vince McMahon — the current CEO of the WWF — wrestling became a hugely successful and spectacular business. Like Thriller, it went everywhere: into your home on video cassette and MTV, into huge sporting stadiums, into the toy aisle of department stores, and into the everyday sensory field of t-shirts, coffee mugs, console games and Rocky III. In 1987, the third Wrestlemania (the pro wrestling Superbowl) was attended by over 90,000 people.
At the time of the WWF’s peak, Billy Corgan was about twenty years old. He grew up with mainstream wrestling as popular culture. To say Corgan had a troubled adolescence is an understatement. Grunge and alternative rock (Corgan’s music) has mythologised the damage that families can do to children, but even within this confessional genre, Corgan’s past looks especially grim. Separated from both his mother and his drug-addicted father, and then later physically abused by his stepmother, Corgan’s upbringing is the type known to turn people into serial killers. Yet throughout, Corgan is anchored by his stepbrother Jesse Anderson, a sufferer of both cerebral palsy and Tourette’s syndrome. Corgan sticks around: “I essentially raised him.” Over the years, he began to identify with his brother. They were both freaks, he figured, both on the outside of conventional society and school cliques and the 80s American family. And right there, the seed of Corgan’s ambition is planted.
Corgan has talked about watching wrestling as a kid and I can see him and Jesse watching men pretend to fight on TV. It draws things together in a way. Wrestling plays with brutality. The viewer always sees the blow coming, always knows the blow isn’t real, that the pain is acted out. Wrestling is about controlled violence, something vastly different to domestic violence. It deals in heroes and heels formally: the lines are very, very clear. In the mid-1980s it could have felt like an answer of sorts to the young Billy Corgan. It had a code. It celebrated difference. Life had made him and his brother outsiders. Through wrestling they watched people prosper from that difference.
III
Barry Blaustein’s 1999 documentary Beyond The Mat is a good signpost for the transitional period between wrestling’s 80s hey-day and pro-wrestling’s contemporary setting. In the film, we see the wrestling industry laid bare. We learn that wrestling works as tawdry entertainment because in essence the wrestling system is a desperate and tawdry thing. The seedy underbelly of the wrestling community is revealed and under examination, the people operating inside it are every bit as archetypal as the stories depicted in the ring. There is the downtrodden loser, Jake the Snake (a huge influence on Mickey Rourke’s character Robin Randzowski from The Wrestler), the sloppy money-man Roland Alexander, and the big-hearted strong man Mick Foley (if for nothing else the film is worth seeing for Christie Foley’s red, white and blue American flag tracksuit). Greed, concealed emotional violence, hucksterism and a very 80s sensibility fuels all of these people. What the film says is this: you thought wrestling was idiotic and falsified entertainment, but real people make and ruin their entire lives doing it.
Beyond The Mat is about the 80s, but it’s a very 90s film. It is not aesthetically grunge in the slightest, but it does articulate a grunge tension. It is not ironically playful like grunge, but the film revels in a confessional, warts-and-all mode of story-telling. It opens up something once fixed and closed and gleaming to the postmodernist turn. Grunge taught us that being a rock star was great but it was also a drag. We saw that heroin, dressing down and fighting the Corporation were all good in the short-term but lousy going forward. Contrary to popular opinion, grunge didn’t destroy glam metal; it just momentarily asked whether glam was a good idea (it was, it seems: nu-metal soon followed). What a generation learned from grunge was that it’s fun to peek inside the grand narrative of popular culture. We saw the inner workings and contrary nature of our entertainment. And instead of being turned off, we were even more entertained by it.
This was Billy Corgan’s moment. Billy Corgan and The Smashing Pumpkins became the quintessential 90s grunge-derived Alternative Nation™ band. Nirvana may be the icons --Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Mudhoney and Sub Pop the rest of the legacy-- but no one interacted with and exploited the era more than Billy Corgan. No one embodied that transitional moment like he did. Here he was: fucked up suburban banger. Here he was: an ambitious and technically adept musician. Here he was: a total outsider. He lived all these things at once and saw it for what it was: a colossal opportunity. It was as though he looked around and realised he was more weird and uncool and low-key metal than his peers. He was too grunge for grunge, in short, and that this was for a brief moment, something big and bankable. He suddenly had an advantage. So he slaved over his jerry-rigged hay-bailer of a rock band while the sun shone, and made a lot of hay in the process.
In the early years of The Smashing Pumpkins, much was made of Corgan’s propensity for bullish, controlling behaviour. It’s common knowledge in music geekdom that he sang and played nearly every note (sans drumming) of the first two albums, 1991’s Gish and 1993’s Siamese Dream. At the time, people were outraged by this. This was not authentic band behaviour in 1992, especially for a band that released a single on Sub Pop. Yet by the time 1995’s double album Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness rolled around, it seemed like a moot point. In assembling a ridiculous 57 tracks for the album and culling it down to 28 for the final mixes, the question of who did what was completely redundant. Those discs of baroque, heavy, corny, sprawling and catchy pop music were a testament to Corgan’s creativity and faith. It felt like a minor miracle that anyone could do what he did, let alone do it and flourish. Suddenly the idea of Corgan as the ambitious control freak wasn’t so unpalatable. Instead, it just became the de facto explanation for how something so unexpected happened: an epic album from an epic ego.
Yet Corgan’s twin passions – wrestling and music – are parallel stories. Both allow a glimpse behind the curtain at the real mess that is popular culture in the making. Wrestling is performance and personal carnage. Rock music is performance and personal carnage. In knowing more and seeing more, we saw — almost for the first time — our entertainment as a hybrid product: our musicians and our wrestlers were out there in the world, walking around, half rational careerist subjects and half bloodied and eroded human beings. We were transfixed by this stuff. It made — and continues to make — us feel more knowing and less seduced by the spectacle of commercial entertainment, but it does so from inside the spectacle. This all went supernova with the internet in the late 90s, but in the earlier half of the decade, no other rock musician seemed to consciously or unconsciously tweak at the zeitgeist like Billy Corgan. It seems unlikely that any other moment in music history would have rewarded him so completely.
IV
It’s 1972 and French academic Roland Barthes has just published his book Mythologies in English. The work inside Mythologies is at least fifteen years old to the author; Barthes had submitted much of it to French magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles in the 1950s. So for English readers, Mythologies is a revelation, the work of a master thinker, using the very best theoretical tools at his disposal (philosophy, sociology, literary criticism) and applying them to the benign topics of everyday life: margarine, motor cars, celebrities, holidays, striptease. In these seemingly ordinary things Barthes finds an almost secret world of meaning. In the book, he writes of his impatience with “the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality, which even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history.” This was a man who obviously had an intense fascination with how ‘normal’ things worked. He was also a big fan of wrestling.
What Barthes recognised in mid-century amateur wrestling was the same thing that ended up driving 90s alternative music: how it entertained an audience. To Barthes, wrestling was never a sport, or even sport-like. It was theatre, and its virtue was the “spectacle of excess” it provided. The topic of this spectacle was suffering, defeat and justice. Wrestling plays off the same themes today, and what better description could there be of 90s rock and grunge than as a spectacle of suffering, defeat and justice? There they were, the ragged, tattered anti-heroes of grunge, dogged by their own fantastic success. During grunge, we all wanted our rock stars depressed and perennially adolescent, naive to the world almost. We all wanted adults who sang about our teenaged angst. But we also wanted them to transport us and to reassure us and to entertain us. We covered the gaping disconnect that opened up between reality and expectation with lashings of punk rock irony and leftist small talk. It only lasted until the mid-90s. As the whole thing subsided (Cobain was dead, Soundgarden spent, Pearl Jam in hiding), The Smashing Pumpkins climbed to the very heights of their career. It was their peak and no one articulates why better than Barthes, when he writes about wrestling:
“…wrestling is the only sport which gives such an externalized image of torture. But here again, only the image is involved in the game, the spectator does not wish for the actual suffering of the contestant; he only enjoys the perfection of an iconography.”
And right there, right at the tail end of grunge, is what? Billy Corgan, riding high on a spectacular double album, wearing silver pants and a ZERO t-shirt (available at the merch stand) and snidely singing, “God is empty, just like me.” He becomes ZERO at this point, a character. Now take a moment to scope down on his namesake’s song:
My reflection, dirty mirror
There's no connection to myself
I'm your lover, I'm your zero
I'm the face in your dreams of glass
So save your prayers
For when we're really gonna need' em
Throw out your cares and fly
Wanna go for a ride?
Or, in a nut shell: this is not real, let’s rock. Corgan very deliberately turned himself into a titanic caricature of the alternative rock star on Melon Collie, a clearly externalised image of that torturous, impossible role.
And it worked.
We did want to go for ride.
Corgan grew even more famous.
V
Pull all this together: take the beaten down kid and the creative control freak and draw a line through time from one to the other. Go back to that childhood Corgan and re-read him, knowing what comes after. Here is Billy Corgan retelling the story of his stepmother (taken from a 2005 entry in his LiveJournal):
“I have learned the fine art now of judging what is expected of me when I am being beat…it takes a keen ear to detect if the desired result is one of the following: submission, capitulation, confession, or negation…sometimes when I am being beaten down, the desired result appears to be tears, a bleating “no more, no more”, until the monster is satisfied…in stark opposition, sometimes the desired result appears to be to stop me crying, until a numb pall falls over the scene…as she beats me, she repeats over and over again “stop crying, stop crying you piece of shit”, and the formula reads that once you do the beating will stop…I learn the fine art of giving her whatever she desires, if only to feel that I am the one ultimately in control…I will never cry for any reason…So when I am beat now, if the desire seems to be to make me cry, I learn a sort of fake sob, dramatized to heighten the necessary effect…she doesn't seem to notice the difference between the fake version and the real deal, so this passes muster and therefore I never need to cry at all.”
What better schooling could there be for what came next in Corgan’s life? What more subtle explanation is needed for how one person understood grunge and alternative rock’s faulty premise? This is how Corgan recognised the gap in the market. He gave all the journalists and listeners and demons what they wanted. Billy Corgan’s ZERO character is total negation of the “fake version” and the “real deal”. On Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness he sings about all the things we wanted to hear, except he wasn’t there at all. As he continually casts doubt over every sincere and insincere moment of those albums. The music was affecting but there was no knowing him through it.
Shuttle forward to 2012, with Corgan promoting his role as creative director for then new independent wrestling company Resistance Pro Wrestling:
There are people I’ve met that it doesn’t matter what you say, it doesn’t matter how you say it, they just think it’s dumb…In my 25 years of playing in music, I’ve seen where rock ‘n’ roll has really been codified in a really lame way. It’s ruled by a bunch of nerds with laptops. So I’ve been attracted to wrestling more in the last 10-plus years because it still gives me that feeling of anything can happen…
So here we have in Corgan someone who feels comfortable inside chaos, but only if he feels like he can exert a controlling influence on it. You can’t go back and correct your childhood, but you can attempt to repeat the experience. It’s built into him: the chaos of domestic violence, then the chaos of an ensemble rock band — and what a chaotic band The Smashing Pumpkins were — and finally the chaos of professional wrestling. He struggled to control The Smashing Pumpkins and failed, then succeeded when he tried again. In 2005, the same year he talks publicly for the first time about the abuse, Corgan reformed the band and proceeded to continually re-write its history. “The Smashing Pumpkins has always been a concept,” he says in a 2012 interview with msn.com, “an adaptable concept.” And now we have the chaos of Resistance Pro Wrestling. As creative director of the wrestling company Corgan literally manages the fighting. He looks at the bouts as a complete story, builds character arcs across a season, and makes heroes and villains out of the people involved. Last year, he put his brother Jesse in the ring. In 2011, Jesse was attacked on the subway and wrestling seems to help his brother let out some of his frustration about his life. When asked about it afterwards, Corgan says, “My brother wants, as a character in the production, to be a ‘bad guy’. I see this as an extension of his life of being spoken to like he’s not a real person.” Sounds familiar.
VI
When I started writing this piece I went into a record store and bought the three-disc reissue of Siamese Dream. I took the little box set back to my apartment and sat down in amongst packing boxes, half opened cupboards and dirty carpet, and listened to the album from start to finish. I had recently given up on CDs, as is now the trend when it comes time to move house. This album was to be both my first CD and my last. It was a gesture. I felt like I had to act out my own story in advance, just a little, to do something melodramatic and controlling. It seemed appropriate.
As the album played, I looked around and thought about how I have never once seen my father enraged. Annoyed yes, and disappointed and depressed, but never wrathful. He never raised his voice. And my mother never beat me. My parents are still together. There have never been separations or abandonments. I was kept close and I’m still close. I had everything you’re supposed to have.
What I don’t have is the titanic ambition of Billy Corgan. I don’t have his talent for hooks and melodies or guitar solos. I don’t have his vision or his confidence, feigned or otherwise. I don’t have boldness. But I also will not possess Corgan’s shortness of temper. I will not suffer from his strange beliefs in chem-trails and weird pyjamas and self-help mysticism. To me, his life seems overly elaborate and ornate. The solutions he has found for his life are complex and come at a brutally high cost, but they seem to work: today, he does not seem unhappy or dissatisfied. He is visible. He’s making music, spruiking Resistance Pro Wrestling and answering questions.
In recent interviews, wrestling and music feature side by side. Corgan describes The Smashing Pumpkins as his job and is calm and matter-of-fact about everything else. In one exchange with Fuse he says, ‘The pomposity (of wrestling) is something I’ve always thought of as funny. The wrestling guys can kind of wink their way out of being a bad guy…I’ve been willing to play a bad guy just because I think it’s funny. It’s certainly funnier than being a good guy. And often times you find in rock and roll that guys who are perceived as being good guys are big fucking assholes behind the scenes. So you spend a lot of energy pretending you’re a good guy. That’s the reason they’re so intent on being the good guy: unconscious guilt.’ Billy Corgan does not bear this guilt. He has relinquished what is common knowledge: while making millions of fans happy, he has made scores of people behind the scenes angry and upset, treating them poorly and living all over them. He rarely hid from this. In rock, he has happily played the heel and the asshole.
Yet every public reference to his own villainy has arrived with a smirk or dressed in a costume of some design. That’s the genius of him. His public persona has been so knowing and so well tailored to his time and to his life. And now, via wrestling, Billy Corgan has found a way to tell the whole world how that persona works. In wrestling, he has found a way to say, ‘This has always been the model. Look!’ He has lived as the villain and taken the hits as required and now, with a history and a narrative to point to, Billy Corgan is showing us how he got over. He sits before us and tells us how he gave the world exactly what it wanted. As he reels these stories off, he again pulls back the veil and reveals the complex and contrary nature of our own desires, good and bad.
END
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