Smashing Pumpkins, 1979. Do you get it?

[The Straight Story]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ2osNmKvNc

Lyrics:

Smashing Pumpkins - 1979 Lyrics

Shakedown 1979, cool kids never have the time

On a live wire right up off the street

You and I should meet

Junebug skipping like a stone

With the headlights pointed at the dawn

We were sure we'd never see an end to it all

And I don't even care to shake these zipper blues

And we don't know

Just where our bones will rest

To dust I guess

Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below

Double cross the vacant and the bored

They're not sure just what we have in store

Morphine city slippin dues down to see

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, lamented and assured

To the lights and towns below

Faster than the speed of sound

Faster than we thought we'd go, beneath the sound of hope

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 that we don't even care to shake these zipper blues

And we don't know just where our bones will rest

To dust I guess

Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below

The street heats the urgency of now

As you see there's no one around

[sendero]

1. No I dont' really "get" it..

... but it is easily my favorite SP song :)

[The Straight Story]

5. I don't but I do :)

Seems to speak to an innocence in life, on the verge of adult hood, and not wanting to conform to the norms brought down upon one.

But hell, I could be way off :)

[sendero]

6. That's as good an interpretation ..

.. as any. Over the years I've realized that lots of pop music lyrics are written in a vague way and may be interpreted many different ways. I've read interviews with artists (such as Kate Bush) in which the interviewer posits a meaning of a song and she says basically "I never thought of it that way" but goes on to say that she could see how someone could arrive at that, but that isn't really what she was thinking when she wrote the song. (Of course, Kate writes beautiful songs!)

We all bring our own selves and experiences to things like song lyics, movies, books and well written works are multi-faceted :)

[cwydro]

2. well. not sure

what I am supposed to get...and I was already "too old" probably, when the song came out, but it is one of my all time favorites...I LOVE that song.....so thanks for a blast from the past...I lost that CD in a hurricane...wonder if I can still buy it...

[Nevernose]

3. Yeah, I get it.

And I never want to think of that life again, though mine wasn't exactly the same as the Pumpkins.

[idgiehkt]

4. I've never read these lyrics

and I'm kind of touched at the care put in to them, they appeal to the eye as well as the ear. I don't know what exactly he's talking about but this could easily apply to that whole musical era where so many of the artists were trying to express feelings and themes that hadn't really been dealt with much in music before, alot of shades of gray going on instead of formulaic pop or the out and out 'f*ck you' of punk. What the hell happened...

[mark414]

7. i think this talks about the exact opposite of youthful innocence and

"the good ol days"

all i hear is/read is something pretty terrible about deep relationship with sister morphine

[buddhamama]

8. Mayonnaise

is my favorite Smashing Pumpkins song. It is one their early ones, before making it big.

i like 1979. and yes, i get it.

[MrCoffee]

9. I don't get it. But then, I don't really get anything.

[mitchum]

10. The song has a beautiful melody, but I always try to ignore Corgan's...

"singing" and lyrics. He sounds like a gnat perched on top of a cathedral.

[Arugula Latte]

11. It's interesting to me that it's entitled "1979"

That always seemed fitting to me. 1979 was one of the strangest "feeling" years I've ever experienced. To me, it had a weird transition vibe, and not in a good way. Then again, I was 13 in that year, which can make any year suck.

[BlueIris]

13. I was born in '79, and "weird transition vibe" is...such a perfect way

to describe what I've always sensed about that time.

[Arugula Latte]

16. Yeah -- The peace-and-love feeling was long gone, but

the country hadn't yet lurched into the Reagan insanity. It was a disco-y, glittery, big hair kind of a feeling, and before some of the developments that would actually make life in this country better -- such as the food revolution (that's a big one for me!) :9 (I shudder when I recall the meatloaf and Campbells soup casserole kinds of foods we ate when I was a kid.)

[koneko]

12. I 'get it' on a level I'm comfortable with

And although the CD's not more than 5 feet from where I sit, I chose to click on the YouTube link.

Ruh-Roh, I feel another Saturday getting sucked into the bowels of YouTube-opia. . . ;-)

[idgiehkt]

14. I'm not the only one?

I saw the best minds of my generation
starving, hysterical, youtubed...

[Ediacara]

15. I'm not sure I get it

It seems to be about the loss of innocence. Corgin was 12 in 1979, so that seems like the kind of age that something dramatic would happen in the "loss of innocence" dept.