Bang Bang You're Dead... POLL In Your Head - ILM Artist Poll #87 - SMASHING PUMPKINS - Results

I had an ex-gf who loved Machina and Adore, didn't listen to the pre-MCIS material, and thought of Gish as worthless

(Before someone asks, this wasn't why we broke up.)

Been lurking for this poll, some crazy nostalgia here. I thought about contributing some votes when I saw it on the board, but couldn't really bring myself to - SP are so bracketed for me with some of my most emotionally intense teenage years, and a lot of the music pretty much captures that sense of overblown melodrama, feels awkward even listening back to it.

I did just want to just echo Soundslike's posts though. Couldn't have put it better myself in terms of the sense of diminishing returns at the time - for me, Adore was the turning point where ultimately we parted ways. Although not right away, there was a period of "denial", not only due to the significance and attention I'd pay to any CD in my small collection at the time, but also the emotional/subjective investments of being a totally dedicated fan, a true believer.

Wow, all night long? Holy crap. I've got a busy Sunday ahead of me. Hope I don't miss out on the top 10.

Good morning, catching up here...GALAPAGOS?!? My people, you are!

Adding to my growing list of embarrassments about this poll: somehow, I forgot to vote for "Perfect".

KM otm about the climax of Galapagos. Appropriately, it arrives with a guitar crash straight out of Baba O'Riley or Come Sail Away. Love that moment.

here's the top 10

https://i.imgur.com/0wtYVoB.jpg
10. Thru the Eyes of Ruby
558 points, 17 votes, 2 #1 votes
From: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, 1995

Fewer votes than the previous 5 - I don't get the love for this myself, but the coda is good.

the chorus is great but to me all the sections feel a little slapped together compared to some of their other similarly structured songs

i love everything about “ruby” and think it’s a way tighter-constructed than “porcelina.” the chorus is also... maybe billy’s best

“galapagos” so deserved to place this high. cutting it off my ballot SUCKED. good work everyone

https://i.imgur.com/PmdHTkL.jpg
9. Starla
564 points, 18 votes, 1 #1 vote
From: I Am One single, 1992 and Pisces Iscariot, 1994

lol i listened to this three times before voting. still mind-blowing. felt like i heard about it a lot before i ever heard it and it still kinda lived up to all that

My #4. Insanely cool song.

ridiculously cool song

This is going to be a perfect top 10.

i think “1979” or “mayonaise” will top this but i’m kinda pulling for “hummer”

THE NIIIIIIIIIGHT HAS COME

That's a moment where you're reminded that 'oh yeah, this is a concept album about nighttime or something'

https://i.imgur.com/uzzYlFx.jpg
8. Rhinoceros
602 points, 23 votes
From: Gish, 1991

i ended up voting for this song real high which surprised me. but it’s so groovy and gentle and then suddenly enormous

sorta their first masterpiece

"Ruby" was my favorite cut on the album and probably still is. I think the joins between parts are brilliant, especially the "so let me TELL you" transition into the second chorus. I'm not sure I could have told you what it was *about* but I just loved listening to it. The piano intro is one of the best uses of the expanded sonic palette on this album. The chorus has this swirling kind of rhythm to it, can't articulate it, but it *felt* like something was being spun around, like the camera is making a graceful arc to take in the breadth of the song or of the guitars or of the album. In a way it belongs with the disc one epics but it's so badly needed where it arrives on disc two.

"Starla" was my #1. If I only had one SP song the rest of my life to give me everything I need from them, "Starla" would be it. The hush, the whispers, the tension, the tightly-shaped bombast, the big-set painterly-yet-intense drumming, and just about the only dose of Guitar Godding I need--it's all there, with campfire bongos to boot. It's even absent Corgan's absolute megalomaniacal control of his world, with the timely bleed in of the cop siren.

Through its ascending repetition, it's almost like a Reich or Glass piece, except as an ode to the elevating potential of Rock. It's in many ways the opposite of most things I look for in music, especially in guitar-and-bass-and-drums-based music. Which only makes me trust my love of it more--and it's been almost the only SP song I've felt the need to put on periodically over the last 20 years since I otherwise walked away. It still gives me the same feeling of soaring, yearning possibility as when I was 14 and Smashing Pumpkins meant the world to me. For me, "Starla" is Smashing Pumpkins.

Rhinoceros was my #3.

I remember trying, as high school freshman, to write decent poetry that had the feel of this song and failing miserably.

i ended up voting for this song real high which surprised me. but it’s so groovy and gentle and then suddenly enormous

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Sunday, April 8, 2018 9:21 AM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nailed it

Corgan is nothing if not the eternal teenage poet : )

https://i.imgur.com/KqvPeVc.jpg
7. Thirty-Three
720 points, 27 votes, 1 #1 votes
From: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, 1995

one of the reasons i don’t rate gish v much is the lyrics are kinda boilerplate (i assume some ppl prefer billy before he started really *trying* and i can’t blame them) but even though it’s so simple there’s something really evocative about the scene “rhinoceros” paints (“planned a show / trees and balloons / ice cream snow”)

i voted “i of the mourning” no. 1 but “33” is pretty much now and forever my favorite pumpkins song

if i listen to it now i’ll probably cry. his absolute best lyrics

Soundslike, you're really tapping deep into some early Pumpkins feels here.

Sometimes I think - for me, anyway - that MCIS was so anticipated and longed for that when it arrived - it and, what, FIVE CDRs of bonus material?!? - it felt so seismic that for years I couldn't recognize what was lost about this band in the process. An immediate and probably naive comparison that springs to mind is everything surrounding the release of My Dark Beautiful Twisted Fantasy (though I'd argue that MCIS is a far better album).

I always forget about "Rhinoceros!". That arbitrary-one-word-title thing again. If it was called "And She Knows" there'd be no problem, but man would this be a different band if their catalog included that, along with "(I Just Wanna) Get There Faster," "I Forget to Forget," "When I Can, I Will," "Silence of the World," "I Won't Deny the Pain," "Rat in a Cage," "If You Wait (I Will Wait)," "Honey and Money (Let Me Out)," "We're Nowhere," "I Shall Be Free!," "The Disappointed," "Get On The Bomb," "Useless Drags," "She Was Crazy," "Where It's Warm," "I'm All By Myself," "Beyond My Hopes," and indeed, "Spin Your Love Around." I wonder if "Stand Inside Your Love" would feel more of a Pumpkinsy piece to me if it was called like, "Tabletop" or "Tread" or "Zork" or something.

All the random titles pose some obstacles to entry but they do seem kinda right for the band and the lyrical voice - the guarded, puzzle-like armor of our picked-on, prog-listening poet, pulling his hair down over a frowning face. A secret language, a secret lore - getting into them was like delving into the Tolkien appendices at the back of ROTK. (Of course, some of it was just the times and the ways of alt-rock - see "Lithium," "Santa Monica," etc. - but surely no other band as big as the Pumpkins has ever had SO much of their catalog consist of match-em-up titles challenging the initiate to get up to speed.)

33 is one of those songs that would've made it onto my ballot if ballots could've been longer.

Thirty-Three is maybe their most perfect song, not my #1 but it could have been easily

You're probably sick of hearing this, ufo, but: thank you so much for managing this poll and rollout. It's brightened my last few weeks.

doc casino otm about the song titles

(CD-5s, not CD-Rs.)

The drumming in set the ray to jerry is amazing idk why some of you don’t feel it, it’s one of their grooviest moments.

Happy to see it in the top 20 as well as Obscured.

I should have placed Thirty-Three higher. It didn't do a ton for me as a youth (since it was about being the elderly, cane-reliant top-hat age of thirty-three) but mannnnn is it a great piece of songwriting. They not only pull off "graceful swans of Never TOPPLE TO THE EARTH" but make it one of the most memorable and hooky lines of their career. I wish it didn't have the video tbh, that kind of put pictures on it, and too-specific ones by their standards.

Same problem for Tonight, Tonight honestly - by the time I had the album it was this celebrated item in countdowns of Great Music Videos but it kind of ties the song to a fannish pastiche (albeit a fun and very Pumpkinsy one) which for years kept me from grabbing how as a mission statement (the impossible is POSSIBLE *tonight*!) it was the equal of "Rocket."

lmao at those potential alternate song titles. Stand Inside Your Love is just oblique and pumpkins enough to work imo though. I think he was asked about the mostly one-obscure-word song titles of Ogilala in an interview recently and just gave a vague answer about finding the words inspiring or something?

Thirty-Three is almost certainly their best video

Doctor Casino, one of the more fascinating aspects of the YouTube era is discovering how many videos I didn't know existed for songs I've known/loved forever, and then realizing "thank GOD I never saw those videos until long after the fact."

Which is to say: until a few years ago I didn't even know there WAS a Thirty-Three video.

I wonder if "Stand Inside Your Love" would feel more of a Pumpkinsy piece to me if it was called like, "Tabletop" or "Tread" or "Zork" or something.

lmao

I think “Stand inside your love” is my favorite music video of them. At least is the one where all of the band look the coolest, in all the others James Iha always looks awkward... in others Corgan has a cowboy hat.

I think the title of Stand Inside Your Love made it feel that much more like they were trying to have a BIG hit, like, oh, anthemic songs about love are crossover gold! Here's a big ballad-sounding name! Along with the "Jimmy's back and they're ROCKING again" there was just a lot of "please clap" hype around that record and then the actual music just wasn't what I wanted from them. Throw in the fact that I was transitioning into college and indie rock and killing my old major-label idols (Pitchfork *savaged* Machina iirc, even making some really strange leaps - "Heavy Metal Machine" as a "Rusty Cage" ripoff???) and it never really had the same chance as Adore, where I kept putting it on even though it didn't grab me at first listen, cause I didn't have THAT many CDs and it had cost me eighteen bucks and the booklet was nice. (Teenage confession: the shot with D'Arcy in the see-through mesh top both intrigued and intimidated/unsettled me.)

In that light, much as I don't like the album, I for one think it's GREAT that this poll reveals that tons of fans older and younger have found lots that they like and relate to in that record - means it's gotten out of the shadow of its original circumstances. I don't think I'll ever hear it and not pick up the particular smell of my dad's car on the hot summer day when I got it, but idk, it's cool to me that someone could become a Pumpkins fan in the 2010s and find all kinds of things to fall in love with on their one (pre-breakup) album that really was almost universally derided upon release.

https://i.imgur.com/IBbWYvy.jpg
6. Cherub Rock
830 points, 25 votes, 1 #1 vote
From: Siamese Dream, 1993

https://www.google.com/amp/s/pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11829-machinathe-machines-of-god/amp/ lollll wow at this review

Yeah, that's one of the early P4K reviews that stays with me.

there are so many weird layers of guitar feedback/ebow work running through all of "perfect"