A poem at a red light, left exactly as it fell
A drum machine keeps a small, stubborn pulse, closer to a car idling than to a band arriving. Guitars wash in late, soft at the edges, and Billy Corgan sings as if the rearview were doing half the work. 1979 does not describe a year so much as the feeling of having one behind you and another, larger and blank, through the windshield. The vocal sits back in the mix. Youth, in this song, is not shouted. It is watched leaving, in ordinary weather, at a light that takes too long.
Corgan has told the weather. He was in a car, wipers going, and the sensation arrived whole: childhood in the mirror, the life he hoped to have still ahead, neither of them in his hands. He wrote a poem and, unusually for him, sang it without alteration. The title was a name he had to give the feeling. He was not, in any literal way, writing from inside 1979. He has said he wrote it in the middle of the nineties about the edge of being seventeen or eighteen, a job, a car, the tethers of home and school still on. When the band was deep in Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Flood heard an early pass and was ready to let it go. Corgan took the hesitation as a dare, finished the song in a night, and Flood, the next day, put it on the album after one listen. The double record, produced by Flood, Alan Moulder and Corgan, came out in October 1995, much of it tracked at Chicago Recording Company.
The video, directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, put teenagers in a car and let the night do the rest: convenience stores, a party, the small illegalities of being almost gone. It matched the lyric’s refusal to climax. On stage the Pumpkins could turn anything into weather, but 1979 stayed a glide. Jimmy Chamberlin’s live drums thickened the machine without breaking its walk. Radio, which had taken the band for grand and wounded, suddenly had a single that felt like a window down. It became the song strangers knew.
I had written it as a poem, and all the lyrics are actually as I wrote the poem. So when I wrote the song I was looking for something, and I stumbled across the poem and I just sang it.
(Billy Corgan, Variety, 2023)
The trick is the unedited poem. Corgan’s other writing often passed through embarrassment on purpose, lines kept because they made him flinch. Here the flinch was the feeling itself, and he left the words in the order they had arrived at the light. That is why the images do not argue. Shakedown, the year, the town you leave by not quite leaving. The double album was a farewell to youth spoken from the last inch of it. This track is the inch.
What remains is the idle. Other Pumpkins songs storm the gate. 1979 sits in the car with you and does not offer to drive. The year in the title is a decoy. The subject is the moment you notice the decoy, and the light, at last, goes green.
