Drum machine like a car idling
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 with the vocal sat back in the mix. 1979 is not a diary of that calendar year. It is a mid-nineties song about being seventeen or eighteen: job, car, home and school still attached. Youth here is not shouted. It is watched leaving, in ordinary weather, at a light that takes too long.
Corgan has told the scene. He was in a car, wipers going, and the sensation arrived whole: childhood in the mirror, the life he hoped for still ahead, neither of them in his hands. He wrote a poem and, unusually for him, sang it without rewriting. The title named the feeling; he was not writing from inside 1979. When the band was deep into Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Flood heard an early pass and was ready to drop it. Corgan took the hesitation as a dare, finished the song in a night, and Flood put it on the album after one listen the next day. 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 for a night of convenience stores, a party, and small illegalities. 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 method is the unedited poem. Corgan’s other writing often kept lines because they made him flinch. Here the flinch was the feeling itself, and he left the words in the order they arrived at the light. That is why the images do not argue with each other: 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 that inch.
What remains is the idle. Other Pumpkins songs storm the gate. 1979 sits in the car and does not offer to drive. The year in the title is a decoy. The subject is noticing the decoy, and the light finally going green.
