The Alternative Number Ones: Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Even among the paralyzingly self-aware class of alternative rock stars who blundered into positions of profound cultural importance in the early '90s, nobody thought more about what it meant to be an alternative rock star than Billy Corgan. Corgan and his band Smashing Pumpkins didn't come from any particular scene, and they didn't sound that much like any of their contemporaries. But they had the good fortune to be swept up in the grunge hype-wave, and then they released one of the definitive albums of that wave. Despite all that, Corgan didn't think like a grunge guy. He didn't shy away from stardom. Instead, he wanted to achieve absolute greatness -- defined, at least somewhere in his head, as making everyone like him.

Of course, the irony there is that probably nobody who came out of that alt-rock moment, with the possible exception of Corgan's friend and collaborator Courtney Love, is as widely or openly disliked as Billy Corgan. Earlier this year, Stereogum published an excerpt from Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour's extremely fun oral history of the Lollapalooza tour. The Smashing Pumpkins headlined Lolla in 1994, the year when that festival was at its cultural peak, and seemingly everyone else on the tour hated that band in general and Corgan in particular. The excerpt we published is basically just one long procession of people talking shit about Corgan, and it probably could've been five times longer.