Freak Out & Give In

An Ode to Butch Vig & Billy Corgan's OCD: 15 years later, Siamese Dream continues to stand alone as an authentic vision of the idealized dream of rock & roll.

It seems a rare offering these days for the Billboard music charts to dump a top-ten album in your lap that not only transcends the demands of stylized trends, but, also immortalizes itself through its own ethereal conception and tooth- and-nail execution.

The 1993 release of Smashing Pumpkin’s, Siamese Dream, spawned a mass phenomena of tongue biting in the mad world of media critics by defying its own expectations and leaving music journalist frantically scrambling to commit the Chicago bands’ sound to a specific genre and desperately trying to quantify its relevance to the thunderous Grunge movement that was currently defining alternative music. The remarkable thing about Siamese Dream was that the album, created with pure grit, blood and emotional combustion, could not be classified or shoved onto the shelves with its similar sounding 90’s comrades. This album stood alone as an homage to originality and innocent rebellion; a romantic vision of the possibilities of rock & roll.

With its quixotic lyrics, vertiginous melodies and elegant layers of fervent and swooning atmospheric guitar and drum chants, Siamese Dream, is to be revered, 15 years later, for its authenticity beyond anything else. In the current state of Billboard charts being dominated by homogenous, manufactured rock bands, it is imperative that in our darkest moments of music industry cynicism, we reconnect with the utopian ideals of such bands as the Smashing Pumpkins to know that there is always a splendid evocation of originality churning and tickling the underbelly of the music world. These days, however, within the massive pits of media outlets, its up to us to discover it....