Mary Star Of The Sea Turns 20

I’ve never cared about Smashing Pumpkins. I remember hearing “Siva,” from their 1991 debut album Gish, on WSOU, the college hard rock/heavy metal station we listened to in the shipping and receiving department at Barnes & Noble, where I worked at the time. It sounded like imitation Soundgarden with a much less compelling vocalist than Chris Cornell; Billy Corgan sang like he was trying to power through a bad cold. I was aware of their subsequent singles — “Today,” “1979,” “Tonight, Tonight” — but those were even less to my taste. Eventually I stopped paying any attention to them at all. I don’t think I even noticed when they broke up after 2000’s Machina/The Machines Of God, an album I had to look up in order to remember its title.