Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Five

Rocket

The song "Rocket" by the Smashing Pumpkins was released in 1994. The video for "Rocket" is science-fictional. It's like a miniature 1980s movie, like Explorers, from 1985. I'm not sure of the physics of the video, but then "Rocket" is not about the physics of space travel. It's about fun and innocence tinged with irony. It has a twist ending. But if you want to make it about physics, it seems to involve a time dilation, so it's not just about space travel. It's also about time travel. The members of the Smashing Pumpkins are now in their fifties and sixties. We are almost arrived at their future forecast in the video for "Rocket."

"Rocket" is a rocket video. The video for "1979," released in 1996, is a car video. It's like a miniature movie, too, like American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused. But there is melancholy in the video and song, a longing for something lost from childhood and adolescence. The video for "1979" also involves time travel. The singer, who is an adult, shares the backseat of a 1972 Dodge Charger with young people--they must have been his friends in 1979--who don't know he's there. He is a ghost from the future haunting his own past. Only he has aged. They are still frozen in time, like Keats' lovers on a Grecian urn.

So in the video for "Rocket," the children travel into the future in a rocketship to see the singer, while in the video for "1979," the singer travels into the past in an automobile to see and be among children. Seventeen years separated the release of the song "1979" from the year about which the singer sings. He travels backward from the year of "Breathe" to the year of "Cars." He reverses the decay of years and undoes time, but only for four and half minutes.

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In "Rocket," Billy Corgan sings:

I shall be free
I shall be free

But the freedom for which he yearns is from "those voices inside me." His song and his feelings are inward, as in "Cars" by Gary Numan. Neither song is about anything larger than the singer.

The Monkees had a song in which they, too, expressed a desire for freedom. It's called "For Pete's Sake," and it was released in 1967, the year in which Billy Corgan was born. They sang:

(In this generation)
We gotta be free
We gotta be free

Their lyric is "we" rather than "I," and they sing for a whole generation. The generation of which they sing is the Baby Boom generation. Billy Corgan's is Generation X. The Monkees' song is outward, as in "Going Mobile" by The Who. Both songs are about something larger than the singer.

By the way, the Monkees had their own custom car. It was called the Monkeemobile, and it was built up from a 1966 Pontiac GTO base. One of the co-creators of the Pontiac GTO was John DeLorean, whose DMC DeLorean is used for time travel in Back to the Future (1985). In that movie, time travel is accomplished when the car reaches 88 miles per hour. Is that an allusion to the original Oldsmobile Rocket 88? The blurb in the advertisement I posted the other day reads: "Rocket Ahead with Oldsmobile." A parallel might be: "Rocket Back with DeLorean." So there is this question: is an automobile a rocket into the past or future?

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley