9 Similarities Between The Smashing Pumpkins' 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness' and Mahler's 2nd Symphony

Are you a real (18)90s kid?

I know some of you have never heard of Mahler and some of you have never heard of Billy Corgan, so let's do quick introductions:

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) was an Austrian Jewish classical composer who bridged Romanticism (the epic, dramatic "emo" style spearheaded by Beethoven and perfected by people like Brahms and Liszt way before his time) and Modernism (the contemporary, radical avant-garde movement that created disturbing, dissonant tones like those of Schoenberg and my GOAT Bela Bartok). Despite a poor, provincial upbringing and serious physical health issues, he became a prominent conductor towards the end of the 19th century and created controversial, excessively self-indulgent music that was only properly appreciated decades later after Leonard Bernstein did a series of live productions of his works.

The Smashing Pumpkins (1988-2000) were a Chicago, IL-based rock band that bridged classic rock (the epic, high-concept style spearheaded by the Beatles and perfected by people like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin way before their time) and alternative (the contemporary, radical DIY movement that created disturbing, noisy tones like those of Nirvana and my GOATs Unwound). The band was led by Billy Corgan, who, despite a dull suburban upbringing and serious mental health issues, became a prominent rock star towards the end of the 20th century and created controversial, excessively self-indulgent music that (some would say) was only properly appreciated decades later after Gen Z tiktok emos got on it.

OK, you're starting to see the point I'm making here? Even the album covers have such similar imagery, celestial maidens with mysterious expressions who seem fixed in place despite their positions implying movement.

1. Goes for huge sense of scope and scale, with crazy emotional highs and lows

This is the main thing most people know about both works of art.

Mahler 2 is an hour and a half long where a normal symphony only runs for about 20-50 minutes. An hour would be really pushing it; 90 minutes was unthinkable even in the Modernist era (experiments with extreme length didn't really start happening until Americans like John Cage got their hands on avant-gardism). It has everything from pounding allegros to ultra-slow lieder to epic choir/string triumphs.

Meanwhile, Mellon Collie is a 2CD album containing 28 songs, summing to almost two and a half hours of music; it also contains a variety of styles, from metal that has screams right up there with the best of them ("Tales of a Scorched Earth") to tender love ballads ("Take Me Down"). There’s a ton of emotional range; Corgan really pours his heart out in the music. In the CD era, it was common for an album to be a little too long as the band struggled to fill up the whole disc; having two was ridiculous. Ridiculous yet completely possible, as it turned out.

Both works aren't just collections of different stuff, too - they really merit being that long, and represent enormous, multi-year conceptual journeys on the artist's part.

2. Came after a work that, while not perfect, was meritable and really put them on the map

Mahler's First Symphony, aka "Titan," had a weird reception - no one was quite sure what all his programmatic music (the then-new idea of music that represented a grand story or concept, the predecessor to the idea of a narrative concept album) meant. He had enormous ambitions, but not really the creative sense of vision to really fulfill them. The audience at the 1889 Budapest premiere liked the first half, but got kind of weirded out by the conceptual bit in the third movement where the melody to "Frere Jacques" clashes in deliberately strange counterpoint with a klezmer-informed folk tune, apparently supposed to express Mahler's difficulty integrating into the rather bigoted European upper class as a Jew. Mahler's name was now very much known to people who liked that kind of stuff, though, and the stage was set for his next major output to have a larger audience.

104 years later, Billy Corgan was in the depths of a severe depressive episode in a recording studio in Marietta, Georgia, $250,000 in debt, having kicked all his bandmates except drummer Jimmy Chamberlin out of the room and insisting on playing every instrument on the recordings to Siamese Dream by himself. Working 16-hour days seven days a week for over a month, he later admitted that he had been "fantasizing about his own death" throughout the recording process. Meanwhile, Chamberlin was disappearing for days at a time due to a drug habit that would come back as a recurring issue through the rest of the band's career. Somehow this tortured process produced something not only listenable but excellent, an album that skyrocketed the underground band into unexpected fame and even chart success. It would be another three years before Mellon Collie hit shelves, but the whole world was watching to see what the hot new band would do next.

3. Influenced by both contemporary and older music

I talked about this in the introduction, but both pieces of music are sharp and contemporary while indebted to a somewhat earlier style. While the Pumpkins are best understood as a '90s rock band, informed by Nirvana's wild success, Mellon Collie displays a self-serious conceptual importance one would usually find in '70s prog and classic rock. There are even a few direct musical nods - "Porcelina" seems to be directly inspired by Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer."

Meanwhile, Mahler, who was classically trained, had a background in everything from Bach to Brahms, and even created his own (rather controversial) re-orchestration of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. At the same time, one of his major influences in terms of grand conceptual musical art pieces was Richard Wagner, composer of the operatic Ring cycle. Ironically, Wagner was a giant antisemite even for the time, but Mahler was already known as an interpreter of his works before he even seriously tried writing compositions of his own.

4. Partially about the composer's childhood

Mahler had a whole music-philosophy thing about the nature of death and life (I'll get to this in a later point), but the important thing is how he developed it. Death suffused his early life - he was from a poor family with 14 children, six of whom died in infancy. Clearly this weighed heavy on his mind. His first composition, at age 10, was titled Funeral March and Polka (which seems like some Weird Al shit nowadays, but could be quite grim in an era when polka was understood as a relatively serious genre.) Funeral marches remained in his wheelhouse for his whole life, and the Symphony is no exception, preoccupied with themes of death. Years later, he even created a full-on tribute to his deceased siblings with the dark, emotional Kindertotenlieder.

On a lighter note, the Smashing Pumpkins were also definitely influenced by the struggles of Billy Corgan's youth. Ennui, boredom, and frustration at the world are recurring themes in Mellon Collie; commenting on the lyrics of metal-influenced lead single "Jellybelly," he said "I just went rode shotgun with the images until it sketched out nicely the gray of my suburban years." Having to overcome the authority of his often cruel stepmother put a rebellious streak in his nature, shown in numerous songs.

5. Outsider artist from the periphery of a city

Tying in to the last point, they both even grew up in similar locations, sort of. Mahler hailed from Austria-Hungary, in a village named Jihlava that would later become part of the Czech Republic; the nearest major city was Vienna, where he spent most of his professional life, going to music school there and later becoming conductor of the Viennese State Opera for many years. Meanwhile, Corgan was from outer suburban Chicago, a boring little town called Glendale Heights - on the periphery, but not close enough to the tantalizing urban scene. Despite a moment of resistance when he moved to St. Petersburg, Florida for a year to join a terrible goth band called the Marked, Chicago continued to define his professional life, and (as I understand it) he now runs a restaurant in the nice suburb of Highland Park, much closer to the urban core.

Vienna is basically Europe's Chicago - always great, yet never the best.

6. Connected to the key of E-flat major

From the beginning of its conceptualization, Corgan knew he wanted Mellon Collie to be "darker" than its predecessor, and he eventually hit upon the idea of having all the guitars tuned down a half step, playing in E-flat rather than E. This creates a deeper sound with more dynamic range - the highs feel higher; the lows are literally physically lower. (Years later, Deftones took this idea a step further by combining it with drop-D tuning, taking the low E string down to a chest-vibrating D-flat.)

Mahler's opus is in C minor, which music theory people may remember uses the same scale as E-flat major. One of the repeating themes you keep hearing (I can't remember which) starts and ends on an E-flat.

7. From the '90s

Are you a '90s kid? Sure, but are you a reeeal '90s kid? Oddly enough, the 1990s and 1890s were pretty similar artistically. You've probably heard about Kurt Cobain and those people enough that it would bore you to hear even more, so let me tell you about an idea called the fin-de-siècle.

The ridiculous over-indulgences of late 19th-century Europe - enormous (and cartoonishly evil) colonial projects, ultra-stuffy Victorianism, the big emotions of Romanticism, huge scientific advances - led to a thought process called millenarianism, where many people thought the state of the world was unsustainable and some sort of enormous societal change/turnover was on the horizon. When it didn't come, this led to ennui (existential boredom), bigotry (it's gotta be someone's fault!), and even - terrifying! - abstract art. A lot of dejection, like our '90s, just not as punk. There was also proto-Surrealism in the form of symbolism, a minor movement that was supposed to counteract the growing rationality that came from new science by appealing to anti-intellectualism and more "authentic," primal human nature. Remind you of a certain heart-on-his-sleeve somebody? Let's play "guess who said it":

"Words can't decide what I feel inside, who needs them?"

(Smashing Pumpkins, "Geek U.S.A")

"Believe, my heart, believe - nothing is lost to you!"

(Mahler, Symphony No. 2, fifth movement)

"With the wings I won for myself, in love's fierce striving…"

(Mahler, Symphony No. 2, fifth movement)

"Destroy the mind, destroy the body, but you cannot destroy the heart"

(Smashing Pumpkins, "An Ode To No One")

That's the essence of the fin-de-siècle. Which brings me to my next point.

8. Life, death, resurrection

It's called the "Resurrection Symphony" for a reason - all the lyrical content in the choir parts is about rebirth, renewal, regeneration. Programmatically, this idea shows up a lot in its narrative, with the gloomy first movement representing a warrior's funeral and the fourth and fifth showing a triumphant rebirth.

Comparably, Mellon Collie is predisposed with various stations of human life, from childhood innocence to the drama of love to existential pain. There's also a similar hero's-journey narrative; the 2 CDs are titled "Dawn to Dusk" and "Twilight to Starlight," suggesting a journey into darkness and night and back to the light, with midnight centered approximately around the gorgeous coming-of-age story put forth in "1979".

9. Originally a way different length

Normally, with an album of Mellon Collie's length, you'd say they could cut a ton of songs, and expect that they had ruined the whole thing by putting every demo and scrap they had on it without regard to quality, right? But it turns out those 28 songs were meticulously QC'd, picked out from a total of around 60. A 1996 release called The Aeroplane Flies High compiles the rest, from simpler ballads to fun covers to a 23-minute "medley" of a number of shorter scraps/pieces. For the insane completionist, there is also the 2012 deluxe box set, which compiles 92 pieces of music over 5 CDs, totaling almost six hours of music - some of it is even good.

From the opposite direction, Mahler's symphony began life as a short tone poem called Tötenfeier, which comprised the material that was later refactored into the first movement. He actually called for a 5-minute pause between the first movement and the rest of the symphony when it was finally finished, a break which most contemporary conductors of the piece prefer to put between the fourth and fifth movements.

It comes to four hours of sometimes obtuse, confusing, questionable music, but I really do recommend you check out both of these great works.

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