“What I choose is my choice. What’s a boy supposed to do?”
— The Smashing Pumpkins,
Disarm
The Smashing Pumpkins are no strangers to addressing very raw and intimate subject matters, particularly mental health, in their music. But if you were to ask me what their darkest song is, even by their standards, I could say in a heartbeat, that it is Disarm.
Appallingly, as the band’s singer and songwriter, Billy Corgan remarked, he wrote Disarm because, “I didn’t have the guts to kill my parents.”
It goes without saying that Billy had an extremely difficult upbringing. His mother was largely unavailable, as she struggled with serious mental health issues, and was in and out of mental institutions when he was little. His father, on the other hand, was physically and emotionally abusive, who Billy described as a “drug-dealing, gun-toting mad man.”
Billy’s parents divorced when he was 3. He spent most of his childhood with his father and stepmother, whom he regarded as his real mother, and was also abusive in the same ways as his father. This marriage also produced Billy’s disabled half-brother, Jesse, whom doctors diagnosed as having “no potential”.
Jesse was born with cerebral palsy, causing him to walk on his toes, and Tourette’s syndrome, which affected his speech. He also had heart problems and a chromosomal disorder that slowed his development as compared to other children.
As the eldest sibling in a broken home, Billy felt a strong sense of responsibility towards Jesse. He stood up for him when he was bullied by other children. And he shielded him from their parents’ abuse.
“I saw how cruel people really are,” said Billy. “If you can’t find it in your heart to love someone like this, well…The world is so petty. So damned petty.”
Jesse loved Billy. They were always by each others’ side. Billy taught him to play baseball, and at night, Billy read him books as he fell asleep. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Jesse would wake up, sleep on the floor next to Billy’s bed, and wait until Billy woke up to let him in.
As Billy’s stepmother described his fatherly bond with Jesse, “He became to Jesse what he would have wanted in a father.”
Despite Billy’s unconditional love and care for Jesse, he couldn’t help but feel like he missed out a lot on his own childhood. His responsibility towards Jesse further alienated him from his peers, when he was already struggling to fit in at school.
“It comes with a lot of mixed feelings,” said Billy. “I just did it because it was the right thing to do. I just accepted it as the way things were.”
Billy’s difficult upbringing imprinted a lasting scar in him, and many of the Smashing Pumpkins’ songs are a testament to how he has struggled, again, and again, with depression and suicidal tendencies.
The song Disarm, from the Smashing Pumpkins’ sophomore album Siamese Dream, is one that is especially worth pondering. Written when he was at the brink of ending his own life, Disarm is Billy’s attempt, as a young man, to make sense of all the grief and rage towards his father and stepmother that he had pent up from his childhood.
As Billy described, Disarm is about “being an adult and looking back and romanticizing a childhood that never happened or went by so quickly in a naive state that you miss it.”
In the lyrics to Disarm, Billy reflects on his role as a “father” to Jesse, of which he honestly felt was unfairly placed on his shoulders. “I used to be a little boy, so old in my shoes,” he rues.
He also laments the undeniable fact that no matter how horrible his parents were to him, they were still his parents. Whatever dark traits he had within himself, he inherited from his parents, particularly his father. As he addresses his parents in the song, “The killer in me is the killer in you.”
Disarm, as I mentioned, is a dark song. But I do mean it in a beautiful way, in that there is a duality to the song. Despite its darkness and brokenness, there are streaks of light that shine through its cracks.
What I personally find beautiful and hopeful about Disarm is in how it elevates our freedom of choice.
Billy wrote this song because he didn’t have the guts to kill his parents. So, instead of repaying violence with violence, he chose to make good art. He remarked, “Rather than have an angry, angry, angry violent song, I’d thought I’d write something beautiful.”
Disarm is a vivid immortalization of Billy’s moment of clarity. The lyrics are a poignant expression of how, in that moment as a young man, he decided that enough was enough. He refused to give his parents any more power over him than he already had. Instead of holding on to the grief and rage that had been consuming him all his life, he chose to “disarm (them) with a smile.”
He chose to accept his parents as who they were, because they were likely in their own repetition compulsion, helplessly struggling to make sense of the traumas that they had inherited from their parents.
He chose to let go of the childhood that he could have had, and he chose to accept that whatever had been done can never be undone, not in a million lifetimes, not ever.
He chose to smile and to look forward to his own future, and keep living.
I know, it can be depressing to think back on just how little control we have over our lives. We can’t choose who our parents are. We can’t ever reclaim the time that we’ve lost. We can’t take back whatever mistakes we’ve made. And we have no say either about the unpredictable circumstances that may suddenly change our lives forever.
Disarm is a much-needed reminder, especially when you’re down and out, that your life is ultimately what you make of it. Let other people do what they do, and let life happen, because no one, and nothing can take away your freedom of choice.
It’s up to you to choose the lens through which you view your life ahead of you.
When life beats you down — and it will, a million times over — Disarm reminds you that you can choose to push forward with a smile.
Izzat Zailan 