Goldfinger: “Here in Your Bedroom”

For an embarrassing year in middle school I got tagged as “The Smashing Pumpkins Kid,” because, oops, I had just discovered band t-shirts, and had overzealously put all my shirt eggs in one Corgan-shaped basket. I think this culminated in ninth grade, when a seventh grader who always wore a bootlegged pink “ZERO” t-shirt sent me a long, rambling note in which she confessed to stalking me and informed me of our wedding date. Holy shit, I just remembered how insane dating was back in the day. Can you even imagine getting passed a note now, on the train or at work or wherever, in your adulthood, that just says “DAN LONNY SAYS YOU HAVE A BIG HOG? YES OR NO.”

Anyway! The best part about that year was definitely the kid in math class who would always try to argue that (A) the Smashing Pumpkins were terrible, as specifically evidenced by the greatness of (B) Goldfinger and (C) Civ. We sort of nattered about it all year and I definitely gave much more thought to those discussions than I ever did to Algebra 3, but we were never able to reach a resolution. Clearly this argument isn’t as cut-and-dry as both of us assumed it was at the time, but ultimately I gotta give it to myself, if only because Goldfinger contains members with soul patches and pork pie hats, and the Smashing Pumpkins did not. Yes: I am arguing that the giant kimono Billy Corgan wore for the VMAs that one year was more appropriate than a soul patch. Have you ever seen a man with a soul patch? It’s the only hairstyle I’ve ever seen on someone that makes me feel like I should be signing in at a dorm security desk.