Last week, our longtime alternative station, Q101, was sold to new ownership which is now in the process of flipping the station to a news format, certainly a waste of a perfectly good FM signal. (In response, CBS flipped its mom-rock station to a simulcast of their AM news station, so we actually lost two music stations.) Anyway, the last song they played as an alternative station was "Tonight, Tonight," and damned if it didn't get me a little choked up. I was never a huge Q101 fan in the mid-'90s, the zenith of both the station and the Pumpkins, but I'd listen now and then as a change of pace. And so here's this song about being young and stuff, and I guess I thought about all the people a few years older than I who really did grow up with the station and the Smashing Pumpkins and 1990s alternative music in general, and how they're all getting old, and how their sort of suburban existence has changed since then, and radio's changing, and the world spins madly on, and so on, so forth. Admittedly, the station was in decline before the sale, being programmed out of the parent offices in St. Louis, the mere principle of which is just in so many ways fucked, but in staying true to Soundgarden and the Pumpkins and Bush and Oasis and all those bands, it was still one of the last vestiges of what just seems like a better time to be alive than today is. At least it was a powerful way to go out.
"Disarm" still has a hysterically awful chorus, though.
