10 Rare Smashing Pumpkins Songs You've Probably Never Heard

2. Cash Car Star – Matt Walker Reimagined/2014

Featured On: Adore 2014 CD/DVD Reissue

Cash Car Star is best known as the track performed on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (17 November 2000), which marked the band's final television appearance until their 2007 revival. The version featured on the Adore issue is a remix of the original from Machina II, which is a more traditional guitar driven rock song.

Matt Walker, the Pumpkins former drummer from 1996 to 1997, was interviewed about his Adore remixes by Pumpkins fan site The SPfreaks Team. Walker talked about his intention as ‘not remixing like turning them into extended electronic versions – more a reimagined arrangement of the song. For instance, I would look for elements that were either not used or buried in the album version and build a new picture from them.’

The remix has an electro-industrial instrumental based around tight percussion sounds, like a less unsettling Terrible Lies (from industrial rock icons Nine Inch Nails). The background track invokes green binary code drizzling down the screen on a 90s computer hacker. Corgan’s lyrics slice through it with cutting cynicism deriding the idea of fame and power.

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An English Lit. MA Grad trying to validate my student debt by writing literary fiction and alternative non-fiction.