It’s interesting how evocative certain songs are, instantly transporting you back in time, if not to the very first time you heard it, then at least to a crucial moment in your developmental timeline.

Track five from the first disc of The Smashing Pumpkins’ magnum opus is probably one of, if not the, most straightforward songs on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It follows a pretty pedestrian verse-chorus-verse structure, doesn’t really deviate from the standard guitar-guitar-drums-bass format (other than the obligatory Corgan wall of guitars overdubs), and lyrically doesn’t really go much of anywhere.

Here’s the thing, though; it’s not intended to. The pedestrian, almost boring musical arrangement serves as the perfect complement to the lyrical content. When Billy sings “The useless drag of another day, the endless drags of a death rock boy…burned by restless thoughts of being forgotten…you’ll forever stay desperate and displeased—with whoever you are,” he’s essentially describing the boredom one suffers when all of their time is spent conjuring up new identities with which to cry out for attention instead of living a fulfilling life. Because presenting the appearance of actions is so much easier than producing the results of actions. Keep in mind this was 1995, and every other white kid in the ‘burbs was dying their hair with a different packet of Kool-Aid each week. So Corgan’s basically writing about the sad existences of the very people that were buying his records by the truck-load. Was he doing it consciously? Maybe. Lyrics were never Billy’s strong suit, though, and I always got the feeling that maybe I was wasting my time trying to get anything particularly meaningful out of them; there was nothing more profound about them than anything I could have written in my diary around that time, were I the kind of navel-gazing misanthrope to keep one.

But then comes the sublime climax of the guitar solo. And all is forgiven.