Posted by What is adolescence? What is the meaning behind that period that many celebrate and many others disown?
Each of us has been a teenager and almost everyone has the same idea about it: we would all like to forget something that we do and then regret for the rest of our life.
Youth.
Its undisputed symbol is the night.
Nights spent crying on the pillow, nights of rage, nights hidden away, smoking a cigarette. Nights where you could make love and nights when you could scream, shout, dance. Nights where one could find himself singing verses like these:
Time is never time at all
You can never ever leave
Without leaving a piece of youth
And our lives are forever changed
We will never be the same
The more you change the less you feel
It’s precisely if you listen to it in the night, that The Smashing Pumpkins’ song gains a whole different strength. In the solitude of a sofa, in the silence of a room, when all thoughts are ready to sleep, Tonight, Tonight hits your soul.
And that’s what makes it an immortal song.
In an album like Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, so colorful, disturbing, difficult, that song gives first the sense of weight and then the desire of freedom. Almost like the feather of Forrest Gump’s ending scene, which tries first to take off, it’s attracted by the gravity, and then, finally flies in the air.
In the same way, that electric guitar and that violins give a special sense of life and freedom. Because every night can be a special moment.
And willing to emphasize the importance of dream in youth, The Smashing Pumpkins made an official video inspired by the cinema of the attractions by Georges Mèliés: the visionary artist who, at the end of the nineteenth century, was one of the founding fathers of cinema and with his passion for magic created the first “special effects” in his short films. Like in his Trip to the Moon, quoted explicitly in The Smashing Pumpkins video, with its way to be dreamy and illusory like human emotions.
The impossible is possible tonight
