Tonight Tonight (Empire Records)

There's a grandeur to this song that feels almost anachronistic even for 1995 — orchestral strings cascading under distorted guitar, Billy Corgan's voice ascending into something that sounds less like a pop vocal than a declaration of war against impermanence. The Smashing Pumpkins pulled off something genuinely unlikely here: making a song about youth and transcendence that actually sounds transcendent, not in a gesture toward transcendence but in the experience of listening to it. The production is enormous and deliberate, every element placed to maximize the sense of emotional scale. The music video's silent-film aesthetic — all hand-tinted fantasy and Georges Méliès-inspired wonder — tells you exactly what register the song operates in: mythic, slightly unreal, suspended outside ordinary time. Lyrically it insists that tonight, specifically tonight, something can be different — that the night belongs to those willing to believe it does. Whether or not you take the lyric literally almost doesn't matter because the music has already convinced you. It belongs to the Mellon Collie era of maximal ambition and emotional overreach, and it worked because Corgan understood that adolescence itself is an act of maximal ambition and emotional overreach. You play it when you need to feel like your life is the lead role in something enormous.