By: Declan Hertel Entertainment Editor
Being a teenager is hard. You have a newfound independence and no idea what to do with it, your body changes in strange and unsettling ways, your emotions are beginning to acutely develop before you know how to handle them, and all the authority figures in your life tell you that none of your devastating, all-consuming problems really matter.
No one wants to hear you when you need most to be heard.
When The Smashing Pumpkins released “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” in 1995, a generation of teenagers finally found something that understood and acknowledged their plight in Billy Corgan’s sprawling double album.
It’s an album that, throughout the course of 28 tracks and just over two hours of run time, explores every difficulty of adolescence. It moves through expressions of blind rage, undying love, being hopelessly lost, and the occasional moments of clarity.
I was introduced to this album relatively recently by a good friend, during one of our many conversations about music.
He was surprised I hadn’t heard of it: an angsty, experimental, prog-influenced, concept double album? Right up my alley. I purchased it and set to listening to it immediately. It was exactly as ‘me’ as he had said, even more so as it had appeared at a particularly emotionally tumultuous time for me.
This is definitely a work for the emotionally vulnerable, but also those who once were. A song like the stellar lead single “1979” expresses to me unsureness about times just past and what they mean for my future, but for someone older it could just as easily be a reminder of that teenage “lostness” they once saw.
A nihilistic burn-it-down song like “Zero” plays to teenagers as relating directly to their experience, while an adult will hear it and shake their head at “those poor kids.” “Mellon Collie” as an album has a sort of timelessness for anyone who was ever lost and confused and angry.
I feel that “Infinite Sadness” will be a record that stays with me over time, as it has been for those who were there when it appeared.
It is a work of art that perfectly encapsulates the experience of adolescence. While I listen to it now with all the attitudes of my overlong angsty-teenager period, maybe when I finally grow up I’ll hear it with my old ears and understand something about the turmoil of youth that you can’t see while young.
