Mayonaise - The Smashing Pumpkins

There is something impossibly beautiful about The Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Mayonaise’—spelt without the customary double n’s--a song that seems to discover its own power, rather than summon it. From the band’s magnificent 1993 album Siamese Dream, Billy Corgan’s creation is a glory of musical architecture: delicate, bruised, incandescent, yet possessing the unforced grandeur of something occurring naturally, like a gathering storm.

Its opening guitar figures gives off strong whiffs of tenderness. Then the distortion arrives. James Iha’s and Corgan’s guitars swell, retreat, shimmer and roar, their extraordinary textures giving the song a breathing, hyperventilating quality. Jimmy Chamberlin’s drumming provides muscular propulsion.

Corgan’s lyrics are fragmentary, elusive, occasionally almost childlike—‘Cool enough to almost be it/ Cool enough to not quite see it/ Doomed./Pick your pocket, full of sorrow/ And run away with me tomorrow/ June.’ They tell us about the exhausting business of becoming oneself, and the desperate wish to be heard.


What makes ‘Mayonaise’ sublime is its refusal to distinguish fragility from strength. Its tremendous sonic force never overwhelms its tenderness. Rather, each makes the other possible. Few rock songs have made vulnerability sound so effortlessly, devastatingly enormous.