About “Love”

Buzzing with multiple and unique guitar tones and anamorphic vocal effects, “Love” plays as if the song has declared war on its subject. Corgan plows through a soundscape that feels deceptive, singing piercingly sincere vocals in what seems like a conscious attack on romantic love.

Indeed, these nihilistic tones seem to often undermine the hopeful idealism throughout Melon Collie as a whole. “Tonight, Tonight,”, arguably the most hopeful song found on the album, still contains at least one line hinting at the loss of innocence: “The more you change the less you feel.”

“Love” is described in the liner notes below first as the type of love “wherever sex is applied as cause and effect” and later as “an unrelenting god that won’t let go until you are spent.” Indeed, love can be dubious and clever in the worst kind of way.

In a revealing 1998 interview with Switch Magazine, songwriter Billy Corgan was asked first what sex meant to him: “It doesn’t interest me, I can reject it.” He was then asked what love meant to him: “I don’t reject love. Love is what you are, love is suicide.”