“Rhinoceros” by The Smashing Pumpkins

"Rhinoceros" comes from Gish, the Smashing Pumpkins' 1991 debut album, and it's Billy Corgan's song through and through: he wrote the words and the music, sings lead, and produced it with Butch Vig. Corgan and James Iha share the guitars, D'Arcy Wretzky plays bass and Jimmy Chamberlin drums, and together they make it sound like a daydream with storm clouds massing at the edges.

It never got a CD single of its own. It led off Lull instead, and Corgan has said that inside the band that release goes by "the Rhinoceros single." It's also one of the few Gish songs the Pumpkins have kept playing onstage right through their career.

The video, one of the band's earliest, was directed by Angela Conway, who had also made the clip for "Siva." Part of it was shot on a sound stage, the band strumming guitars and looking bored, while D'Arcy toys with a white ping-pong ball that seems to hang in the air, a trick pulled off by shooting in slow motion and running the footage in reverse.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.