Songfacts®:

• The song's opening riff had been sitting around for a while, but though the band felt strongly about it, they weren't sure what to do with the idea. "It had a, dare I say, 'modern-feeling' to it, said Billy Corgan to Music Radar, "but still in the style of guitar that I like to play."
  
  "Ultimately, I just sat down and wrote the song on the piano," he continued. "Sometimes, when you've got a riffy song, it helps to just play the chords with no rhythm, and then you hear the 'song' in it. It's those very Paul McCartney/Wings-type chords - Broadway-type chords."
• Corgan is especially proud from a songwriting standpoint how the song goes from D major to A minor. "It goes from a very 'majorly' feel into something sorrowful, almost a Spanish feel," he explained to Music Radar. "I don't know how the heck I did that, but it's one of my favorite things in the song, how you can keep the key but change the emotion."
• The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). The idea behind the design was to allow an observer to watch all inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being observed. Bentham devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison, but though the British government rejected his scheme at the time, it has since been seen as an important development. Social critics have subsequently used the principle behind Bentham's Panopticon project as a metaphor for the intrusion of modern societies and their pervasive inclination to observe and normalize. The increasing use of CCTV cameras in public spaces is cited as a current example of the deployment of panoptic structures.