Billy Corgan explains how Smashing Pumpkins’ music surpasses any hipster's mentality

Order the latest issue of Goldmine (click above) to get an in-depth interview with Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan. The discussion reveals a lot about the character of Corgan — cerebral, insightful and ready to put aside any concerns about how the band’s catalog will be perceived.

Smashing Pumpkins’ latest studio release, Aghori Mhori Mei (shown above), sees the band dialing back to their roots as a lyrically rich, heavy-riffing, pile-driving rock band. To most, that would mean less Adore (1998) and Atum (2022-23) and more Oceania (2012), Gish (1991) and Siamese Dream (1993), or dare we say — Zeitgeist (2007).

"It’s hard to explain unless you’ve lived it,” Corgan explains, "but we personally don’t feel we’ve ever made a bad album.

"But there are a lot of people who would strongly disagree,” he continues. "At the end of the day, whose opinion matters? Your opinion, the critics’ and the fans’ opinion. The music will sort itself out. And like I’ve said in the past, if you follow rock history, there were a lot of people in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s that were super huge and celebrated in their time that are completely forgotten about.

"I was doing interviews in the ’80s when the band was first starting, and I was name-checking [Led] Zeppelin, [Black] Sabbath, Queen and Electric Light Orchestra. The hipster journalists would laugh at me. They would straight out laugh in my face and say, 'Why would you care about those bands?' And then, try and name-check whatever was the trendy band in the moment in their minds. You know, the next greatest thing … until the next greatest thing that ever happened comes along."

Corgan concludes: "The good news is that over time, the band’s musical contribution, vision and forward-thinking proved to me more valuable than all the other stuff people thought was valuable."

"If you’re a musician, and you believe in music, well, that’s your religion. So, you should trust that what you believe in is ultimately more valuable than anything else anybody throws at you.” — Billy Corgan

It’s true, the band have outlasted most of the critics that sought to bring them down.

“The band got a lot of clickbait,” says Corgan. "If you look at a lot of those clickbait sites, a lot of them have gone out of business. Or, in the case of some of the hipster sites, they’re so laughably unimportant that now, no one cares about their snarky opinion. I’m trying to say this like a dance on the grave type of thing.

"What I’m saying is this: If you’re a musician, and you believe in music, well, that’s your religion. So, you should trust that what you believe in is ultimately more valuable than anything else anybody throws at you. That’s why the band is in good stead. I think you can see that over and over and over again, we’ve made musical decisions, not cultural ones."

Read the rest of the interview (conducted by Andrew Daly) by picking up Goldmine's Fall 2024 issue (GO HERE) 

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