The Transformation of Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan
Billy Corgan at a Toronto Instore March 2000
By Christophe Bergeron
Here, Billy Corgan, front man for The Smashing Pumpkins answers some random questions and gets all philosophical on us. What happened to songs about girls and cars?
Chartttack: You talk a lot about transformation. Is it transformation as a natural process or is it transformation towards a goal?
Do you use music to change destiny?
The response to Adore was timid, does that mean that your fans only respond to you music when you play hard?
I imagine that you only design your albums for mass appeal in any case.
...To change as many lives as posible?
So you're saying you're trying to educate your fans?
Which is?
Gotta live the good life. He's having a good time, he's having more fun than me.
You seem to talk a lot more about humility these days
People take you more seriously now that you're a little older, have a few records under your belt.
"I'm not dead yet," the first like of the album, what does it mean?
The obvious reading is that you're back as we know you.
Monday April 17, 2000 @ 01:30 PM
By: Chartattack.com Staff
Billy Corgan: It's about changing destiny. It's saying "I see what's before me, my mentality, my spiritually, my physicality and I'm going to transform all these things into a new being." The concept of transformation is something that resonates very deeply in our spirit. That's why people daydream. They daydream about being on a beach but they daydream because they wish they had a life that gave them freedom. They wish they could be themselves
It is a way to do that both for us and for the audience that lets our music affect them. We believe that our music can actually transform you and it has transformed us. That explains why the music has an archaic, strange language to it. It overpowers the people that connect to it. Some people find our music offensive beacause there's a penetration to it that's not apologetic
That fails to recognize the three million people that did buy it and that it resonate to it. Do you look down on people because they touched a small amount of people? You can't judge inherent value on mass appeal. The album wasn't designed to have mass appeal, it wasn't meant to have mass appeal. We got caught in a cultural turnover.
No, I will not take credit for that. The band is inherently designed to have mass appeal
We didn't start that way. We just wanted to blow up our head. But our goals have become more humanistic. We realized somewhere along the way, that we could use our size and the power that we can achieve in diffrent rare moments, to actually make good things happen. That's what the charity tour was all about, that's what talking to you about these things is all about. It's not for my own personal identification. It's for connecting the dots for other people
It's all education. I learned something from Ricky Martin!
I talked about humility before, but people never wrote about it. My overall tone didn't seem to coincide with the thought.
I think people tend to forget where we come from. It's like Elton John. You think about Disney soundtracks, you forget that this guy was one of the best songwriters of the 70's [John did the music, Bernie Taupin did the lyrics], the thought changes. You become some sort of caricatured version, but I don't think that people remember where you're from.
Well, first tell me what you think it means?
I wouldn't use the first sentence of the first song of an album to say that we're still alive and that we're still here to sell records. That would be sad. So I'm telling you that never in a thousand years would it come to that. Nothing is as it seems. When people buy our albums or come see the shows, they fall in a trap of what they think we are. But we've shown time and time again, and there's a history to prove that we're the ultimate fucking pranksters, we pulled the wool over our own eyes. We got some 6'4" guy with a whining voice and three suburban kids. We've convinced everyone that we're one of the best heavy metal bands in the world, we don't know how we did it. We've managed to have titanic failures in public and always survived.
