Credit: Scarlet PageEarlier this month, The Smashing Pumpkins completed a co-headlining tour with Marilyn Manson. While the trek paired two icons of '90s rock, Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has long been pessimistic regarding the current state of rock. In Corgan's mind, today's rock scene is missing one key ingredient.
"I think the real issue is more the lack of fight coming from rock music," Corgan tells ABC Radio. "It's broken into its own subculture, and it sort of seems to be content to just kinda stay there and wallow in it, or point fingers and say, 'We're cooler than them,' or whatever. I think the fight's been kinda given up, it's like, 'Well, this is the way of the world now, and as long as we get to go play festivals it's all good, even though we're playing music that's 20 years old, it's all good.' It just seems to be this kind of uncomfortable silence about the whole thing."
Corgan adds that rock music has lost the "moral high-ground," meaning that it no longer represents the voice of the common people.
"I used to say back in the '90s we're a populist band," he says of the Pumpkins. "We want to represent something popular, but from a perspective of our own middle-class upbringing. It was sort of middle-class rebellion."
Corgan also laments what he feels is a lack of guitars in today's rock music, but he doesn't think you necessarily need a guitar to be a rock band with fight, as evidenced by the rap group Public Enemy.
"To me, Public Enemy was rock," Corgan says. "They were coming from a place up off the street that represented something. And when that fight is pushed to the side, in essence the people don't seem to have a voice in what's going on. People rising up off the streets saying, 'This is our message,' whether it's The Clash or Run DMC or Public Enemy or Nirvana, when you lose that kinda edge in popular music, and it's not in the charts, it's a lot of beige, and that always frightens me."
Corgan thinks that without that edge rock music can't combat today's pop music, of which he is not a big fan, to say the least.
"When you lose that voice of rebellion, the Bob Marleys and that stuff, and you've got a lot of like, fake rebellion which, pop music is, generally speaking -- not always, but generally speaking -- is fake rebellion," Corgan tells ABC Radio. "And it's never been worse in the time of popular music staring since the 1920's, it's never been worse than it is now."
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