The Transformation Of Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan

04/17/00 12:30pm

by Christophe Bergeron (CHARTattack)

Here, Billy Corgan, frontman for the Smashing Pumpkins answers some random questions and gets all philosophical on us. What happened to songs about girls and cars?

CHARTattack: You talk a lot about transformation. Is it transformation as a natural process or is it transformation towards a goal?
Billy Corgan: It's about changing destiny. It's saying "I see what's before me, my mentality, my spirituality, 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.

Do you use music to change destiny?
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 because there's a penetration to it that's not apologetic.

The response to Adore was timid. Does it mean that your fans only respond to your music when you play hard?
That fails to recognize the three million people that did buy it and that did 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.

I imagine that you design your albums for mass appeal in any case.
No, I will not take credit for that. The band is inherently designed to have mass appeal...

...To change as many lives as possible?
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 different rare moments, to actually make good things happen. That's what the charity tour was about, that's what talking to you about these things is about. It's not for my own personal identification. It's for connecting the dots for other people.

So you're saying you're trying to educate your fans?
It's all education. I learned something from Ricky Martin!

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.
I talked about humility before, but people never wrote about it. My overall tone didn't seem to coincide with the thought.

People take you more seriously now that you're a little older, have a few records under you belt.
I think people tend to forget where we come from. It's like Elton John. You think about Disney soundtracks, you forget that the guy was one of the best songwriters of the '70s [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.

"I'm not dead yet," the first line of the album, what does it mean?
Well, first tell me what you think it means?

The obvious reading is that you're back as we know you.
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 the 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" bald 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.