“Unlike anything I’ve heard”: Billy Corgan on the most important band in the world
Most bands are playing with fire the minute they start to take themselves too seriously. Rock and roll is supposed to be about having one big party every time a group hits the stage, and the minute that someone gets up on a soapbox or claims to have written the greatest music since Lennon and McCartney is usually a sign of when things are going to take a massive nosedive. Although Billy Corgan never quite fit into that traditional rock star bubble in the first place, he still had these rock icons in the highest regard during his prime.
But was Corgan ever supposed to be the stereotypical take on a rock star? After all, he had the chops to pull it off and could certainly write some catchy tunes, but looking at where he was in conjunction with the biggest names in grunge music, he was always slightly off to the side, never quite having the same kind of grip on the generation that someone like Kurt Cobain had in the early 1990s.
That’s not to say that he wasn’t an absolute legend in his own right. His knowledge of the fretboard is still unparalleled compared to every other 1990s rock guitarist, and the cajones that it took to release the alt-rock equivalent of a stadium-rock album on Siamese Dream was what turned them from being another underground band into one of the biggest acts of their generation once ‘Today’ started blowing up.
But Corgan always looked at the big picture of what it meant to be in a rock band, and that was something that U2 knew like the back of their hand. From day one, Bono wanted his music to mean something more than the average stadium rock that was clogging up the radio, and even when they scaled the kind of heights that made them look like pretentious assholes, Achtung Baby managed to put them back on track as one of the foundational pieces of rock and roll history.
And the beauty behind them is that they never truly stopped. Even though they have made some truly embarrassing pieces in their catalogue, the Irish icons have done everything in their power to keep their sound fresh, whether that’s diving into electronic music on Pop or making a fresher take on their old sound on All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
While Corgan had been studying the band ever since War, he knew that ingenuity was the reason why U2 was still miles ahead of any alt-rock act, saying, “I was destined to meet U2 the moment I heard their song ‘New Year’s Day.’ It was 1983, I was 16, and it was unlike anything I’d ever heard: fierce, political, passionate, sexy. They quickly became the most important band in the world to me. Since then, I have followed their every move with fascination, sometimes with clucking disdain, but always ascribing revelations to their rock ‘n’ roll choices.”
Despite waving the flag for them, there are also a few moments where Corgan beat U2 at their own game. Since Pop went over terribly with fans, Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore felt like a more concentrated version of what Bono wanted to do, almost making the alternative equivalent to a Depeche Mode or New Order record.
Even if not everything Corgan has made since has been up to that quality, you have to thank U2 for daring musicians of his generation to dream bigger. Some of those dreams landed them in great big ditches, but it’s interesting to at least see where their muse took them rather than hearing whatever a sequel to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness would have sounded like.
