The Smashing Pumpkins song Billy Corgan dismissed as “dumb”
Successful artists are often caught between the pressure to maintain their popularity and the desire to remain authentic, ultimately leading bands down one of various paths: selling out, fading into obscurity, or breaking up. We’ve seen it so many times – bands release music that feels so special and creative, only to move towards more radio-friendly sounds, shifting their sonic and visual aesthetics to fit with the demands of a record label. The music industry is tough to survive, and Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins has experienced this firsthand.
The musician has previously spoken out about how he has grappled with feelings of worthlessness and the pressures to deliver something that will keep the band in the charts and sell out large venues. If an album flops, bands are at real risk of being chucked to the wayside by their labels, potentially threatening the success they’ve already built up.
During the 1990s, alternative rock became incredibly popular, dominating the charts in many countries. Bands like Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Radiohead, Oasis, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, and the Smashing Pumpkins all experienced massive chart success and were widely known. For Corgan, the desire to become successful and make music that could earn significant acclaim gained him a reputation as someone who took their career a little too seriously.
While he achieved his aims of success by the mid-1990s, Corgan felt the pressures of delivering music that would continue the band’s legacy while also staying true to his creative urges. He didn’t want to make anything contrived or devoid of emotion, but what he soon realised felt like a shock to the system.
After releasing ‘Disarm’, a controversial song about child abuse featuring Corgan’s repeated delivery of “The killer in me is the killer in you, my love,” the musician didn’t get as much praise from his peers as he had hoped. Even though it charted, hitting number five in the US Mainstream Rock charts, “Not once after that song did anybody in my life – anybody – pull me in a room and say ‘Give me more of that,’” he told Howard Stern. “Not one time did anybody sit me down and say, ‘Can you write me more of those songs’. They were like, ‘Give me more of the ones that sell sausages.’”
Faced with the fact that songs from rock bands featuring delicate strings and emotionally troubling lyrics might not be as in demand as big stadium-ready anthems, Corgan wrote ‘Bullet With Butterfly Wings’ in retaliation. He explained that the song was him saying, “You want me to be this rat in the cage. Here I am. Here’s the dumb beat, here’s the big rock chorus, and it was a big hit, and they were like, ‘Great, give me more of that.’”
Corgan elucidated, “And to this day, by the way, and that’s what 28 years ago, to this day, the fans, God bless them, and the critics are still asking for more of the rat in the cage guy. They ain’t asking for this guy.” This was a disappointing lesson for him to learn, reconfirming “everything that your parents told you, which is, if you’re not this, you’re worthless, you have no value.”
Continuing with a rather negative mindset, he said, “If you’re not willing to sacrifice in these ways, you are worthless. If you’re not willing to do what we say, you are worthless. Worthless. Not ‘you have some value’, you are worthless.”
