Music

Billy Corgan says rock musicians are getting their "asses kicked by EDM"

by Dan MacRae

Billy Corgan (pictured above at Disneyland looking like an emotionally distraught Daddy Warbucks) says rock music hasn’t really bothered to change in the past two decades. In fact, he says the bassy beast that is EDM is currently kicking the genre’s ass.

“If you look at most alternative rock music in 2015, it hasn’t really evolved for 20 years,” offered Corgan in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “We get our asses kicked by EDM or some of these artists that are more keyboard and drum machine and reverb. They’re engaging in new technology. Guitar isn’t new technology — there are only so many ways you can warp it around. Radiohead was probably the last band that really did anything new with the guitar.”

The Smashing Pumpkins frontman/TNA wrestling producer says his focus right now is just on making the best songs possible.

“My point is once I started to make peace and committed to playing guitars and realized that all the time I spent trying to reinvent the wheel was a waste of time, now I could get back to writing really good songs and figuring out how to produce it in a contemporary frame,” he explains. “That combination of things has really brought fans back to the fore, and now they want to see deep cuts and acoustic tours.”

“Every day on Twitter fans are asking me for a return to the 30-minute songs and the longer shows,” Corgan continues. “There’s a call to bring back the band we put away because we realized nobody wanted to see that version of the band. Now there’s this rallying cry to bring back not the classic line-up, but it’s about bringing back the epic style from a few years ago. That’s an interesting thing to contemplate, because I had pretty much given up on that.”

Elsewhere in the land of Corgan… Let’s see that Disneyland train pic again with some excellent commentary.