Billy Corgan Reacts To ‘Stealing’ From James Iha Rumor

Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan recently admitted that he finds it “irksome” when he reads people claiming that the Smashing Pumpkins have lost what they perceive as the band’s essence, and noted how there is a lot of “fake authenticity” that he says has become a trend in the “social media times.”

Billy Corgan opens up on the matter

There are a fair few examples of successful bands who kept on being successful by staying firmly within the borders of their established sound, artistic evolution is something that tends to happen naturally to artists as their careers progress.

The Smashing Pumpkins has covered a lot of sonic ground since the days of “Gish” and “Siamese Dream”, although Billy Corgan tells Allison Hagendorf in a recent interview that not all of it was universally accepted:

“The one thing that was always irksome to me, you’d see these people railing at me on message boards [with] this idea that we had lost the capability to be *that* band, as opposed to [the reality where] we made a choice not to be that band. It’s a weird thing, because you would do music that you thought at least was saying something new, and it would be judged within the prism of, ‘See, he can’t go back to that. He’s not ‘Siamese Dream’ guy anymore. In fact, he probably didn’t write that stuff. He stole that stuff from James [Iha, guitarist].'”

“People can create all these conspiracy theories, and I’m sitting there like, ‘You have no idea. You don’t know what it was like to be in a studio with Butch Vig seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day.’ I built those machines. It took some time to blow the dust off the old machines, but it’s all intact, like Frankenstein. And, of course, Jimmy [Chamberlin, drummer] and James, they know that that’s all a bunch of bullshit.”

The situation is all the more complicated in today’s age, where Corgan stated that there is a lot of “fake authenticity”:

“There is the real version of authenticity and there’s the fake version of authenticity. And we see now, in 2024, a lot of fake authenticity, because it’s a social media skill set… We’re warts and all. You can’t fake being this fu**ed up, you know? [laughs] I mean, we just are.”

“And some people find it endearing, and some people find it completely grating. Because, the application of the idea, especially in social media times, is, if you know that this thing that you represent irritates people, why wouldn’t you tone that down? …They can’t understand why you wouldn’t change who you are to serve an audience so, instead of selling 23,000 records, you’re selling 26,000 records. We’re like, ‘Who gives a f***?'”

“Because that application, [had] we applied it back in the day, we never would have made videos like ‘Disarm’, ‘Tonight, Tonight’, or ‘The Everlasting Gaze.’ We never would have taken those chances. We would never done those crazy albums.”

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