Billy Corgan Says Rock Was “Purposely Dialed Down” by the Music Industry

Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan says the decline of rock music in mainstream culture was no accident — it was engineered.

Speaking on a recent episode of his podcast The Magnificent Others alongside writer and cultural commentator Conrad Flynn, Corgan laid out his theory that rock was deliberately marginalized beginning in the late 1990s, even as the genre remained commercially dominant.

“I think, and I will say it overtly, I think that rock has been purposely dialed down in the culture,” Corgan said. “Again, this gets ‘wizard behind the curtain,’ right? Somebody’s gonna say, ‘Well, how do you know who was the wizard behind the curtain?’ All I know is I saw the gravity shift.”

 

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The MTV Shift

Corgan pointed to changes he witnessed firsthand at MTV around 1997–98, claiming the network abruptly pivoted away from rock programming despite the genre’s chart strength at the time.

“If you were at MTV, or around MTV in 1997–98, suddenly they decided rock was out, when rock was very, very high up in the thing. And it was replaced by rap,” Corgan said. “Their standards and practices immediately shifted. So now things that weren’t allowed were suddenly allowed — people were waving guns. Some people assert that the CIA was involved in all that. Again, above my pay grade, but I saw it happen. I did witness it happen.”

The Beatles vs. The Monkees Model

The remarks came during a broader conversation about industry control over artists. Corgan and Flynn had been comparing The Beatles — widely regarded as rock’s artistic gold standard — with The Monkees, whose early career was largely manufactured by executives. Corgan argued the industry ultimately adopted the Monkees model as its blueprint.

“If you stop the clock in 1966 and say, ‘Take your pick, The Beatles or The Monkees,’ you’d say The Beatles win every time,” Corgan said. “But The Monkees end up being the model that comes in. We don’t have 20 Beatles now. But we have 20 Monkees.”

A Genre That Sells but Doesn’t Get Seen

Corgan acknowledged that the shift produced legitimate talent and important music, but argued the net effect was a deliberate suppression of rock’s cultural voice — one that persists today despite the genre’s live-music dominance.

“Rock is probably the most dominant ticket-selling thing in the Western world, and yet there’s almost no representation of rock in culture,” Corgan said. “So why do we have that schism? I think they purposely dialed down the ability of rock stars to have a voice in the culture. Or those who exist within the ecosystem basically know they’ll color between the lines, so they don’t have to worry about that.”

Context

The comments align with positions Corgan has staked out over the past several years. In October 2024, he told interviewers that the music industry was “resentful” of 1990s rock icons like Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder because executives “couldn’t control” them.

The Smashing Pumpkins, meanwhile, remain active. The band released its thirteenth studio album, Aghori Mhori Mei, in August 2024, and is set to launch a 30-plus-city tour beginning March 5, 2026 in New York.