On a recent episode of his podcast “The Magnificent Others,” Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan shared his thoughts on the decline of rock music as it pertains to mainstream exposure. Corgan said he thinks it was a calculated move on the part of pop culture tastemakers that began in the late ‘90s and has continued ever since.
“Rock has been purposely dialed down in the culture,” he said. “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, OK? If you were at MTV or around MTV in 1997, 1998, suddenly they decided rock was out when rock was still very, very high up in the thing. And it was replaced by rap. Their standards and practices immediately shifted, so now that things that weren’t allowed were suddenly allowed. People were waving guns. Some people assert the CIA was involved in all that, again, above my pay grade. But I saw it happen. I did witness it happen.”
Corgan continued: “And of course, great music came out of it, so it’s not like it’s a barren wasteland where something was pushed in that replaced something … qualitative things and great artists came in, but there was this overt shift. I saw it happen. And now rap seems to waning in terms of its cultural influence. Pop is completely dominant. Rock is probably the most dominant ticket selling thing in the Western world, and yet there’s almost no representation of rock in culture. 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.”
