During a recent episode of the “The Magnificent Others” podcast, The Smashing Pumpkins vocalist and guitarist Billy Corgan sat down with host Conrad Flynn for an in-depth conversation. The discussion eventually turned toward the noticeable decline of rock music’s presence in mainstream culture, prompting Corgan to share his belief that the shift was entirely intentional.
While rock dominated the charts and media coverage for decades, its cultural footprint has significantly shrunk since the late 1990s. According to the frontman, this was not an accident, but rather a calculated move by music industry executives to promote artists who were easier to manage and control.
The topic emerged as Corgan and Flynn compared the organic brilliance of The Beatles to the manufactured, television-driven success of The Monkees. Corgan argued that while The Beatles are universally respected as musical pioneers, the heavily controlled corporate model behind The Monkees is what the modern industry ultimately adopted as its blueprint.
He said (as transcribed by theprp): “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. But The Monkees end up being the model that comes in. We don’t have 20 Beatles now. But we have 20 Monkees.”
Flynn expanded on this thought, suggesting that the industry intentionally pivoted toward artists who lacked direct creative control, making them far more profitable and compliant.
Building on that theory, Corgan shared his firsthand experience witnessing the sudden cultural shift during the late 1990s. He pointed directly to major media platforms completely changing their programming standards to push rock out of the spotlight in favor of rap and pop.
“I think, and I will say it overtly, I think that rock has been purposely dialed down in the culture. [It began in the] late ’90s. I think the first, and again this gets wizard behind the curtain, right? Somebody’s going to say, ‘Well, how do you know who was the wizard behind the curtain?’ All I know is I saw the gravity shift ,okay?”
“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. They immediately changed the way… their standards and practices immediately shifted. So now that things that weren’t allowed were suddenly allowed, people were waving guns. Okay, so some people assert that the CIA was involved in all that. Again, above my paygrade. But I saw it happen. I did witness it happen.”
“And of course great music came out of it. So it’s not like, it’s not 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 then now as you pointed out rap seems to be 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. Or… those who exist within the ecosystem are basically… they know they’ll color between the lines so they don’t have to worry about that.”
