Last week on his podcast “The Magnificent Others,” Billy Corgan made a bold thesis: “I believe—and I say this openly—I believe that rock has been intentionally turned out of the culture.”
He further expanded on this idea by explaining who he believes deflated rock: “If you were at MTV or around them in 1997, ’98, they suddenly decided rock was out – even though rock was still very, very high at that point – and it was replaced by rap, right?” he said. “Their standards and practices suddenly shifted. … Some say the CIA was involved in all this, which again is above my pay grade, but I watched it. I was there when it happened.”
Aside from the eyebrow-raising thesis, the CIA cooperated with MTV’s parent company Viacom, to end rock’s ubiquity, Corgan seems to either have his facts wrong or doesn’t remember the ’90s as well as he thinks.
What the numbers say
If you look at any edition of Billboard’s Video Monitor chart from November 1998, there’s a lot of rock in MTV’s Top 10 for that month: videos from Alanis Morissette, Barenaked Ladies, Korn and Hole. Almost a year later, in October 1999, the same chart listed an MTV Top 10 with Limp Bizkit, Bush, Kid Rock and the Offspring. The number one song of the week was Blink-182’s “All the Small Things.” So rock wasn’t gone at all.
Second, Corgan has some bitter pills to swallow. One of them: MTV’s programming, like that of most TV channels, has always been more or less based on the wishes of the advertising industry. (Yes, apparently that many people actually watch “Ridiculousness.”) To sell advertising, Viacom needed music videos that appealed to consumers between the ages of 12 and 24 – which meant constantly changing with the times.
Music fans who were 16-year-olds in 1993, when the Pumpkins helped shape the sound of alternative rock, were 23 when the band released “Machina/The Machines of God” in 2000 – and already too old for MTV’s record. Why not give more airtime to Fred Durst, who captured the imagination of teenagers by asking whether a red baseball cap helps with being hit on?
And related: Corgan has to accept that the Smashing Pumpkins’ late ’90s albums simply aren’t very good. The band’s rise to rock greatness earlier in the decade was perfectly timed: MTV had just turned its rock spotlight from slickly produced groups like Cinderella and Poison to a clear alternative – the raw sounds of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, which might not have seemed like primetime stuff but came at just the right time.
Pumpkins on the siding
The Pumpkins rode that wave admirably in 1993, with the faux-optimism of “Today” and “Cherub Rock” and the melodramatic, childhood-wounds pathos of “Disarm.” Corgan took the stage, bleated a ballad into the mic that was truly moving – and people wanted to hear it. 1995’s “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” was more bombastic (strings!), more faux-nostalgic (“1979”) and heavier (“Zero”, “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”) – and still pretty great, even if the album was two hours long.
But then they seemed to lose track over the next three years, culminating in the lame, forgettable fourth album, Adore. Corgan seems to have forgotten that he used a trip-hop beat on “Perfect” – like many rock bands trying to stay hip at the time – and a hip-hop groove on “Ava Adore.” The songs didn’t become hits because they simply lacked the hooks that had defined the big Pumpkins hits. “The Pumpkins have given up on being a rock band and instead committed themselves to a pop project,” SPIN wrote in a review.
Rolling Stone later called the record “a dud.” And it’s best to say little about the poorly mixed, pompous “Machina”. “The nearly 70 minutes of ‘Machina’ boil down to a handful of recurring ideas: love is good, drugs are bad, God is everywhere – and seriously – thanks for listening,” wrote Rolling Stone in a review. The magic was simply gone.
So when MTV tested the Backstreet Boys with “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” in 1997 and Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” in 1998, garnering a positive response from teenagers interested in designer knock-off perfumes or whatever MTV was promoting, it only made more sense that the network was making room for artists who made more of an impact. Much to Corgan’s chagrin, fewer rock videos meant more room for the Macarena, Aaliyah and all the women Lou Bega had a little time for.
Reactions from the industry
As Corgan’s theories circulated on social media this week, MTV veteran Kurt Loder simply commented, “Sure.” Filmmaker Joseph Kahn, whose 1998 videography included clips for Brandy and Monica as well as Rob Zombie, offered his own theory: “Rock died when he separated himself from sex,” he wrote. “I was making a video for a big rock band and they were arguing about the ‘Male Gaze.’…Music is ultimately driven by horny teenagers, and they went over to rap.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone at the CIA (even in its current form) being so concerned about the state of popular music that they would try to control cultural discourse in the late ’90s. The CIA was probably more concerned with tracking the war in Kosovo and hunting down a Saudi dissident named Osama Bin Laden. But at the same time, the likelihood that they were targeting rock & roll isn’t exactly zero – after all, they once did the full Wile E. Coyote act and tried to explode a cigar on Fidel Castro.
However, the CIA did not respond to ROLLING STONE’s inquiry about Corgan’s claims. If he is proven right in a few years through a Freedom of Information Act request that reveals collusion between MTV and the CIA, ROLLING STONE will happily buy Corgan a Coke.
Similar observations have been made by others in a less conspiracy-theory tone, such as Garbage’s Shirley Manson, who put it this way last year: “Radio only really played a certain sound – a very calming, safe, fun vibe – and these very wild women from the ’90s just disappeared,” she said, referring to the years after 9/11. “That was the moment we saw the rise of true mega-capitalist pop. These sounds have been inundating us for a good 20 years now.”
Nostalgia as a business model
Corgan actually has little to complain about these days, as the Smashing Pumpkins are profiting well from the nineties nostalgia. Even though their post-’90s albums have mostly garnered mixed reviews, a reunion with three-quarters of the classic lineup can still headline Madison Square Garden and tour stadiums with fellow ’90s rockers Green Day.
It goes without saying that Corgan has precious little interest in any of this – he’s still eager to convince people that Machina/The Machines of God is worth 74 minutes of their time. Last year he toured as a solo act called Billy Corgan and the Machines of God, playing a selection of songs from that album, peppered with Mellon Collie favorites. But no matter which venue Corgan performs at, he seems doomed to feel like a rat in a cage. And this is not a CIA psyop.
