The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan Feels Underappreciated As A Guitarist

The Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, who is known to be the driving creative entity behind much of The Smashing Pumpkins’ most renowned music, recently told Guitar World that he feels his abilities as a guitarist are too often ignored.

Every year, the conversation surrounding who is and who isn’t classified as “great” in music history comes up. While there are many justified nods on some of the “Greatest Guitarists Of All Time’ lists, Corgan told Guitar World that he is rarely celebrated as a guitarist.

“Most people don’t even recognise my contributions as a guitar player,” he said. “They don’t even assume I’m the one playing a lot of the guitar,”

“You have these silly lists that come out about the greatest guitar players; I usually don’t even make those lists. Or they’ll put me behind somebody who I could play circles around. I don’t mean to denigrate the person in front of me or the people in front of me, but come on, you know? I’m enough of a guitar player to know who’s a great guitar player.”

Corgan states that many guitarists who are celebrated in music media today outside of the “Zakk Wyldes and Dimebag Darrels and the truly great Randy Rhoadses” are pretending to play guitar as opposed to actually playing, before pointing out that the reason he isn’t recognised in conversations about the greats comes down to lack of acknowledgement that he is a man of many talents.

“If I’m being frank about it – and maybe this isn’t the best way to do it – but if I’m being frank, people have a hard time understanding that as it pertains to the Smashing Pumpkins, I’m writing the songs, lyrics, melodies, arrangements and playing most of the complicated guitar,” he said.

“And that I’m capable of doing a solo on top of that. I think that’s hard for people to process.”

One thing that is profound when it comes to Billy Corgan and The Smashing Pumpkins is how music making is still an intimate, necessary process of creation for them, releasing 13 studio albums throughout their 36-year career, the most recent being Aghori Mhori Mei which came out in August of this year. Corgan expressed in a press release that “in the writing of this new album I became intrigued with the well-worn axiom, ‘you can’t go home again’ which I have found personally to be true in form but thought well, what if we tried anyway?”. Before this, the band toured Australia in 2023 with their The World Is A Vampire tour, playing several dates across Brisbane, Bribie Island,  Sydney, Melbourne, Ballarat, Adelaide, Newcastle and the Gold Coast.

If you’ve yet to sink your teeth into The Smashing Pumpkins of today, Aghori Mhori Mei is available on streaming platforms now.